Nat Friedman: Building AI-Native Products & What’s Next For AI

The speaker discusses the emergence of AI capabilities and the need for product development to bridge the gap between research and practical applications. They also touch on the potential for startups to build new products and the challenges of incumbents in adopting generative AI technology.

• AI capabilities have created new opportunities for product development
• Product development requires a level of tinkering and creativity to find the intersection between new capabilities and user needs
• Language is an AGI complete problem with a lot of potential value to be unlocked
• Models are becoming more accessible and less brittle, making them easier to use for product development
• Startups have an opportunity to build new products that don't fit neatly into existing categories
• Incumbents face challenges in adopting generative AI technology due to reputational risk and the potential for offensive content
• The emergence of AI capabilities is not a joke and may be bad news for startups
• The moat for startups may be in the application or workflow rather than the model itself

The speaker mentions the development of CoPilot, which had the potential to say offensive things. Despite concerns, they shipped it anyway and it probably does say offensive things. However, for big companies with a small product that may only make $100 million a year, the reputational risk may not be worth it.

Nat Friedman was the CEO of GitHub from 2018 to 2022, led Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub, and founded two startups. Friedman is joined by Alexandr Wang, Founder and CEO of Scale, to explore this new AI-native future and what it will take to succeed.AI researchers have given the world a revolutionary new platform in the form of large models trained on internet data. And the game has changed dramatically with the recent release of advanced open source models.Some people think that the model is the product. It is not. It is an enabling technology that allows new products to be built. The breakthrough products will be AI-native, built on these models from day one, by entrepreneurs who understand both what the models can do, and what people actually want to use.While many AI technologies are still in their infancy, several are starting to emerge as practical for real-world applications. Many new AI-native products have grown explosively, reaching millions of users and creating huge businesses practically overnight. This is just the beginning.