Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI

纳特·弗里德曼(GitHub首席执行官)——阅读古卷轴、开源与人工智能

Dwarkesh Podcast

2023-03-22

1 小时 38 分钟
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单集简介 ...

It is said that the two greatest problems of history are: how to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account for her fall. If so, then the volcanic ashes spewed by Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD - which entomb the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in South Italy - hold history’s greatest prize. For beneath those ashes lies the only salvageable library from the classical world. Nat Friedman was the CEO of Github form 2018 to 2021. Before that, he started and sold two companies - Ximian and Xamarin. He is also the founder of AI Grant and California YIMBY. And most recently, he has created and funded the Vesuvius Challenge - a million dollar prize for reading an unopened Herculaneum scroll for the very first time. If we can decipher these scrolls, we may be able to recover lost gospels, forgotten epics, and even missing works of Aristotle. We also discuss the future of open source and AI, running Github and building Copilot, and why EMH is a lie. Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes. Timestamps (0:00:00) - Vesuvius Challenge (0:30:00) - Finding points of leverage (0:37:39) - Open Source in AI (0:40:32) - Github Acquisition (0:50:18) - Copilot origin Story (1:11:47) - Nat.org (1:32:56) - Questions from Twitter Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
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单集文稿 ...

  • We have 600 plus kind of roughly intact scrolls that we can't open.

  • And I heard about this and I thought that was incredibly exciting,

  • like the idea that there was information from 2000 years in the past.

  • We don't know what's in these things.

  • We could read all of them.

  • Then that would give us approximately a doubling of the total text that we have for antiquities.

  • There are thousands more papyrus scrolls in there and we now have the techniques to read them.

  • Then there's gold in that mud and you know, it's gotta be dug out.

  • I just fundamentally don't believe the world is efficient.

  • And so if I see an opportunity to do something I used to,

  • but I no longer have a reflexive reaction that says, oh, that must not be a good idea.

  • If it were a good idea, someone would already be doing it.

  • Okay.

  • Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Nat Friedman,

  • who was the CEO of GitHub from 2018 to 2021.

  • Before that he started in Sol2 companies, Zimian and Xamarin.

  • And he is also the founder of AI Grant and California YMB.

  • And most recently, he is the organizer and funder of The Squirrel Prize,

  • which is where we'll start this conversation.

  • So Nat, do you want to tell the audience about what The Squirrel Prize is?