In his words
We spent the last year working closely with OpenAI to build GitHub Copilot. We’ve been using it internally for months, and can’t wait for you to try it out; it’s like a piece of the future teleported back to 2021.
Biography
Nat Friedman (born 1977) is an American technologist who co-founded the open-source companies Ximian and Xamarin before running GitHub as CEO from 2018 to 2021 following its acquisition by Microsoft. His tenure produced GitHub Copilot, built with OpenAI and launched in June 2021 — the first AI pair-programmer to reach millions of developers, and arguably the product that proved generative AI could be a mainstream tool rather than a research demo.
From Copilot to superintelligence
After leaving GitHub, Friedman became one of the most sought-after AI investors, running the AI Grant program with partner Daniel Gross and backing a generation of AI startups. He also funded the Vesuvius Challenge, the 2023 competition that used machine learning to read carbonized Herculaneum scrolls buried by the eruption of 79 AD — a showcase of AI as an instrument of humanist discovery. His personal site distills his accelerationist temperament: “It’s important to do things fast… You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently.”
In June 2025, Mark Zuckerberg recruited Friedman and Gross to Meta’s newly formed Superintelligence Labs, where Friedman partners with Alexandr Wang to lead Meta’s work on AI products and applied research — placing the man who commercialized AI coding at the center of the industry’s most aggressive talent consolidation.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/nat-friedman