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Alex Graveley

Director, Comet, Perplexity AI · 1 appearance on the record.

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engineerfounderexecutiveinvestor@alexgraveley ↗LinkedIn ↗alexgraveley.com ↗

Alex Graveley is an engineer and entrepreneur best known as the creator and former Chief Architect of GitHub Copilot and the founder of Hackpad. He subsequently founded Minion AI to develop browser-controlling AI agents before joining Perplexity to lead its Comet product.

15statements → 10claims → 1claims resolved → 3.73/5average certainty → 1.93/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 2said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 8 not checkable as stated how the 10 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 8 assertions · 1 opinion · 4 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 10 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 8 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Alex argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up
Autonomous tax-filing AI agents are achievable within the next few years
“You want to make a thing where you say, hey, computer, file my taxes, and it does the right thing. You know, I think we can get there. That's certainly in the next few years you know.”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 35:53 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Alex Graveley on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

Everything Alex Graveley said on No Priors that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Graveley: Bad actors with AI pose a bigger threat than AI existential risk
“I'm not really scared about AI is killing us, although I'm very grateful that there are people that are thinking about it. I'm more worried about bad people using new technology to hurt us.”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 10:51 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley
Assertion Not yet assessed · timeframe Apr 2023
Training OpenAI base models on code improved chain-of-thought reasoning
“So they had wanted to see what introducing code into their into their base models would do. I think it had positive effects on chain of thought reasoning.”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 15:28 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Graveley: Every 10ms of latency drops Copilot completions by 1%
“Every 10 milliseconds is one percent fewer completions that people would do.”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 24:16 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley
Insight
Graveley: Programmers think in blocks, making block autocomplete optimal
“The key insight was realizing that programmers kind of think in blocks. So if you can just autocomplete the rest of the current block, Then that's what people want. People can, they're kind of like judging what this block is going to do, and if it does the rig…”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 26:34 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Graveley: Copilot writes 80% of code for top power users
“There's some whales out there. Like there's people who it writes 80% of their code.”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 29:47 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley
Prediction Held up
Autonomous tax-filing AI agents are achievable within the next few years
“You want to make a thing where you say, hey, computer, file my taxes, and it does the right thing. You know, I think we can get there. That's certainly in the next few years you know.”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 35:53 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley
Insight
Graveley: Applied AI intuition is bimodal between junior and senior engineers
“You know, one thing, I don't know if other people have noticed this, but it seems very bimodal, like very senior people get it and very young people get it, and so I don't know that the middle has really caught up yet or realizes that, that .”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 37:33 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley
Insight
Graveley: Unlike most software that breaks at scale, AI models improve
“The crazy thing is that these things work at all, right? And not only that, but they scale and they improve the scale, right? Most things break at scale. Almost everything breaks at scale.”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 40:28 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley
Insight
Graveley: Traditional UIs enforce structured flows, whereas text interfaces invite erratic goal changes
“So the beauty of the web and like traditional UIs, right, is that you fill them in. And like, if it, if you can't, if it doesn't do what you want, then you make the decision to either go forward or not go forward. Right? Text has this annoying property of you …”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 5:36 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Graveley: AI scamming will cause years of extreme discomfort and financial harm
“The honest answer is I think we're going to go through a many year period of extreme discomfort where AIs pretend to be things or confuse people or extract money from your grandparents or you know, drain people's life savings in ways that are that are scary”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 10:04 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Graveley: GitHub Copilot's in-the-wild test pass rate rose from under 10% to over 60%
“And eventually, you know, it went from, you know, less than 10% on in the wild test to over 60%. So that's like one in two tests it can just generate code for.”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 18:25 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Graveley: GitHub Copilot weekly cohort retention stayed above 50%
“Our retention rate was 50%. Like, it never went, like, months later, it was still above 50% by, like, weekly cohort, which is, like, insane.”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 28:04 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Web interaction click data is a massive and unowned dataset
“So people clicking on stuff on the web is a gigantic data set, which is currently unowned.”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 36:55 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley
Assertion Not checkable as stated
GitHub initially considered building a Stack Overflow competitor using OpenAI models
“And at the time they were thinking in terms of like, maybe you can replace Stack Overflow or something, you know, do a Stack Overflow competitor.”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 19:01 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Graveley: Early data centers and networks ran primarily on Windows
“Windows was popular at that time. So people ran their, you know, data centers on windows and networks on windows. And this Linux thing was like very strange and people didn't really know what it was.”
Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 0:57 No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley

The other half of the tape: Alex Graveley's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes on No Priors. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Sarah Guo 2

Every mention by year

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2023 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
No Priors Ep. 10 | With Copilot's Chief Architect and founder of Minion.AI Alex Graveley Apr 25, 2023 30m
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