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TWiT 1093: California Sober - Kimi K3, Qwen3.8, & China's Open-Weight AI Gambit
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GitHub Copilot's Failure and Microsoft's Surprising Reinvention
At 1:15:19 · chapter starts 1:12:45
Alex Wilhelm poses the question that's been nagging at tech observers: Microsoft had GitHub, had GitHub Copilot at $10/month, had a massive developer user base — and still lost the agentic coding wave to Anthropic and smaller startups. Harper Reed's answer is blunt: Copilot sucked, and it launched the old way — big release, iterate slowly — right at the exact moment Claude Code, Cursor, and a dozen competitors compressed the entire product cycle to weeks. Alex adds that Microsoft effectively outsourced its intelligence to OpenAI, then saw Anthropic leapfrog. But Harper also credits Microsoft for surprising reinvention under Satya Nadella, noting that younger developers who've only known the post-Ballmer Microsoft have no idea how monopolistic and hostile the company once was.
Satya Nadella posted that companies using AI are paying not just in cash but in something more valuable: the business knowledge, workflows, and correction patterns they feed into models every day. Even if labs don't train on your prompts directly, the metadata teaches them everything about your business.
