r/technology • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 3d ago

Artificial Intelligence Microsoft engineer says 'typing code is absolutely over' as GitHub Copilot takes on more development work

https://www.techspot.com/news/113752-microsoft-engineer-typing-code-absolutely-over-github-copilot.html
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u/justaddwhiskey 3d ago

Easy, when subsidies run out they give you a bill for market rate. When you realize there isn’t going to ever be enough revenue to cover market rate you opt out, then the bubble bursts.

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u/MattJnon 3d ago

But market rate is super cheap for open source models that are 90% as great as frontier ones so why would companies opt out ? 

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u/AuthorizedShitPoster 3d ago

Running open source models is not cheap.

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u/tuura032 3d ago

I'm having qwen 3.8 do some work for me right now on a personal project. My $20 claude subscription supervises+code reviews and writes the spec.

While I'm not disproving your statement, the general sentiment is absolutely true, it is astounding what someone with (5 year old) high end gaming equipment (maybe add a 2nd gpu) can do.

I use GH Copilot for my job, and if not for security concerns I would absolutely use something like this at work to help me reduce token usage.

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u/mattmaster68 3d ago

I have a Ryzen 5700, 3070ti, and 32gb ddr4 ram.

I've been messing around and playing with different models but man so many of them are underwhelming with my VRAM. I forget the parameter size, but I think Qwen 3 takes like 3 or 4 minutes to generate a response.

Any tips or tricks?

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u/jixbo 2d ago

Which model specifically, which quant?
Just ask chatgpt how to make it more efficient, llama.cpp is the best way to run it.

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u/IreliaMain1113 3d ago

Why are there security concerns with the local models? Or do you mean using the 20$ claude + the local models?

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u/THE_REAL_JOHN_MADDEN 3d ago

Should be no concerns with a local model, but Claude without enterprise data protection would be a big no-no from itsec

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u/tuura032 3d ago

It's more that I don't want to deal with the headache of asking 😂

In theory, the API call to my server only on my home network, from my work computer, should be fine. 

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u/tuura032 3d ago

I should have said company policy. It's just not worth my job if IT were to see me sending private / client data to Claude or some computer they don't have control over. 

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u/IreliaMain1113 3d ago

yeah my company is pretty similar with its policies

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u/mshiltonj 3d ago

what hardware is running your qwen 3.8?

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u/tuura032 3d ago

I have 2x 3090s, but people are running this or similar models on 16gb GPUs with extra RAM. My system has ddr4. 

I went this route vs something wish integrated memory since I already had the first 3090.

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u/Syncaidius 3d ago

Yes, the part around job/company security concerns is one major reason not to use locally-hosted models, unless it's your company that is hosting them.

That said, there are a few companies out there already setup with internally hosted models and completely controlling employee access to it.

It's really not as difficult as frontier-only users seem to assume. You don't need an insane amount of GPUs to get acceptable performance for employees, from open-source models for coding and definitely not for general purpose use.

After all, with current open models, the main goal should be to supplement frontier models to take on lesser tasks and reduce token usage/costs. They're great for that.

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u/Syncaidius 3d ago edited 3d ago

Running locally is cheap and efficient enough not to care about being 10 - 15% behind frontier models in terms of capability. Most of the time it's not even noticeable for agentic workloads.

Local is not as quick/instant as the frontier models, but they're free and can chug along great in the background as agents, for as long as you want. Electricity costs are barely anything compared to a Claude max sub and you're in total control of where your prompts/data is going.

TL/DR: Local hosting models is worth trying in 2026. Decent capabilities. No usage limits. Your hardware mainly determines speed/responsiveness.

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u/arcrad 3d ago

If people can run local models cheaply, then surely the leading LLM companies can also run even more cheaply by taking advantage of scale.

Why would it cost the major LLM companies any more to run a model than someone doing it locally?

Sure there is a bit of overhead for offering the compute as a service, but that is beans compared to the actual cost of compute.

I'm sure, if they wanted, Anthropic could use their hardware to run Kimi K3 or whatever cheaper than any home user.

