Artificial Intelligence · 14 April 2023

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke: AI is changing the way we code

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke on the disruptive power of artificial intelligence and his path from Germany to the top of the US tech industry.

He is one of the most successful Germans in the US technology landscape: Thomas Dohmke founded several start-ups, sold one to Microsoft, then moved into the tech giant’s headquarters and today leads the programming platform GitHub. In this episode of Handelsblatt Disrupt, he speaks with me about his career path and the question of how artificial intelligence is changing the world.

AI, Dohmke argues, is becoming a co-pilot in every area of life. Lawyers, doctors, teachers and students will work in close collaboration with the technology. The chatbot ChatGPT, from US start-up OpenAI, is “exactly the right tool to learn more and know more all the time,” he says.

With GitHub, Dohmke has built an encyclopaedia for computer programmes. Software developers can store different versions of their code there, manage it and discuss it openly. Now he is ushering in the next phase of the platform – and in this episode gives a preview of the new technologies that come with it.

From the Handelsblatt print archive

March 23, 2023 · Handelsblatt no. 059 · page 029 ·THOMAS DOHMKE

Pioneer of a new way of coding

The GitHub CEO is one of the most successful Germans in the US tech scene. He wants to use AI to make writing computer code dramatically easier. Microsoft is involved too.

Machine translation. The verbatim German original is in the Handelsblatt print edition (link below).

"We are on the brink of a revolution," says Thomas Dohmke. As CEO of GitHub, he oversees what amounts to a vast library of computer code. GitHub serves as a platform where programmers store, manage and openly discuss different versions of their software. Now Dohmke is ushering in the platform's next phase and gave Handelsblatt an advance look at the new technologies.

With the Copilot X project, the 44-year-old is having the platform's knowledge analysed and delivered to programmers by artificial intelligence. In practice, the tool is meant to function as an AI assistant that supports developers.

"When he founded his first start-up, ToDoSoft, in the late 1990s, he would have loved such support. "We shipped our software on floppy disks," Dohmke recalls.

Dohmke studied computer engineering at the Technical University of Berlin and went on to earn a doctorate. He also built several more companies. His firm HockeyApp was acquired by Microsoft in late 2014, and Dohmke moved to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond.