GitHub CEO: AI could add more than $1 trillion to global GDP by 2030
AI could boost GDP globally by more than $1 trillion over the next seven years — and that might be underselling the productivity gains, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke told Yahoo Finance at the 2023 Collision Conference in Toronto.
"Think about the days when no one had a PC, then we evolved to a PC in every household, and, now, a computer and cell phone in every pocket," said Dohmke. "That's effectively the culmination of the personal computer revolution, right? We now have an insanely powerful device that's with us all the time... and it's enabled us to live a very different life than we could have imagined 30 or 40 years ago."
GitHub, which was acquired in 2018 by Microsoft (MSFT) in a stock deal valued at $7.5 billion, has been working with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. The two companies began collaborating on GitHub Copilot, an AI chatbot specific to coding, in 2020, said Dohmke. In June 2022, GitHub Copilot became generally available.
"We've also basically changed our lives by sharing so much data with one another, whether it's news articles, Wikipedia, or even GitHub," he said. "There's now so much data available. Then, you add in AI and neural networks, which Alan Turing was talking about in the '50s, starting AI before PCs and the Internet. Now, we have all this data and the compute power available to train models as big as ChatGPT, which is allowing this productivity jump."
"These timelines that stretch back to the '50s are now coming together to create the explosion of AI that we're seeing this year," added Dohmke.
The efficiencies from AI don't just apply to developers — they show the extent to which AI can improve productivity in all kinds of jobs, said Dohmke.
"For developers, reporters, and many other professions, you start with a blank sheet of paper, virtual paper these days, and you start typing," he said. "Eventually, you have to look something up, and go searching for the answer on Google or Bing… Twenty minutes later, you finally get back to what you’re actually doing but you’re out of the flow, no longer in the same kind of creative headspace."
He added: “Every bank, automaker, pharmacy, or insurance company, they’re all software companies now. ... They have a huge number of backlog items… and [with AI] I think developers will be able to get more done and they’ll be able to manage larger-scale systems. The world is way more complex now than it was 30 years ago — think about how many software systems you use every day to get your job done, to order food whether it’s on DoorDash or Uber Eats. In the '90s, that was a phone call.”
Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Tech Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter at @agarfinks and on LinkedIn.
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