In your mind, what were some of the most important advancements in AI this year?

When we were heading into 2022, I think just about everybody in AI was anticipating really impressive things to take place over the next twelve or so months. But now that we’re pretty much through the year, and even with those lofty expectations, it’s kind of genuinely mind-blowing to look back at the magnitude of innovation that we saw left-to-right in AI. The things that researchers and other folks have done to advance the state-of-the-art are just light years beyond what we thought possible even a few years ago. And almost all of this is a result of the incredibly rapid advancement that has happened with large AI models.

The three things I’ve been most impressed by this year were the launch of GitHub Copilot, which is a large language model-based system that turns natural language prompts into code and has this dramatic positive impact on developer productivity. It opens up coding to a much broader group of people than we’ve ever had before, which is awesome because so much of the future is dependent on our ability to write software.