OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil

0:00

The AI models that you're using today is the  worst AI model you will ever use for the rest of your life, and when you actually get that  in your head, it's kind of wild.

0:05

Everywhere I've ever worked before this, you kind of  know what technology you're building on, but that's not true at all with AI.

0:13

Every two  months, computers can do something they've never been able to do before and you need to completely  think differently about what you're doing.

0:21

You're chief product officer of maybe the  most important company in the world right now.

0:25

I want to chat about what it's just  like to be inside the center of the storm.

0:29

Our general mindset is in two months,  there's going to be a better model and it's going to blow away whatever the current  set of limitations are.

0:33

And we say this to developers too.

0:37

If you're building and  the product that you're building is kind of right on the edge of the capabilities  of the models, keep going because you're doing something right.

0:44

Give it another couple  months and the models are going to be great, and suddenly the product that you have that  just barely worked is really going to sing.

0:51

Famously, you led this project  at Facebook called Libra.

0:55

Libra is probably the biggest disappointment of my  career.

0:55

It fundamentally disappoints me that this doesn't exist in the world today because the world  would be a better place if we'd been able to ship that product.

1:04

We tried to launch a new blockchain.

1:04

It was a basket of currencies originally.

1:04

It was integration into WhatsApp and Messenger.

1:10

I would  be able to send you 50 cents in WhatsApp for free. It should exist.

1:16

To be honest, the current  administration is super friendly to crypto.

1:20

Facebook's reputation is in a very different  place.

1:20

Maybe they should go build it now.

1:27

Today my guest is Kevin Weil.

1:27

Kevin  is chief product officer at OpenAI, which is maybe the most important and most  impactful company in the world right now, being at the forefront of AI and AGI and maybe  someday super intelligence.

1:37

He was previously head of product at Instagram and Twitter.

1:43

He  was co-creator of the Libra Cryptocurrency at Facebook, which we chat about.

1:48

He's also  on the boards of Planet and Strava and the Black Product Managers Network and the Nature  Conservancy.

1:52

He's also just a really good guy and he has so much wisdom to share.

1:57

We chat  about how OpenAI operates, implications of AI and how we will all work and build product,  which markets within the AI ecosystem, companies like OpenAI won't likely go after and  thus are good places for startups to own.

2:07

Also, why learning the craft of writing evals is quickly  becoming a core skill for product builders, what skills will matter most in an AI era and what he's  teaching his kids to focus on and so much more.

2:24

This is a very special episode and I am so excited  to bring it to you.

2:24

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2:39

With that, I bring you Kevin Weil.

2:45

This episode is brought  to you by Eppo.

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4:00

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5:11

Kevin, thank you so  much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

5:23

Thank you so much for having  me.

5:23

We've been talking about doing this forever and we made it happen. We did it.

5:27

I can't imagine how insane your life  is, so I really appreciate that you made time for this and we're actually recording this the  week that you guys launched your new image model, which is a happy coincidence.

5:35

My entire social feed is filled with ghiblifications of everyone's life and  family photos and everything, so good job. Yep, mine too.

5:44

My wife, Elizabeth, sent me  one of hers, so I'm right there with you.

5:51

Let me just ask, did you guys expect this kind  of reaction?

5:51

It feels like this is the most viral thing that's happened in AI, which a high bar  since, I don't know, ChatGPT launched.

5:55

Just like, did you guys expect it to go this well?

6:00

What does it feel like internally?

6:03

There have been a handful of times in my career  when you're working on a product internally and the internal usage just explodes.

6:09

This was  true by the way when we were building stories at Instagram.

6:14

More than anything else in my  career, we could feel it was going to work because we were all using it internally and we'd  go away for a weekend.

6:18

Before it launched we were all using it and we'd come back after a weekend  and we would know what was going on and be like, "Oh, hey, I saw you were at that camping  trip, how was that?"

6:27

You were like, "Man, this thing really works."

6:32

ImageGen was definitely  one of those, so we'd been playing with it for, I don't know, a couple months and when it  first went live internally to the company, there was kind of a little gallery  where you could generate your own, you could also see what everyone else was  generating and it was just nonstop buzz.

