Nat Friedman
AI Angel Investor & Cluster Builder | Former CEO, GitHub | Co-Creator of AI Grant & Andromeda
Former CEO of GitHub who oversaw the inception, development, and launch of GitHub Copilot in partnership with OpenAI—catalyzing the modern AI coding era. Co-founder of AI Grant, funding frontier AI builders with Daniel Gross. Co-builder of the private 'Andromeda' GPU supercluster (thousands of H100s dedicated to portfolio AI startups). Sponsor and co-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge, using volumetric CT and 3D computer vision to read carbonized Herculaneum scrolls.
Areas of focus
Professional niches
Proof of Work
The Vesuvius Challenge: Machine Learning on Carbonized Papyrus
Co-founded and funded the global open scientific prize that mobilized computer vision and 3D deep learning teams to detect hidden ink patterns in non-invasively scanned 3D CT volumes of Herculaneum scrolls sealed in 79 AD.
Papyrus segmentation requires substantial manual inspection and geometric mesh flattening prior to virtual unrolling.
Context: 3D U-Nets and Vision Transformers processing gigavoxel synchrotron X-ray tomographic volumes.
View missionGitHub Copilot: Conception, Technical Architecture & Launch
Conceived and executive-led GitHub Copilot, pairing OpenAI Codex with IDE telemetry, context window assembly from local tabs, and low-latency inline code ghost-text completions used by millions of software developers.
Early versions could suggest code containing outdated security vulnerabilities or license incompatibilities without automated scanning.
Context: OpenAI Codex model running custom token-level streaming inference into Visual Studio Code extensions.
View mission