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

**Ryan J. Salva** (0:00)
We had actually created a snapshot of GitHub's public code for what we call the Arctic Code Vault, right? Essentially, this is up in way in the Northlands of Finland. There's a seed vault.
And we're like, you know what? Seed vaults are really there to preserve the diversity of the world's flora in seeds in case of some crazy, either natural or man-made disaster.
But another really important asset to the world is our code, our open source. This represents actually a lot of the collective, well, certainly software, if not intelligence of the modern world, right? And so we had put this snapshot of public repositories on this silver film that would be preserved for thousands of years in this Arctic Code Vault. Well, we took that same data snapshot and we brought it to our friends over at OpenAI to see like, okay, what can we do with these large language models built on public code? Well, it turns out we can do some pretty cool things.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:12)
Ryan Salva is VP of Product at GitHub, where amongst other projects, he incubated and launched GitHub Copilot, which in my opinion is one of the most magical products that you'll come across. If you haven't heard of it, it uses OpenAI's machine learning engine to auto-complete code for engineers in real-time as they're coding, and I think it's one of the biggest advances in product development and productivity that we've seen in a while. I'm always really curious how a big product like this starts, gets buy-in, builds momentum, and then launches, especially at a big company like Microsoft and especially a product like Copilot that has surprising ethics challenges, scaling challenges, business model questions. Also, this came out of a small R&D team that GitHub has. And it's so interesting to hear what Ryan has learned about incubating big bets within a large company and then taking them from prototype to Microsoft scale. Ryan is also just super interesting as a human. He's got a very non-traditional background. And so I am excited for you to hear this conversation.
And so with that, I bring you Ryan Salva.
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Ryan, welcome to the podcast.

**Ryan J. Salva** (4:42)
Thank you, my friend. I am genuinely very excited to be here. Lovely to geek out with you for a little while.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:48)
I'm excited as well. We were chatting briefly before we started recording and you mentioned a little bit about your background, which is really unique for someone that is leading product at GitHub.