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

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.