6:54

So yeah, we had a sense that this was going  to be a lot of fun for people to play with. That's really cool.

6:58

That should be  a measure of just confidence into something going well that you're launching  is internally everyone's going crazy for it. Yeah.

7:05

Especially social things because you have  a very tight network as a company socially, so you know each other and you're experts in  your product hopefully.

7:13

And so there's some sense in which if you're doing something  social and it's not taking off internally, you might question what you're doing.

7:23

Yeah, and by the way, the Ghibli  thing, is that something you guys seeded or how did that even start?

7:26

Was that an intentional example?

7:29

I think it's just the style people love and  the model is really capable at emulating style or understanding what...

7:35

It's very  good at instruction following.

7:35

That's actually something that I think people...

7:38

I'm starting to see people discover with it, but you can do very complex things.

7:43

You can give  it two images, one is your living room and the other is a whole bunch of photos or memorabilia  or things you want and you say, "Tell me how you would arrange these things."

7:53

Or you can say,  "I'd like you to show me what this will look like if you put this over here and this thing to the  right of that and this one to the left of this, but under that one."

8:01

And the model actually will  understand all of that and do it.

8:01

It's incredibly powerful.

8:06

So I'm just excited about all the  different things people are going to figure out. Yeah. All right. Well, good job. Good job  team OpenAI.

8:11

Let's get serious here and let's zoom out a little bit.

8:15

The way I see it is you're  chief product officer of maybe the most important company in the world right now.

8:20

Just not to set  the bar too high, but you guys are ushering in AI, AGI at some point, super intelligence at some  point. No big deal.

8:27

I have more questions for you than I've had for any other guest.

8:33

Actually  put out a call-out on Twitter and LinkedIn and my community just like what would you want to ask  Kevin?

8:36

And I had over 300 well-formed questions and we're going to go through every single one.

8:42

So let's just get started. I'm just joking. Cool.

8:45

I picked out the best and there's a  lot of stuff I'm really curious about. Well, it's 1 PM here.

8:48

It doesn't get  dark for a while, so let's do it. Okay, here we go.

8:51

Okay, so first of all, I'm just going to take notes here. When  is AGI launching? When in December?

8:58

I mean, we just launched a good  ImageGen model. Does that count? It's getting there. It's getting there.

9:05

There's this quote I love, which is "AI is  whatever hasn't been done yet" because once it's been done, when it kind of works, then you call it  machine learning, and once it's kind of ubiquitous and it's everywhere, then it's just an algorithm.

9:17

So I've always loved that we call things AI when they still don't quite work and then by the time  it's like an AI algorithm that's recommending you follow, oh, that's just an algorithm, but this  new thing, like self-driving cars, that's it.

9:29

I think to some degree we're always going to be  there and the next thing is always going to be AI and the current thing that we use every day and  is just a part of our lives, that's an algorithm.

9:46

It's so interesting because in the Bay Area you  see self-driving cars driving around and it's so normal now when four years ago and three years  ago, you would've seen this and you'd be like, "Holy shit, what is... We're in the future."

9:56

And now we're just so take it for granted.

10:01

I mean there's something like that  with everything. If I showed you...

10:05

When GPT-3 launched, I wasn't at  OpenAI then.

10:05

I was just a user, but it was mind-blowing.

10:10

And if I gave you  GPT-3 now I just plugged that into ChatGPT for you and you started using it, you'd be  like, "What is this thing?" It's like mess. Flop, flop.

10:23

I had the same experience when I first got into  a Waymo, your very first ride, at least my very first ride, my first 10 seconds in a Waymo,  it starts driving and you're like, "Oh my God, watch out for that bike."

10:36

You're holding onto  whatever you can.

10:36

And then five minutes in, you've calmed down and you realize that you're  getting driven around the city without a driver and it's working.

10:47

You're just like, "Oh my God,  I am living in the future right now."

10:47

And then another 10 minutes, you're bored, you're doing  email on your phone, answering Slack messages, and suddenly this miracle of human invention  is just an expected part of your life from then on.

