The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2022

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ryan J. Salva is the VP of Product at GitHub, where he led the incubation and launch of Copilot. Copilot uses OpenAI’s ML engine to suggest code and entire functions in real time, right from your editor, and is changing the way we build software. Ryan is an experienced developer and product manager, with over a decade of experience working for Microsoft before moving to lead the GitHub product team. In today’s episode, he shares how Copilot got its start, how it moved from prototype to live product, and how he structures R&D teams within larger companies. He also discusses the ethical questions surrounding AI use and how to build a successful product team, and shares the inside story of the development of Copilot.

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Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-role-of-ai-in-new-product-development-ryan-j-salva-vp-of-product-at-github-copilot/#transcript

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Where to find Ryan J. Salva:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanjsalva

• LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanjsalva/

• Website: http://www.ryanjsalva.com/

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:

• Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/

• Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lenny

• Modern Treasury: https://www.moderntreasury.com/

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Referenced:

• GitHub Copilot: https://github.com/features/copilot

• Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction: https://www.amazon.com/Make-So-Interaction-Lessons-Science/dp/1933820985

• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: https://www.amazon.com/Brief-Interviews-Hideous-Foster-Wallace/dp/0316925195

• The Memory Palace podcast: https://thememorypalace.us/

• Arrival: https://www.hulu.com/movie/arrival-6ec67b11-b282-4383-85ac-38c4731b40e4

• Oege De Moor’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oegedemoor/

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In this episode, we cover:

[04:39] Ryan’s background and how he became involved in development

[10:46] What is GitHub Copilot?

[14:44] How GitHub Copilot can be utilized for education

[17:46] How GitHub incorporated AI models with computer languages

[27:24] Project horizons: delegating tasks based on confidence levels

[30:39] How to put together a development team for “moonshots”

[35:22] When and how to transition your R&D team smoothly

[38:28] Dealing with ethical issues surrounding AI

[44:40] The future of AI in development

[48:48] Challenges with scaling Copilot

[54:23] Allocating your energy as products scale

[58:17] Lightning round

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Production and marketing: https://penname.co/

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	We had actually created a snapshot of GitHub's public code for what we call the Arctic Code
0:08.3	right? Essentially, this is up in like way in the northlands of Finland.
0:14.0	There's a seed vault.
0:16.0	And we're like, you know what, like seed bolts are really there to preserve the diversity of the world's
0:22.0	flora in seeds in case of some crazy either natural or man-made disaster.
0:28.0	But another really important asset to the world is our code, our open source.
0:33.4	Like this represents actually a lot of the collective, well certainly software
0:38.8	if not like intelligence of kind of like the modern world, right? And so we had put this snapshot of public
0:47.8	repositories on these like this like silver film that would be preserved for thousands of years and this Arctic Code Bowl.
0:56.1	Well, we took that same data snapshot and we brought it to our friends over at Open
1:00.8	AI to see like, okay, what can we do with these large language models
1:04.4	built on public code? Well it turns out we can do some pretty cool things.
1:09.7	Ryan Solva is VP a product at GitHub where amongst other projects he incubated and
1:18.4	launched GitHub Co-Pilot, which in my opinion is one of the most magical products that you'll come across.
1:24.0	If you haven't heard of it, it uses open-eye's machine learning engine to
1:28.0	auto complete code for engineers in real time as they're coding and I think it's one of the biggest advances in
1:34.4	product development and productivity that we've seen in a while. I'm always
1:38.6	really curious how a big product like this starts, gets buy-in, builds momentum, and then launches, especially at a
1:45.8	big company like Microsoft, and especially a product like Co-Pilot that has surprising ethics
1:50.9	challenges, scaling challenges,
1:53.0	business model questions.
1:54.9	Also, this came out of a small R&D team
	...

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