No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley

Everyone talks about the future impact of AI, but there’s already an AI product that has revolutionized a profession. Alex Graveley was the principal engineer and Chief Architect behind Github Copilot, a sort of pair-programmer that auto-completes your code as you type. It has rapidly become a product that developers won’t live without, and the most leaned-upon analogy for every new AI startup – Copilot for Finance, Sales, Marketing, Support, Writing, Decision-Making. Alex is a longtime hacker and tinkerer, open source contributor, repeat founder, and creator of products that millions of people use, such as Dropbox Paper. He has a new project in stealth, Minion AI. In this episode, we talk about the uncertain process of shipping Copilot, how code improves chain of thought for LLMs, how they improved product, performance, how people are using it, AI agents that can do work for us, stress testing society's resilience to waves of new technology, and his new startup named Minion. 00:00 - Introduction 01:50 - How Alex got started in technology 02:28 - Alex’s earlier projects with Hack Pad and Dropbox Paper 07:32 - Why Alex always wanted to make bots that did stuff for people 11:56 - How Alex started working at Github and Copilot 27:11 - What is Minion AI 30:30 - What’s possible on the horizon of AI