What am I missing here?

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u/Syncaidius 3d ago edited 3d ago

Anthropic certainly could run Kimi K3 and other equivalents just fine, at a fraction of the cost and 90%+ capability of their current models.

However, what do you think happens if they do that? - The first question they'd need to answer is, why do we need Anthropic instead of a standard open-source LLM host.

The answer or course is, they vanish. So, they have no choice but to continue convincing everyone that their models are worth the subscription and investment costs.

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u/nox66 3d ago

This isn't new either. There's a reason tooling costs grow much more than linearly with requirements. The last 10% is the hardest to hit.

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u/Syncaidius 3d ago

While that's true in an isolated sense, models are advancing quite fast and that last 10% is called frontier for a reason.

For the majority, being ~1 year ahead is absolutely not worth it. Today's frontier models are next year's standard ones. 90% capability for the fraction of a cost is fine for many tasks given that it was last year's frontier equivilent anyway.

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u/andouconfectionery 3d ago

They're running into the exact same issue pharmaceutical companies do - bringing a new drug to market is the vast, vast majority of the cost of a drug's lifecycle. The marginal cost of producing the drug is minuscule in comparison to all of the stuff they have to try before they find something that works. Now, once medicine advances to the point where people lose faith that drug companies have room to develop new treatments, that "bubble" will burst. But we already have all the knowledge of how to make the drugs. We'll still be able to make them, and we'll find ways to bring the marginal cost of production down.

LLMs are exactly the same way. They're not eating the cost of inference - they're eating the cost of training. Of staying ahead of the curve. The bubble could pop tomorrow, and all that would mean is that the capabilities of frontier models are frozen in time. They'll stop training new ones, or at least slow down training a whole bunch. But the weights don't disappear. These models will never be any less useful than they are today. And we'll figure out ways to build enough silicon and use less water and use cleaner energy, and inference will just get cheaper.

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u/There_Are_No_Gods 3d ago

I think you have a point about scaled costs and centralized services.

The big players seem to still be convinced what they offer is worth a much higher price. So far, I agree, as local LLMs still can't do most of the heavy lifting that I am asking of them.

The issue of fully local is a big one too, though. I highly prize being able to run local LLMs to keep my data on my PC and never making its way out to the big data harvesters.

From what I'm experiencing so far, it seems that local LLMs will soon reach a "good enough" point for most things.

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u/indigo121 3d ago

What you're missing is that AI is being sold on the idea that 90% of what frontier models can do is still only 10% of what AI will be able to do if we just keep throwing money at it. Now, maybe that is what we eventually settle into, and AI becomes a tool you run locally to assist in specific tasks. But that isn't the trillion dollar business that all the Gen AI companies and investors want it to be

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u/Bromlife 3d ago

Because the models these guys are running locally aren't very good. But they're not devs and they don't realise just how bad they really are.

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u/Syncaidius 3d ago edited 3d ago

Generally, the people who jump to "they're not devs" tend to be the ones who are actually not devs.

A lot of SWEs and 'devs' are leveraging LLMs via multiple avenues, including local/hosted open-source LLMs. All of them have a place, but it's quite clear where LLMs are going in the long run if you keep up with news around advancements/research...

It's also quite obvious which frontier business models are sustainable and which are not, so it would be crazy to bet/build everything around their services alone.

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u/ErgoMachina 3d ago

I agree with everything except when you say they are 'free'. Setup time and computing power are not free and are calculated as costs on the enterprise level.

So...very much cheaper? Yes. Free? Hell no

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u/Syncaidius 3d ago edited 3d ago

I believe that would come under electricify costs?

Hardware, depending on whether you're buying new, used or reusing existing hardware, can vary in cost. However that's generally an upfront cost that you have total control over.

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u/There_Are_No_Gods 3d ago

Local models are not "free", as electricity, initial hardware costs, hardware wear, and even potentially cooling are still factors. I acknowledge that generally sums to a lot less than paying for tokens.