11:03

And there is really something in the  way that we all are adapting to AI that's kind of like that.

11:08

These miraculous things happen  and computers can do something they've never been able to do before and it blows our mind  collectively for a week and then we're like, oh, yeah.

11:18

Oh, now it's just machine  learning on its way to being an algorithm.

11:23

The craziest thing about what you just  shared actually is, I don't know, ChatGPT, which is now feels terrible. 3.

11:26

5 was a couple  years ago, and imagine what life will be like in a couple years from now.

11:33

We're going to get  to that, where things are going, what you think is going to be the next big leap.

11:36

But I want  to start with the beginning of your journey at OpenAI.

11:41

So you worked at Twitter, you worked  at Facebook, you worked at Planet, Instagram.

11:50

At some point you got recruited to go and come  work at OpenAI.

11:50

I'm curious just what that story was like of the recruiting process of joining  OpenAI as CPO.

11:54

Is there any fun stories there?

12:00

If I'm remembering the timeline right,  we communicated at Planet I was leaving and I was planning to just go take some  time.

12:05

I wasn't going to stop working, but I was also happy to take the summer.

12:10

This was  maybe April or something.

12:10

I was like, cool, I'm going to have the summer with my kids.

12:15

We're going  to go to Tahoe or something and I'll actually get to hang out rather than what I usually do going  up and down and all that.

12:19

And then Sam and I had known each other lightly for a bunch of years and  he's always involved in so many interesting things like companies building fusion and all these  things.

12:32

So he'd always been somebody that I would call occasionally if I was starting to think  about my next thing because I like working on big tech forward, sort of next wave kind of things.

12:44

And so I called him and I think Vinod also helped to put us in touch again.

12:54

And this time it  wasn't like, "Oh, you should go talk to these guys working on fusion."

12:59

He said, "Actually, we're  thinking about something, you should come talk to us."

13:05

I was like, "Okay, that sounds amazing. Let's do it."

13:05

And it goes really fast, really, really fast.

13:11

I met most of the management  team in a brief period of time, a few days, and they were telling me, 'Look, we're basically  going to move as fast as we want to move.

13:18

And if you talk to everyone, everyone likes you,  you're ready to go."

13:27

Sam came over for dinner and we had a great evening together just talking  about OpenAI in the future and getting to know each other better.

13:40

And at the end I was like,  I was going to go in the next day for a bigger round of interviews and Sam was saying, "Hey,  it's going really well. We're really excited." And I said, "Cool.

13:52

So how do I think about  tomorrow?"

13:52

And he said, "Oh, you'll be fine. Don't worry about it.

13:54

And if it goes well, we're  basically there."

13:54

And so I go in the next day, meet a bunch of people, have a great time.

14:00

I  really enjoyed everybody I met with.

14:00

In any interview, you can always second guess yourself  like, oh, I shouldn't have said that thing or that thing I gave a bad answer on I wish I could  redo, but I came away feeling like I think that went pretty well.

14:16

And I was expecting to hear  that weekend basically because they sort of set expectations as soon as if this goes well, we're  ready to go.

14:24

And I didn't hear anything.

14:24

And then it was like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I still  didn't hear anything and I reached out to folks on the OpenAI side a couple of times, still nothing.

14:42

And I was like, "Oh my God, I screwed it up.

14:42

I don't know where I screwed it up, but I totally  screwed it up. I can't believe it."

14:49

And I was going back to Elizabeth, my wife and being like,  "What did I do? Where do you think I..."

14:53

Getting all crazy about it and then it's still nothing.

14:58

And finally it was like nine days later, they finally got back to me and it turned out there was  a bunch of stuff happening internally and this, that and the other thing, and there's just  a million things happening.

15:11

And they finally were like, "Oh yeah, that went well. Let's  do this."

15:15

And I was like, "Oh, okay, cool, let's do it."

15:19

But it was nine days of agony and  they were just super busy on some internal stuff and there I was fretting every single day and  re-going over every line of our interview process.

15:33

It makes me think about when you're  dating someone and you've texted them and you're not hearing anything  back, you assume something is wrong. Yeah, totally. They might just be busy.

