The Octoverse report: state of open source and AI
Every year, releases the Octoverse report, which focuses on the state of open source worldwide. The latest Octoverse was released late last year and focused on open source activity around Cloud and AI and how these technologies are changing the developer experience.
Open source stats and trends
The report starts with some stats on the growth of open source projects:
420 million total projects, representing a 27% year-over-year growth
284 million public repositories across , with 22% year-over-year growth
65K public generative AI projects were created in 2023, which represents a 248% year-over-year growth
45 billion total contributions to all open source projects on GitHub in 2023
The report also uncovered three major trends:
Generative AI is more popular than ever, with 92% of all developers using or experimenting with AI coding tools.
Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) continues to grow; just like last year, the rate at which developers use Git-based IaC workflows significantly increased.
First-time contributors were at an all-time high in 2023, with generative AI projects entering the top 10 most popular open source projects for first-time contributors.
Other key insights from the report
Other key insights covered in the report include the growth of generative AI, the global distribution of open source developers, and the most popular programming languages on GitHub.
Open source and generative AI
Unlike last year’s report, the 2023 Octoverse report focused less on (GitHub’s AI coding assistant) and more on the explosive growth of generative AI in general. A graph on the generative AI shows how AI projects have skyrocketed this year. Just halfway into 2023, according to GitHub’s data, there were more than twice the number of generative AI projects than there were in 2022.
The report also showed that more developers are experimenting with AI models and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT’s rather than the previously common practice of building projects with machine learning libraries like and .
It will be interesting to see how more developers use pre-trained AI models and APIs to build different apps.
Global and regional distribution of open source developers
The report has a global heatmap showing the density of developer populations worldwide, alongside a breakdown of the estimated number of developers and year-over-year growth across multiple regions and countries. Like last year, the highest number of open source developers are in the US, India and China, with India projected to overtake the US by 2027 as the largest developer community globally.
Australia remains 10th in developer growth in the Asia-Pacific region, with a 21% year-on-year increase in the number of new developers.
Most popular programming languages
The commonly used programming languages by developers in 2023 were almost unchanged from 2022, with only Typescript overtaking Java as the third most popular language:
- JavaScript
- Python
- Typescript
- Java
- C#
- C++
- PHP
Rust and Lua also get a notable mention as the top languages by percentage growth of contributors.
Security in open source
Developers, open source communities and companies alike are responding faster to security events, with more developers using automation to secure dependencies.
Salsa Digital’s take
The Octoverse report gives a number of insights into the world of open source and AI. Interestingly, as we predicted last year, expanded its tracking of AI usage and adoption beyond to see how developers are using generative AI, especially pre-trained models from other companies.
However, there was not much information on how governments are using generative AI, which is a hot topic at the moment as more government agencies explore safe and responsible use cases for generative AI .
In the next edition of the Octoverse report, we hope to see more insights on how government policies and regulations might impact AI adoption by both developers and government agencies, especially for open source, pre-trained models.