GitHub copilot is a great deal for the user at only $10 per month. It loses GitHub $20/user/month, says Wall Street Journal.
FWIW, the former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman claims this is false and that Copilot was profitable. He was CEO at the time Copilot was getting started, but left in late 2021. So, it’s possible that costs have increased >3x since then, though unless they’re constantly using GPT-4 under the hood, I would be surprised to learn that.
Others have speculated that maybe Copilot loses money on average because it’s made available to free for students (among others), and free users heavily outweigh paying users. The WSJ article said that:
the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.
Which doesn’t exactly say that the median user is unprofitable.
On the other hand, Microsoft 365 Copilot is planned to cost $30, conveniently exactly $20 more than the $10 GitHub Copilot costs per month, so perhaps there is something to the figure.
I thought CEV was meant to cover the (idealized, extrapolated) preferences of all living humans in perpetuity. In other words, it would include future generations as they were born, and would also update if the wisdom of the current generation grew. (or less charitably, if its moral fashions changed)
I do recognize that classical CEV being speciesist in favor of Humans is probably its central flaw (forget about hypothetical sentient AIs and friendly aliens, what about animals?), but I think it might at least be self-modifying on this front as well? For example, if we ran into some friendly Star Trek aliens, and we wanted to have them join humanity as equals in a new Federation, our CEV would then become “also include these guys as sources of the CEV”, and thus they would be.
I’m not sure if a CEV-as-learned-by-AI would necessarily be flexible enough to make those aliens permanent voting shareholders of the CEV, such that if humanity later regretted their decision to include these aliens they wouldn’t suddenly get removed from the CEV, but it at least seems plausible?
(Anyway I’m really liking this series, thanks for writing it!)