I was one of the first to touch the OAI code model. Me and Albert developed the in-the-wild testing harness still in use today. We pulled all nighters to get GitHub approved for participation in the MSFT-OpenAI deal using those test results.
Existing Microsoft AI teams worked to halt our work, pushing their own small, worse models instead of OpenAI's.
I protoyped and lobbied for creation of the VScode extension. I invented and hacked the ghost text prototype into VScode, I invented the block based termination and implemented all the tree-sitter based logic needed to do it. Then I had to lobby up to Satya to get VScode to implement proper support in less than 6 months.
I named it Copilot.
I implemented GH auth, made the waitlist and onboarding. Helped design the e2e http/2 go server, after designing the fast.ly based precursor. Coordinated moving from OpenAI datacenter to Azure to improve Asia experience, and oversaw the cutover.
I was Chief Architect. It was my baby. Sad if this is how they are spinning the story internally at GitHub today.
I am specifically referring to the features he lists in his comment above. E.g. ghost text, block completion, and OpenAI integration.
To add to his credit Copilot in VS proper still sucks, so I'd estimate original VS Code hack to have better skills than the whole (e.g. the sum of) VS proper Copilot extension team.
Edit: I’m not saying that MS / GitHub is obligated to do anything more than it already has. From a PR perspective, it’s just far cheaper to give a fatter bonus and promotion to early contributors to a big product and publicize it. It will also encourage other employees to push instead of just cruising. Otherwise, now you have someone making a logical case for not working very hard for either GitHub or MS
He leveraged massive resources to do it and was allowed to tap people with multi-decades of experience (even implicitly - you think he build the execution engine where his "test harness" ran?). Not to mention that he essentially wrote a wrapper around an API..
If he put his total comp this pity party would shrink to one.
No matter the accomplishment, I doubt they would have been able to create copilot outside Microsoft and thus without Microsoft’s resources (computing infrastructure, engineering talent and software ecosystem).
And the “join a startup” is a dumb piece of advice as you’d be still making some one else profit.
Create your own company, and face the likelihood of bankruptcy.
That said, Alex's title appears to be principal engineer at GitHub, which is roughly equivalent to principal at Amazon in both expectations and comp. I worked at AWS for just shy of six years, and I can tell you that the person who created Firecracker -- which underpins huge portions of AWS's technology -- was at the same level, and while they were promoted shortly thereafter, they didn't receive a bonus (because comp packages at that level don't include bonuses at all). So, yeah, Alex is justified in sharing these details publicly, but this is just how it works in tech. (And, frankly, all the underpinning infrastructure that supported him wasn't his work -- he might have come up with Copilot, but would he have been able to without the work of thousands of others?)
I mean sure, technically this is correct. But it also fundamentally takes away from independent contributors and visionaries. Sure, "software is all about teams," but Linus Torvalds is definitely the guy behind Linux, and Palmer Luckey is the guy behind Oculus. It's unfair to take their achievements away because nowadays millions of people people contribute to Linux and Oculus was acquired by Meta.
I don't know OP, but I've seen this play out dozens of times in the cutthroat of corporate day-to-day, so it wouldn't surprise me for Microsoft to have a revisionist interpretation of how Copilot got started.
That's why the "I created" self-description rings hollow in my book -- as it does in essentially every other corporate / large-org case I've heard of (whether done as self-promotion, or the puff stories we're told about people we're supposed to hire or have run our teams or otherwise).
And which is why even people like Steve Jobs, who of course "was" the products he was famously associated with -- never went around saying "I created this." Not because he lacked for ego, or because his contributions were not monumental. But because he was smart enough to understand that once things get to a certain scale -- this kind of attribution is both absurd, and entirely beside the point.
I don't see this reading in the comment above. He is just sharing the passion and sense of ownership he put to create a great product. BTW He mentioned that it was a team effort in the thread, so I don't see any problem issue here.
Microsoft may be bad but it's not the most evil company in history, not even by a long shot.
Exxon and Texaco (now Chevron) would also be high on the list.
I want to be clear: I am absolutely not giving Microsoft a pass here. They've done quite a lot of bad. But they're a relatively new kid on the block vis-a-vis other companies out there.