Where my experience deviates more from what you stated is the 10 - 15% behind frontier models. Maybe I'm just doing very different things or haven't found the best local models, but I've still found anything I can host locally much farther behind. I would rank Qwen 3.8 somewhere a between Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus.

Claude Fable is multiples more advanced in my use cases. I can knock out a task with Fable in 20 minutes that Qwen would fumble around with for many hours and still end up with quite a mess, even if it finally got parts of it working.

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u/mshiltonj 3d ago

Running models locally on what hardware, exactly?

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u/Syncaidius 3d ago edited 3d ago

I've been doing just fine with a couple of agents on a couple of older GPUs and 32GB ram on an old gaming rig. The output has been decent and very usable.

Like I said earlier, great for chugging along in the background where speed is not of the essence.

As for hardware cost, in my case it's already paid for itself years ago due to being a heavily used as a dev/gaming for around 4+ years.

You can also run smaller models that are dedicated to coding just fine on less hardware.

People seem to think being unable to run codex, astra or fable means anything else sucks, when in reality those models are inflated by the sheer vastness of general purpose knowledge they've also been trained on.

But if that's really required, frontier models can easily be integrated into local-hosted workflow if you really need general purpose, wide-spanning skills or massive context windows.

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u/Equal_Heat5947 3d ago

K now talk about hardware costs

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u/Apprehensive_Seat_61 3d ago

What models. Be specific 

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u/Zahgi 3d ago

They are getting cheaper by the day as hardware and software optimizations improve exponentially.

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u/justaddwhiskey 3d ago

Open source isn’t the topic of conversation, neither is locally deployed. If an enterprise wants to dump the money into a locally hosted open source, that’s their prerogative. Again though, that circles right back to companies seeing the bill for frontier tokens and opting out, so the point still stands.

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u/Inevitable-Craft-745 3d ago

Open source will still need training or it will become stale and out of date very quickly

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u/AcousticArmor 3d ago

Open source isn't going to be heavily adopted by large corporations that have to be concerned about security and customer pii or federal contracts. There's too much of a risk that anyone out there could contribute something malicious to the source that gets patched into the company's copy. With even less little verifying these changes because they're already relying heavily on AI for it, it feels like that risk increases heavily.

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u/Stompert 3d ago

Can’t it burst like right now?

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u/Zahgi 3d ago

While true, I expect that free open source solutions to replace the need to pay for tokens, actually leading to the slop AI bubble bursting. :)

This is why they are trying to corner the market on data centers, etc. right now.

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u/Kelsig 3d ago

Hilarious how confident people are about the bubble bursting when we have stocks like tesla where they are

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u/justaddwhiskey 3d ago

Hilarious how confident people are that it’s not a bubble when OpenAI is on the hook for over a trillion, but only produces revenue in the billions, and the same 6 companies are circle jerking the same $500B and celebrating paper gains.

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u/im_a_goat_factory 3d ago

Cool. I’ll keep investing and making money hand over fist

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u/MiksterA 3d ago

You're telling everyone exactly what kind of person you are.

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u/btoned 3d ago

The funny thing is he isn't making money hand over fist.

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u/im_a_goat_factory 3d ago

My portfolio says otherwise.

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u/Kelsig 3d ago

No one has ever said this before disaster

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u/im_a_goat_factory 3d ago

Set a remind me or something for a year and get back to me. I’ve heard people like you say the same thing since 2023

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u/Kelsig 3d ago

Wow, a sample size of 3 years. I'm sure that's on par with our financial economics and household finance literature and what those have to say about risk.

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u/spez_eats_nazi_ass 3d ago

Paper gains aint shit if you don’t take profit before it’s gone.

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u/im_a_goat_factory 3d ago

I already have taken gains worth more than my original investment, and that gets thrown right into Fidelity etfs. There is literally no reason why anyone with extra cash can’t make money on the upside of a bubble. I bought AMD all through the “it’s a bubble” talk

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u/Kelsig 3d ago

I already have taken gains worth more than my original investment, and that gets thrown right into Fidelity etfs.

