GitHub’s developer base in India crosses 17 million, retains tag of fastest growing community in the world

Thomas Dohmke, CEO, GitHub

GitHub, the popular developer platform, now has over 17 million developers in India, an increase from 13.2 million during the same time last year. The year-on-year (YoY) increase of 28 percent came on the back of India’s vast population and the high number of students in computer science and engineering skills.

With the increase, India has retained the tag of the fastest growing community in the world for GitHub. For the company, the Asian country, also the world’s second-largest internet market, is behind only the United States which has over 22 million developers and is the largest for the firm.

India also has the second-highest number of GitHub Education users, second-highest number of contributors to public generative AI projects, and the second-highest number of contributions to open source projects—underscoring India’s rise as a global technology leader, the company said on October 29.

"Our latest Octoverse report affirms that India's developer community is the fastest growing developer population on the planet. India's rise as a global tech titan is now inexorable," said GitHub CEO, Thomas Dohmke. "Not only this, but India's booming developer community is using AI to build AI in record numbers, making it evermore likely that the next great multinational will come from India,” Dohmke added.

ALSO READ: AI will not replace developers, will instead create more work: GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke

Anthropic and Google come onboard

GitHub, acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in 2018, has been working on infusing AI across every step of the developer lifecycle. In the past, this has included a code completion tool, Copilot, in 2022, Copilot Chat for natural language-powered coding in 2023 and an AI developer environment, GitHub Copilot Workspace, in April 2024.

The company, on October 24, at its annual flagship event GitHub Universe in San Francisco, announced a slew of changes that will help the firm be the go-to choice for developers across the world.

Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet will be available via GitHub Copilot starting October 29, and Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro will be available for use in “the coming weeks”.

GitHub will continue to enable developer choice in partnership with leading model providers, and will bring multi-model choice across many more of GitHub Copilot’s surface areas and functions soon.

“We're integrating Claude 3.5 Sonnet with GitHub Copilot today to further our ongoing efforts to put our most advanced AI capabilities directly into developers' hands wherever they're needed and wherever they work," said Jared Kaplan, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Anthropic.

GitHub CEO Dohmke also said the early days of AI code gen are now over, and the second phase has arrived, indicating that GitHub’s latest offerings will empower developers and help them with more efficiency.

Developers want a broad choice of models that are best-suited for development, including code generation, refactoring, and optimising code, as per Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud.

“Gemini models excel at this and are accessible on widely used developer platforms and environments – including now with GitHub Copilot – so millions of developers globally can benefit from trusted, enterprise-grade AI through Google Cloud,” he said.

(The reporter was in San Francisco for the annual event at the invitation of GitHub)