GitHub Copilot goes token-based, SoftBank bets €75B on France, and AI grifters target Black creators

Something quietly broke the trust between developers and Microsoft this weekend - and the timing couldn't be worse for GitHub Copilot. Meanwhile, a €75 billion datacenter announcement landed with a thud in Paris, and a genuinely unsettling AI grift is spreading across TikTok. Let's get into it.

GitHub Copilot first launched as a technical preview in what year?

The answer is hiding near the bottom of today's newsletter... keep scrolling. 👇

GitHub Copilot has made a move that's annoying a lot of developers: it's switching from a flat monthly subscription to token-based billing. If you've been using Copilot as an unlimited coding companion, that model appears to be ending.

The developer community's reaction has been blunt - 'What a joke' is apparently a common sentiment in the forums. The concern isn't just cost; it's unpredictability. When you're deep in a coding session and burning tokens fast, a flat fee feels safe. Per-token billing introduces anxiety that flat subscriptions were specifically designed to remove.

This puts Copilot in a tricky position against competitors who've built loyalty around predictable pricing. If you want to keep tabs on how token costs affect your actual spend, our Token Calculator is a good place to run the numbers before committing.

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SoftBank just announced it will invest up to €75 billion to build AI datacenter infrastructure across France. The goal is to develop and operate up to 5 gigawatts of additional datacenter capacity - a number that puts this announcement firmly in the 'nation-reshaping' category, not just a corporate press release.

France has been aggressively courting AI infrastructure investment, and this is the biggest payoff yet. For SoftBank, which has a complicated history with big bets (remember WeWork), this signals a renewed conviction that physical AI infrastructure is where sovereign value gets locked in. Europe has been watching the US and Middle East dominate datacenter announcements - this shifts that narrative.

Five gigawatts is a serious number. For context, that's roughly the power consumption of five million average European households. The energy and grid implications alone will be a story worth watching for months.

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This one is genuinely disturbing. The Verge has documented a pattern of AI-generated fake personas - specifically fake Black women - being used to sell cheap dropshipped products on TikTok Shop. These aren't crude deepfakes. Some are convincing enough to trigger emotional responses from real viewers.

The grift is calculated: AI-generated creators appear to cry, plead for views, and invoke their identity to gain sympathy and keep viewers watching long enough to convert. One example described a light-skinned AI 'Black woman' in country-western gear pitching metal buckles, tearfully asking viewers to stay on the video.

This sits at an ugly intersection of deepfakes, AI impersonation, and racial exploitation for profit. It's a reminder that the downstream harms of AI image generation don't always look like obvious sci-fi fakes - sometimes they look like a crying woman asking you for 13 seconds of your attention.

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After smart glasses and wristbands, Meta is reportedly developing an AI-powered pendant. The details are still sparse, but the pattern is clear: Meta is making a serious multi-form-factor bet on AI hardware that lives on your body rather than in your pocket.

This puts Meta in direct competition with a growing category of ambient AI devices - think Humane's Ai Pin (which struggled) and the Rabbit R1 (which also struggled). But Meta has two things those startups didn't: a massive distribution network and an existing AI ecosystem through Ray-Ban glasses that's already proven people will wear AI on their face.

If you're building products in this space quickly, it's worth noting that tools like 60sec.site let you spin up an AI-powered landing page in under a minute - handy when you need to move fast around a hardware launch or pivot.

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A TUC-backed report from the IPPR thinktank dropped last Friday with a clear message: workers are being left out of AI decisions that directly affect their jobs, and that needs to change. The report calls for a package of measures to boost employees' bargaining power over AI adoption at what it describes as a 'pivotal moment' in history.

The core argument is simple - the people closest to the work understand it best, but they're rarely in the room when AI tools get selected and deployed. This connects to what we covered recently about the quiet crisis in entry-level jobs - it's not just about displacement, it's about who controls the pace and shape of change.

For a deeper look at how the future of work is being shaped by these decisions, this report is worth a read. The IPPR's specific policy proposals include new consultation rights and transparency requirements around algorithmic management.

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The answer is B) 2021! GitHub Copilot launched as a technical preview in June 2021, powered by OpenAI's Codex model. It became generally available to individual developers in June 2022. Which makes the current billing controversy feel especially pointed - it took a few years to build that developer loyalty, and it could erode fast.

GitHub Copilot's token-based billing shift is a big deal for a lot of developers. So I'm curious - are you still on Copilot, or have you already switched to a different AI coding tool? Hit reply and tell me what you're using - I read every response and it genuinely shapes what we cover next.

That's it for today - see you tomorrow with more! For more AI coverage, head to dailyinference.com and explore the full archive.