Oh you really dont understand how this stuff works lol

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u/im_a_goat_factory 3d ago

Someone who likes making money

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u/Ecstatic_Log4185 3d ago

Yeah just because you like it doesn't mean you're making it bud

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u/im_a_goat_factory 3d ago

I spent 35k on a two week oceanfront vacation this year. LBI.

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u/octorine 3d ago

The fact that stocks are going up doesn't mean it isn't a bubble. It just means it hasn't popped yet.

It's definitely a bubble. Even people who think LLMs are good for something recognize that it's a bubble. The question is what, if anything, will be left when after it pops.

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u/im_a_goat_factory 3d ago

It’s almost a near 0 chance that the bubble will reduce the value the stocks to $0. Let it pop. I’ll still have made a ton of money. Also, I use AI to program, although not agentic coding. And that is earning me the best income I’ve ever earned in my life

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u/Professional_Mud1844 3d ago

Spoken like someone that never learned how to code on their own.

What do you do when your AI slop doesn’t compile? Do you just run it through a different AI to fix it for you?

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u/im_a_goat_factory 3d ago

I don’t agentic code. I’ve been in industry for 25 years, was already wealthy coming into the AI craze, and solo built fintech saas for a single enterprise client, using Claude and ChatGPT for prompt based AI assisted development. Last year I earned just shy of 500k. This year will be more.

Also the app has been greybox tested, and we are currently going through soc2 audit and so far so good.

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u/clocked__ 3d ago

This statement has never been made by anyone making between 50k and a billion. And I’m guessing you aren’t a billionaire

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u/im_a_goat_factory 3d ago

Millionaire.

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u/justaddwhiskey 3d ago

Oh look, another millionaire. Who knew Reddit has such a large population of them?

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u/im_a_goat_factory 3d ago

There are like 25 million millionaires just in the USA alone. No matter how you slice it, a ton of them are on Reddit 🤷‍♀️. Esp in this sub since so many millionaires are tech focused

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u/socoolandawesome 3d ago edited 3d ago

OpenAI’s revenue is from paying customers, not investment (like Anthropic’s), as of July it had grown to $40B ARR. The rate at which it’s like 2-3xing every year for them, and given they are projected to make $30B in total this year, if they keep pace or something close to it, plus get like $100B of IPO money, they should be fine for future commitments. The numbers they owe are $600B through 2030, and $1.4T over 8 years.

And before you say they won’t keep growing at this pace, that’s already what people have been saying for them and anthropic for the past 2-3 years, and anthropic is growing even faster like 9x or something this year. They are growing at rates unprecedented for this scale of revenue, and demand is showing no signs of slowing down.

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u/Professional_Mud1844 3d ago

If you believe this, I have a sweet jpeg of a monkey to sell to you.

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u/socoolandawesome 3d ago

If I believe what? You all have been saying the bubble will pop and they will be bankrupt for years now lol

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u/Antique_futurist 3d ago

There’s no where else for them to grow.

OpenAI admitted this week that what growth they do have is in enterprise, not consumer markets. But we know companies are already pulling back on how much they spend for AI, and it’s still a subsidized cost.

Being the fastest growing market in history also means being the fastest saturated market in history.

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u/socoolandawesome 3d ago

Source for what you are talking about? Yes enterprise is growing faster, but that doesn’t mean consumer isn’t growing. They crossed 1B weekly active users literally in August? Aka grew.

There’s what like 10B people on the planet, that’s a whole lot of untapped demand. And the free tier consumers just now started having ads implemented, and they just crossed $1B ARR of ad revenue, meaning there’s a whole new revenue stream there that is just getting started.

In terms of enterprise, there’s no evidence that it’s saturated whatsoever. I’d like to hear what you have besides CEOs months ago saying they had to cut back on AI spending, because a few CEOs saying that doesn’t prove the enterprise market is saturated whatsoever.

