GitHub Innovation Graph Update Reveals Digital Divide, AI Growth

Like many IT services, GitHub is seeing growing interest among its developer users in AI. Unfortunately, GitHub is also seeing continued evidence of a digital divide when it comes to development activities around the world.

Those findings are part of the GitHub Innovation Graph, which was recently updated with new data for the first quarter of 2024, revealing a series of shifts and insights into software development activities around the world.

The data reveals a number of key findings:

The U.S. and European Union states continue to dominate as the leading collaborators on software projects hosted on GitHub. That dominance, however, is indicative of some geographic disparity in how development activity is happening.

"The data shows there is still a big digital divide, reflected in differential activity across economies," Mike Linksvayer, vice president of developer policy at GitHub, told ITPro Today. "Studying exactly how GitHub activity correlates with other measures of opportunity — from GDP to education to internet access — is something we'd love to see researchers dig into."

Related:A Beginner's Guide to GitHub: What You Need To Know

AI Popularity Continues to Grow

A primary trend observed in the latest dataset from GitHub is the continued growth of AI interest and usage.

Linksvayer noted that from Q4 2023 to Q1 2024, AI jumped from 23rd to 15th in the ranking of the 50 most popular topics globally. AI's jump in the rankings is possibly the result of an increase in the number of developers building AI products, he said.

"It'll be interesting to see how far AI continues to climb in these rankings and how that corresponds to new AI products coming to market," he said.

What Is the Actual Impact of AI on Development?

A lot of developers are using generative AI today.

For example, more than 50,000 organizations and 1.8 million paid users are using GitHub Copilot. There is also a measurable impact from the use of GitHub Copilot: Linksvayer said that research shows developers are already writing code more than 55% faster with GitHub.

"We also conducted research with Accenture to understand GitHub Copilot's impact in an enterprise setting and saw an 84% increase in successful builds, and 91% of developers reported that their teams had merged pull requests containing code suggested by GitHub Copilot," he said.

Related:GitHub vs. GitLab: Which One Is Better for Your Enterprise?

That same study found that 90% of the developers reported they found their jobs more fulfilling when using GitHub Copilot, and 95% said they enjoyed coding more with Copilot's help.

ChatGPT Leads to More Development Activity

The use of OpenAI's ChatGPT conversational AI assistant also revealed a correlation with development.

"Using Innovation Graph data, researchers found that the availability of ChatGPT was correlated with an overall increase in development activity," Linksvayer said.

The research found that using ChatGPT significantly increased the number of Git pushes per capita in specific countries and had a positive, although not statistically significant, correlation with the number of repositories and developers per capita.

While there is growing interest in and usage of AI, developers still face no shortage of challenges, including security ones.

"More broadly, developers face many of the same challenges today that they always have — access to the latest technologies, ample opportunity for training and education, keeping their software secure, and preventing attacks from bad actors," Linksvayer said. "The security side is really critical given the collaborative nature of software development and downstream impacts."