PS. Within tech, I would also say that Oracle might top the list of 'evil companies' - but in their case, they really seem to actively embrace it (not that that's a good thing).
John Carmack would agree with you.
And it's funny because while Carmack was that single person which was pretty much the best dev in the whole company, Romero was a better fit of your description.
I know I do :D
I can't stand working with people like you, classic main character syndrome.
Even though I don't use it personally, Copilot is a great tool and the bonus is laughable when you put it next to the impact it had on how people write code. For me lesson learned was that in order to spend your career in a good place and to save yourself months or years of time is to voice your concerns early and move on if all you hear are promises without any follow up.
> The trick to effective min-maxing in social contexts is to make sure people can't tell you're min-maxing.
It means that, while in interview situations there is an expectation that you say "I did this", in social situations you might get more benefit from seeming to be more humble and appear to withhold your accomplishments, perhaps doing it in a way where someone else fills the gaps for you, or it entices the other parties into doing a bit of digging on their own and perhaps find some well-placed bios online that look like they weren't written by you / at your behest which do your bragging for you.
This avoids the situation where someone will say: "I work on Copilot now, and I can say this guy is totally full of himself." as other people respond "huh. yeah. that makes sense."
- From 2010 to 2019: 40 occurrences in HN's comments
- Compare that to over 70 for just the past two years.
Basically, it's as if you said “Woke” wasn't a contemporary word, because it used to exist in a niche for a long time.
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
What a funny world we live in! :)
Getting back to reality, ideas and prototypes are easy. Execution and delivery is hard.
I think "creator" is entirely appropriate in this case based on the features that he contributed.
I call everyone who builds the first thing the creator(s). This isn't uncommon or weird in my mind at all.
He may be totally fully of himself, but I don't see any realistic argument that he isn't one of the creators.
Thanks for the reality check, and Occam's Razor suggests this is (unfortunately) the most likely explanation for what we're reading.
Sure, employees get taken advantage of, and screwed over by politics all the time. But something about going online and openly (and quit caustically) negging your employer while still on their payroll suggests that there's something seriously off about this guy.
And that in any case, his synopsis of the situation is not to be taken at face value.
Edit: Actually we don't have information about his current status with them. My mistake. Thanks to the commenter below for pointing that out.
I believe that he turned 100% conspiracy theorist in recent years. He famously blames Alan Turing for his own judicial punishment and suicide.
What reality check? One online commenter you don't know contradicts another online commenter you don't know.
And you're basing the truthfulness of his statement on what, exactly? That it corroborates with how you want to feel about the original poster? Hardly a "reality check."
Pretty telling
The risk from zero to prototype is an order of magnitude more than the risk from prototype to product.
This dude is more than justified in being disappointed. The value added by de-risking a product of this size is massive.
The older I get, and the more I work on aspects of trying to build businesses, products, and services, the more I lament the loss of a kind of service-oriented ethos that truly makes societies great and that seems to only be "refreshed" (in America, in particular) by the darkest of times*. Here, I think of the people who went through the first half of the 20th century in comparison to the MBAs and similarly naively "optimizing" agents elsewhere in important / controlling positions in current society.
Game theory 'says' that anyone can choose D(efect)-heavy strategies, and in many environments, profit heavily, personally (aka, "The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do..."). But, a society with too many such players is not long for this world.
* Much as was said by a certain Founder about the "tree of liberty" - many of the Founders, including even TJ, who could be quite self-interested, understood that liberty requires responsibility and sacrifice ...
Dude, it might take a few weeks to work out if a big project is even viable in a large company.
Prototyping a full product is not the easiest part of the big project by a long shot. Prototyping is when you find and create the constraints, reduce the chaos and make the project legible so other people can work on it.
If you do it right, it should make it easier for other people to work on the project not harder.
Now, I have no idea if that's true and to what extent it's true - it's common for ICs to be unaware of the work others have done behind the scenes to convince the right folks and unblock their work (not saying that this is what happened, just that it's not inconsistent with Alex's perception that he drove this himself) - but I'm not sure how anything you're saying disproves his version of the story. You could say that about just about every startup founder.
It is you who is full of oneself, your attempt to belittle his contributions shows the kind of human you are. Stop hiding behind the keyboard and tell that to his face.
Downvote at will.