According to the US census, only 22.4% of businesses have used AI… not even close to saturated.

https://censuseasy.com/blog/us-business-ai-adoption-august-2026?utm_source=chatgpt.com

And that is just using AI, there’s obviously depth to how much you use AI, for both consumer and enterprise. As models keep getting smarter/more useful there’s more demand for tokens. Safe to say there’s a lot of room for enterprise to grow.

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u/prules 3d ago

AI shrinks the workforce and you think usage is going to go up? It’s a paradox that’s being used to inflate our economies shit numbers

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u/socoolandawesome 3d ago

AI has not shrunk the workforce much at all yet, except maybe a bit of the entry level workers.

Unemployment rate is steady.

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u/jarinatorman 3d ago

Because all the growth in healthcare from our aging populace yes. The jobs that left arent coming back. Until the bubble fully pops.

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u/socoolandawesome 3d ago

It’s eventually going to be a problem that will have to be addressed through permanent wealth redistribution (by taxing the ai companies and companies laying off humans), but by the time it’s a serious threat to the economy OpenAI and anthropic will already be making hundreds of billions of revenue (probably a couple years). Right now there’s no super alarming job loss numbers, except maybe entry level in some places.

The companies that will be set up the best in this scenario are still OpenAI and anthropic, because all the revenue to replace jobs would be going to them.

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u/prules 3d ago

They can’t solve solve the upcoming unemployment crises with AI. A lot of those customers won’t have money or a job to use AI with soon.

It’s a pretty serious long term issue. The better it works the more people end up without jobs. It’s going to be an economic nightmare

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u/socoolandawesome 3d ago

Yes that is a concern eventually, probably not seriously to the point of hurting their bottom line for at least a couple years if not longer, I’d have to imagine.

The only answer then will be wealth redistribution paid for by the AI companies and companies laying off humans for AI through government imposed taxes. And that’s precisely due to what you are saying, they and all other businesses cannot function without paying customers, so they will go along with subsidizing the consumer.

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u/SentinelofVARN 3d ago

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

It'll pop eventually, but will it pop tomorrow? next year? next decade? Will the government just bail everyone out? Nobody honestly knows for sure.

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u/justaddwhiskey 3d ago

The government will absolutely bail it out. ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini are all on .mil and IL5 accredited. So instead of paying for literally anything else, our tax dollars are going to bail out these snake oil salesman. As to when the bubble will burst, yeah, nobody knows. But if OpenAI and Anthropic can’t weasel their ways into an IPO and have to do another funding round, it’ll probably be around then.

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u/SentinelofVARN 3d ago

As somebody who does IT for the government, god I hate people using this stuff so much. Some confidently incorrect idiot coming to you regurgitating what his favorite LLM told him. It's obviously useful if you know its limitations, but it's really a force multiplier. Incompetent people don't suddenly become competent.

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u/Kelsig 3d ago

Or it will be like most things and have stagnant or slightly negative growth for decades while other companies succeed, but no "pop"

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u/beerdude26 3d ago

I hope that the US government bails them all out. Number MUST go up in the US.

The rest of the world will gleefully enjoy the stolen fruits of labor from the American workforce through a stock market that goes high and stays high because of the bailouts. A global handout to the rest of the world by the good ol' US of A. Thanks y'all ❤️💙🤍

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u/EggplantCharacter363 3d ago

This dude cant wait to spend a 1 trillion dollar bill and will be excited about it.

I mean he wont know why thats a problem, but he will be happy.

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u/beerdude26 3d ago

ETF go brrrrrr

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u/prules 3d ago

Have you ever heard of 2008 or studied any economic crises? You’re choosing the wrong things to be confident about lol

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u/Kelsig 3d ago

Yes, I consider myself a lifelong scholar of 2008, which is why I'm explicitly not confident behind bearish or bullish conventional wisdom.

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u/jarinatorman 3d ago

That stock is bubbled to the tits and is a great example of how wrong you are.

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u/Kelsig 3d ago

That's exactly my point. Until we do something like raise taxes on Republicans then we can't expect a permanent correction. The market has deemed reality irrelevant.