Today, I’m talking with Thomas Dohmke, the CEO of GitHub. GitHub is the platform for managing code — everyone from solo open-source hobbyists to the biggest companies in the world relies on GitHub to maintain their code and manage changes. But it’s been owned by Microsoft since 2018, which makes this a perfect Decoder episode since I have a lot of questions about that structure. Thomas and I talked a lot about how independent GitHub really is inside of Microsoft, especially now that Microsoft is all in on AI, and GitHub Copilot, which helps people write code, is one of the biggest AI product success stories that exists right now. How much of GitHub’s AI roadmap is tied to Microsoft’s AI roadmap? How do resources get moved around? And since GitHub is used by all sorts of companies for all sorts of things, how does Thomas keep them all feeling secure that Microsoft isn’t just trying to pull them toward services it prefers, like Azure or OpenAI? Thomas had some surprising answers for all of this. Like any good Microsoft executive in the Satya Nadella era, he told me that the company’s strength is in working well with partners. But he also insisted that tech isn’t a zero-sum game and that one company winning doesn’t mean another has to lose. You’ll hear him tell me that he enjoys competition and that if there were only one option — just OpenAI or Meta’s Llama, for example — to him, that would be like a sport “with just one team in the league.” Of course, I also asked Thomas about AI and whether our current AI systems can live up to all this hype. He’s got a front-row seat, after all: not only can he see what people are using Copilot for but he can also see what people are building across GitHub. I think his perspective here is pretty refreshing. It’s clear there’s still a long way to go.
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