Ryan J. Salva: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah, I can totally see the challenge that comes from... This was my thing. I've been working on this. What are you guys doing to this project? Where is this going? I'm not sure I'm feeling... And then there's all these new asks that are coming at you like, oh my God, this was so much fun and now I have to scale this freaking thing. I mean, this is the best problem in the world to have. Talk about kind of customer ask, for Copilot in particular, the amount of chatter, the amount of customer feedback that was coming in especially for us with AI, I mean, the world is still figuring out AI, candidly. I mean, we're getting a lot better at it, especially in the last couple of years with things like Dolly and Copilot. But it brings with it not only engineering challenges, but also, frankly, ethical challenges and legal challenges, like making sense of what our expectations are of AI. If AI produces something that is offensive, who's at fault? Our stance on it, what we ended up coming to is actually the framing of Copilot as an AI pair programmer I think is a useful one. Pair programmer, I suspect most of your listeners will know, but pair programmer is usually two developers sitting side by side working on a problem together. One's at the keyboard and the other one's kind of helping them talk through it, talk through the ideas and make corrections, that kind of thing. Well, if Copilot is your AI pair programmer and they're whispering crazy stuff into your ear and they're bringing politics into it or gender identity into it or, I don't know, whatever other... They're spouting off slang and slander and all that kind of stuff. You're probably not going to be able to focus on your work, right? It's going to be really distracting. Really coming down to some principles about what is the use case we're trying to solve, what is appropriate, I put this in scare quotes, behavior of the AI bot sitting side by side with you, helped us create some principles or some guidelines for the developer experience that we wanted to create. Oh, I love that. Just kind of creating a persona of the thing to help you inform how the behavior of the thing should work. How do you work through these challenges? Is it discussions with you and the legal team? I don't know, these ethical things are really tricky, I imagine. How do you approach them like that as a product team?…

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