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

Nat Friedman was the CEO of Github from 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 uncover these scrolls, we may be able to recover lost gospels, forgotten epics, and 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. Vesuvius Challenge: https://scrollprize.org/ Nat's Wisdom: https://nat.org/ Nat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/natfriedman 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 * Transcript: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/nat-friedman * Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3TCHFcY * Spotify: https://spoti.fi/42rce9v 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 00:00:00 - Vesuvius Challenge 00:30:00 - Finding points of leverage 00:37:39 - Open Source in AI 00:40:32 - Github Acquisition 00:50:18 - Copilot origin Story 01:11:47 - Nat.org 01:32:56 - Questions from Twitter

Nat FriedmanguestDwarkesh Patelhost
Mar 21, 20231h 38mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Nat Friedman on decoding ancient scrolls, AI, and open source leverage

  1. Nat Friedman discusses the Vesuvius Challenge, an open competition he’s funding to virtually read carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum using advanced CT scanning and machine learning, potentially doubling surviving texts from antiquity.
  2. He explains the technical hurdles of detecting ink and unrolling scrolls digitally, and why a prize model and open participation can accelerate progress more than a closed research team alone.
  3. Friedman reflects on his role in Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub, the creation of GitHub Copilot with OpenAI’s models, and what that taught him about shipping AI products and empowering developers.
  4. The conversation broadens into how inefficient the world really is, how open source and AI will reshape software and labor, and why alignment, governance, and individual judgment matter in building future technologies.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Prize competitions can unlock stalled, high-upside scientific problems.

By turning the Herculaneum scrolls project into an open, well-funded prize (the Vesuvius Challenge), Friedman and Brent Seales hope to attract diverse talent, explore a large solution search space, and solve in a year what might otherwise take Seales’ lab many years.

Recovering the scrolls could dramatically expand our knowledge of antiquity.

Historians estimate that successfully reading the 600+ known scrolls—and possibly thousands more still buried—could roughly double the surviving corpus of ancient texts, with potential discoveries ranging from lost literature to early Christian references or works saved from the Library of Alexandria.

Technical innovation depends as much on product design as on model capability.

GitHub Copilot only became compelling after multiple prototype iterations—from Q&A bots to clumsy multi-option code generators—evolved into low-latency, inline completions that fit seamlessly into developers’ workflows, showing that UX choices can be as decisive as the underlying model.

The world is far less efficient than most people assume.

Friedman rejects the idea that good ideas are always already taken; from hedge-fund “secret” strategies to underfunded archaeology sites, he sees many obvious, high-leverage opportunities left untouched simply because institutions and individuals assume someone else is handling them.

Open source excels at infrastructure but struggles with tightly curated user experiences.

He argues that open source governance and coordination costs make it strong for languages, operating systems, and components but weaker for consumer-grade applications that require a single coherent aesthetic and fast, tightly guided iteration with users.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

If we could read all of them, then that would give us approximately a doubling of the total texts that we have from antiquity.

— Nat Friedman

I just fundamentally don’t believe the world is efficient.

— Nat Friedman

We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.

— Nat Friedman

The set of people who really do have great judgment is small, and we should fully empower them to exercise it.

— Nat Friedman

An open competition seems like the most efficient way to get it done.

— Nat Friedman

The Vesuvius Challenge and the Herculaneum papyrus scrollsCT scanning, virtual unwrapping, and machine learning for ink detectionPrize-driven innovation vs. grants and closed research teamsMicrosoft’s acquisition of GitHub and running it as an independent developer hubThe creation and product design of GitHub CopilotOpen source governance, licenses, and the limits of community-driven developmentAI proliferation, economic impact, alignment, and the (in)efficiency of the world

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