What is the financial upside Microsoft is seeing to this that no one else seems to see?
Many businesses have not adopted Copilot because of potential legal issues.
If any of the generated code / content is copyrighted, it could result in negative impacts to the business.
For example, if Copilot generated code that is identical to code that it was trained on that was licensed under the GPL and a company included the generated code in a proprietary commercial product, then the company's product could be subject to the terms of the GPL and the company sued in court.
Assuming liability for the generated code means that Microsoft is making Copilot more attractive for businesses to adopt. More Copilot adoption means more profits for Microsoft.
Even if it gets 1 million subscribers, it would represent 0.1% of Microsoft's overall revenue. Software lawsuits can become multi-billion dollar expenses, and targeting Microsoft instead of random Copilot customer Bespoke Clojure Gurus, LLC will mean much larger awards in such suits. Why Microsoft would just volunteer for such a risk baffles me.
My confusion is more over the balance of revenue and expenses than just "derp, me no understand why do companies do things to make money, derp"
Microsoft is going all in. They want to have hundreds of millions of subscribers. They want everyone who is using Visual Studio Code for a business to use Copilot. With enough uptake, it could be a billion dollar business.
>> Software lawsuits can become multi-billion dollar expenses
Microsoft has teams of top lawyers and they are rolling the dice that there will not be enough lawsuits to justify the risk.
>> My confusion is more over the balance of revenue and expenses than just "derp, me no understand why do companies do things to make money, derp"
If you want more precise answers, ask more precise questions.
Your confusion come from your mis-assessment of the actual risks. Microsoft engaged with tons of lawyers and legal experts and determined there is basically no risk at all taking this stance.
You think there is a very real risk that the AI output is copyright infringement while Microsoft's deep analysis says the opposite; that's the mismatch.
If Copilot becomes more widespread, it might also force regulators to adopt more friendly regulations that would favor it, lowering the expected legal expenses. So this move by Microsoft might just be the bootstrapping they need to get this dynamic going.
it could easily work the other way too
The GPL requires that any software based off of it be GPL licensed and have public sources available. I can't imagine a situation where Microsoft pays a fine, and their customer gets to violate the GPL license by not removing the infringing code, or open-sourcing their product as GPL and providing sources to the public.
Enforcement of the GPL can't just involve paying a monetary settlement to get away with stealing open source code. It must involve the direct targeting of infringing software with demands that the software either take efforts to remove illegally borrowed code, or license the borrowed code as legally prescribed by the original license agreement.
That an AI got in the way of reading the license agreement should not be an excuse for doing zero due diligence in maintaining a lawful code base.
Maybe they hope to kill new entrants for the enterprise market, including open source.
Training an LLM is a low barrier; legal guarantees is a high barrier.
This might turn out to be quite important; without backfiring it seems like a very smart move.