Post #2306919

2026-04-30 12:02 UTC

What? Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018. ChatGTP was released 4 years later. The AI boom wasn't a thing when MS was buying Github and no one was thinking about using it for data back then. Cloud was big thing in 2018 and MS bought GitHub to integrate it with Azure and sell computing to people using github actions.

Replies (4)

@NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 2026-04-30 12:55

And they said years earlier at dev meetings: Microsoft is about data. Harvest all you can. Hence the linked in purchase. They may have not known chatgpt was around the corner, but they did believe that the value is in harvesting as much information as possible.

Open ##2306920
@MangoCats@feddit.it 2026-04-30 15:55

> no one was thinking about using it for data back then Everyone with any foresight whatsoever has been thinking about using every source of data since the Babylonians were taking census 6000 years ago.

Open ##2306921
@gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 2026-04-30 12:07

Google Voice was also a service designed to gather training data for speech to text / text to speech services at Google. That’s why it was free. The advent of LLMs just gave it something else to plug the data into. The Microslopening of GitHub, at its core, had similar motivations. Having effectively full backend visibility of all content on the (at the time) centralized service that damn near everyone who publicized their code was using to publicize their code was a valuable business proposition even before they shoved it all in to a training set.

Open ##2306922
@Croquette@sh.itjust.works 2026-04-30 17:34

LLMs are just one way to monetize the data. I would bet hand over fire that Microsoft used the data as soon as they bought GitHub.

Open ##2306923