Nat Friedman is a technologist and entrepreneur who approaches AI with relentless curiosity and speed. After serving as CEO of GitHub from 2018-2021, he’s been building personal AI experiments, funding AI startups through AI Grant , and leading the Vesuvius Challenge —a $1.5M+ prize competition using ML to read ancient Roman scrolls carbonized by Mount Vesuvius.
Background
- Grew up in Charlottesville, VA; on the Internet since 1991
- MIT graduate (inspired by Richard Feynman’s autobiographies)
- Co-founded Ximian (Linux desktop, acquired by Novell)
- Co-founded Xamarin (cross-platform mobile dev, acquired by Microsoft)
- CEO of GitHub (2018-2021), overseeing Copilot’s development
- GitHub: @nat — 7k followers
- nat.org
Philosophy: Go Fast
From his personal site, Nat’s core beliefs about building:
“It’s important to do things fast. You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently. Going fast makes you focus on what’s important; there’s no time for bullshit. ‘Slow is fake.’”
This manifests in his projects—rapid experiments that explore AI capabilities rather than polished products.
natbot: Browser Automation with GPT-3
natbot (1.9k stars) was an early experiment in LLM-powered browser control, released in late 2022. The concept: give GPT-3 a serialized view of the DOM and let it drive a browser through natural language commands.
From the README:
“Drive a browser with GPT-3”
The project outlined future improvements:
- Better prompt engineering
- Prompt chaining for complex tasks
- Human feedback collection for few-shot learning
- Better DOM serialization
- Multi-tab support
natbot pioneered ideas that later appeared in more sophisticated agent frameworks. Its simplicity made it influential—one Python file demonstrating that LLMs could reason about web interfaces.
openplayground: Local LLM Exploration
openplayground (6.4k stars) is “an LLM playground you can run on your laptop.” It provides a unified interface for comparing different models:
- Side-by-side model comparison
- Local and API-based models
- Parameter tweaking (temperature, top-p, etc.)
- Response streaming
This reflects Nat’s philosophy of personal AI tools—run it locally, experiment freely, learn through direct interaction.
Vesuvius Challenge: ML for Ancient Texts
Perhaps Nat’s most ambitious AI project is the Vesuvius Challenge , co-founded with Daniel Gross and Dr. Brent Seales .
The goal: use machine learning to read the Herculaneum Papyri—ancient Roman scrolls carbonized when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. These scrolls have been unreadable for 275 years.
| Milestone | Achievement |
|---|---|
| March 2023 | Challenge launched with $1M+ in prizes |
| 2023 | Grand Prize claimed—first text recovered |
| 2024 | Multiple scrolls being decoded |
| 2026 | $1.5M+ awarded, ongoing progress |
The technical pipeline combines:
- High-resolution CT scanning
- 3D surface reconstruction (segmentation)
- Ink detection via ML pattern recognition
- Virtual unwrapping algorithms
Sponsors include the Musk Foundation, Patrick & John Collison, and Matt Mullenweg.
AI Grant: Funding AI Builders
AI Grant is an accelerator Nat co-runs that provides:
- $250,000 on uncapped SAFE
- $350,000 in cloud credits
- Summit in San Francisco with advisors
- Demo Day with top investors
Notable advisors: Andrej Karpathy, Patrick Collison, Tobi Lütke, Guillermo Rauch, Dylan Field.
AI Grant has funded projects like:
- Pika — generative video
- ggml — run AI models anywhere
- Lindy — AI personal assistant
- Perplexity — LLM-powered search
- K-Scale Labs — consumer humanoid robots
Other Projects
- ghtop (846 stars) — Real-time GitHub activity viewer
- trackmac — Simple time tracker for macOS
- PlasticList — Testing Bay Area foods for plastic chemicals
Key Principles
From nat.org:
| Principle | Implication |
|---|---|
| “Time is the denominator” | Speed of iteration > perfection |
| “Smaller teams are better” | Faster decisions, no room for mediocrity |
| “The efficient market hypothesis is a lie” | Opportunities exist where others don’t look |
| “Where do you get your dopamine?” | Better from improving ideas than validating them |
| “You can do more than you think” | We’re tied down by invisible orthodoxy |
Why It Matters
Nat represents a particular approach to personal AI: rapid experimentation, open-source sharing, and funding others to explore. His projects aren’t products—they’re probes into what’s possible.
natbot showed that LLMs could control browsers before agent frameworks existed. openplayground gave developers a local sandbox when most were stuck with OpenAI’s playground. The Vesuvius Challenge proved that ambitious, seemingly impossible problems could attract world-class ML talent when properly incentivized.