GoKawiilImage via GitHub
Over the years, generative AI has exploded in usage, but the party is coming to an end. For a while, the industry operated in some sort of "subsidy window" where giant AI labs and venture capitalists were happy to lose billions just to hook you onto their platforms. And no, your $20/month subscription is not enough to cover the catastrophic burn rate from inference (computing power required every single time you ask for a response).
With an over $400 billion gap between the money invested in AI data centers and the actual revenue these products generate, Silicon Valley slowly returned to the tested and trusted playbook: advertising.
Now, ads are starting to appear in pull requests generated by Copilot. According to Melbourne-based software developer Zach Manson, a team member used the AI to fix a simple typo in a pull request. Copilot did the job, but it also took the liberty of editing the PR's description to include this message: "⚡ Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast."
A quick search of that phrase on GitHub shows that the same promotional text appears in over 11,000 pull requests across thousands of repositories. Even merge requests on GitLab aren't safe from the injection.
So what's happening? Well, Raycast has a Copilot extension that can do things like create pull requests from a natural language command. The ad directly names Raycast, so you might think that Raycast is injecting the promo into the PRs to market its own app.
But it is more likely that Microsoft is the one doing the injecting. If you look at the raw markdown of the affected pull requests, there is a hidden HTML comment, "START COPILOT CODING AGENT TIPS" placed right just before the ad tip. This suggests Microsoft is using the comment to insert a "tip" that points back to its own developer ecosystem or partner integrations.
Apart from the Raycast Copilot extension ad, Neowin discovered that over 1.5 million GitHub pull requests have ads injected into them by Copilot. Some include lines like "Send tasks to the Copilot coding agent from Slack or Teams to turn conversations into code," along with a note that Copilot will post an update in the thread once it’s done. Others promote starting Copilot coding agent tasks directly from your editor, including VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, and Eclipse.
Ads in generative AI products have been "successful" for companies like OpenAI so far. Just weeks after launching ads for Free and Go tier users in January, OpenAI claimed its ChatGPT ad business crossed a $100 million annualized revenue run rate. The campaign has been so successful that OpenAI is planning to open up a "self-serve" ad platform for businesses next month and is expanding the ads to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.