The question there is how many of the estimated 100,000 software engineers at Microsoft are using Copilot, and what has been their (I'm sure measured) productivity boost. Microsoft does derive some benefit from Copilot being accessible to the paying subscribers of the world from having them give feedback and in free (and paid) press. But the internal use numbers probably easily justify its initial cost to train.

Say Copilot makes an engineer 2x as productive, their all-in salary is $500k to make the math easy, 1,000 MS sw engineers are using it, and Copilot took $5mm to train (GPT-3 took $4.6mm). Those 1k MS employees now being twice as productive are doing the work of an extra 1k people at $500k, or $500 million's worth in a year. That means $5 million in Copilot training costs are paid for in... 4 days. I have no inside information, so those number are all made up, but I'm pretty sure the initial training costs have already been paid off internally.

We also don't know how many multiples of $5mm it took to produce the initial version of Copilot, nor how many subsequent training runs there have been.

Point is, any significant productivity gains made, across an organization the size of Microsoft engineering, easily pays for big expensive training runs.

SOME parts of an engineer's work are 2x faster, but not all. Generating code - yes, writing tests and docs - yes, designing the system - no, debugging - no, attending meetings - no, getting your data faster, or moving the other team to finish integration sooner - no help. So it's going to be 10% boost overall, not 100%.

The nice effect is that the AI makes people more confident to try things and go out of their comfort zone. Maybe the quality of the end product will be higher.

It makes tou nowhere nearly 2x productive. Usefull yes but 2x is a dream

It's a good question, but also helpful to point out that one of the beauties of these models is that you can train them once and deploy to many use cases. The same model can be used by Github, Bing, Office 365, Azure and so on.

And as for the big multi-billion investment in OpenAI, they may have more than made that back up on their valuation already. Plus the deal was structured that OpenAI would pay it's revenues into Microsoft till the investment was paid back and MS would sill end up with a 49% stake.

All in all, sounds like a smart investment from MS and, cerry on top, managed to majorly embarrass a main rival.

agree on it being a good play by MS. will interesting to see if they do spin it out to their other realms

If the return are computed by increase in market cap, they may already have got that.