GitHub Copilot's Origin: 50 Oxford Puzzles and Early GPT-3 Sealed the Deal in 2020
npew · x · 2026-10-31
Oege de Moor recounts how, after GitHub acquired his startup Semmle in 2020, Nat Friedman gave him free rein to turn GitHub's untapped developer data into products. Early GPT-3 access in June 2020 revealed code-generation potential, and 50 Oxford-style programming puzzles proved the model viable. OpenAI's npew credits the team for solving latency, caching, and coding evals that Copilot took for granted.
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