• by Laurie Sullivan , 6 hours ago

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke has resigned. He is leaving GitHub to “become a startup founder again,” and pursue opportunities outside of the two companies, Dohmke wrote in a blog post.

Dohmke will remain with the company through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition.

GitHub supports more than 150 million developers, and the open-source projects continue to expand with more contributions each year. AI projects have doubled in the last year alone.

Microsoft acquired GitHub seven years ago. At the time, buying the code repository was viewed as the company embracing open-source projects.

With Dohmke’s departure, Microsoft plans to move GitHub under Core AI, its AI engineering team.

The decision comes at a time when AI has become much more a part of Microsoft’s strategy to accelerate production of products and services. Those services include platforms for its advertising devision such as media buying and ad serving.

Microsoft views AI as a foundational technology that will shape the future of advertising.

In addition to making investments in a variety of companies like OpenAI, it has integrated AI into its core products and services including Windows, Microsoft 365, Xbox, Azure and Dynamics 365.

CoreAI plays a crucial role in the Microsoft’s AI strategy, and indirectly is of significant importance to Microsoft Advertising. 

In a separate memo seen by Axios, Microsoft Core AI head Jay Parikh outlined a new company structure that will see GitHub leadership report to several Microsoft executives.

Microsoft developer division head Julia Liuson will oversee GitHub's revenue, engineering and support, and GitHub chief product offer Mario Rodriguez will report to Microsoft AI platform VP Asha Sharma.

Microsoft announced Core AI in January led by Parikh. At the time the former Meta engineering chief was appointed executive vice president at Microsoft.

The move aimed to accelerate the development of AI applications and agents. The new division focused on building an end-to-end Copilot and AI stack, enabling first-party and third-party customers to build and smoothly run AI apps and agents.