15:43

I have a hard time about it still. That's wild.

15:47

I love that it worked out.

15:47

And I guess the lesson there is  don't jump to conclusions. Yeah.

15:55

Have a little bit of chill.

15:59

Speaking of that, I want to chat about what  it's just like to be inside the center of the storm.

16:03

Again, you work at a lot of, let's  say traditional companies even though they're not that traditional, Twitter and Instagram and  Facebook and Planet, and now you work at OpenAI.

16:13

I'm curious, what is most different about how  things work in your day-to-day life at OpenAI?

16:19

I think it's probably the pace. Maybe it's two  things. One is it's the pace.

16:19

The second is everywhere I've ever worked before this, you  kind of know what technology you're building on.

16:31

So you spend your time thinking about what  problems are you solving?

16:31

Who are you building for?

16:35

How are you going to make their lives  better? How are you going to...

16:35

Is this a big enough problem that you're going to be able  to change habits?

16:40

Do people care about this problem being solved?

16:45

All those good product  things.

16:45

But the stuff that you're building on is kind of fixed.

16:50

You're talking about databases  and things and I bet the database you used this year is probably 5% better than the database  you used two years ago, but that's not true at all with AI.

17:01

It's like every two months  computers can do something they've never been able to do before and you need to completely  think differently about what you're doing.

17:10

There's something fundamentally interesting  about that makes life fun here.

17:10

There's also something we will maybe talk about evals  later, but it also really, in this world of...

17:25

Everything we're used to with computers is about  giving a computer very defined inputs.

17:25

If you look at Instagram for example, there are buttons that  do specific things and you know what they do.

17:31

And then when you give a computer defined inputs, you  get very defined outputs.

17:36

You're confident that if you do the same thing three times, you're  going to get the same output three times.

17:45

LLMs are completely different than that.

17:45

They're  good at fuzzy subtle inputs.

17:45

Then all the nuances of human language and communication,  they're pretty good at.

17:50

And also they don't really give you the same answer.

17:55

You probably get  spiritually the same answer for the same question, but it's certainly not the same set of words every  time.

18:00

And so you're much more, it's fuzzier inputs and fuzzier outputs.

18:05

And when you're building  products, it really matters whether there's some use case that you're trying to build around.

18:13

If the model gets it right 60% of the time, you build a very different product than if the  model gets it right 95% of the time versus if the model gets it right 99. 5% of the time.

18:26

And  so there's also something that you have to get really into the weeds on your use case and  the evals and things like that in order to understand the right kind of product to build.

18:36

So that is just fundamentally different.

18:36

If your database works once, it works every  time.

18:41

And that's not true in this world.

18:45

Let's actually follow this thread on evals.

18:45

I  definitely wanted to talk about this.

18:45

We had this legendary panel at the Lenny & Friends Summit.

18:50

It  was you and Mike Krieger and Sarah Guo moderating. That was fun. So fun.

18:57

The thing that I heard that kind of stuck  with people from that panel was a comment you made where you said that writing evals is going  to become a core skill for product managers, and I feel like that probably applies  further than just product managers.

19:08

A lot of people know what evals are.

19:11

A lot  of people have no idea what I'm talking about.

19:14

So could you just briefly explain  what is an eval and then just why do you think this is going to be so important for  people building products in the future? Yeah, sure.

19:22

I think the easiest way to think  about it is almost like a quiz for a model, a test to gauge how well it knows a certain  set of subject material or how good it is at responding to a certain set of questions.

19:34

So in the same way you take a calculus class and then you have calculus tests that see if  you've learned what you're supposed to learn.

19:43

You have evals that test how good is the model  at creative writing?

19:43

How good is the model at graduate level science?

19:51

How good is the  model at competitive coding?

19:51

And so you have these set of evals that basically perform as  benchmarks for how smart or capable the model is.

20:04

Is it a simple way to think about  it, like unit tests for model?

20:07

Yeah, unit tests, tests in  general for models. Totally. Great, great. Okay.

20:10

And then why is this  so important for people that don't totally understand what the hell's going on here with  evals?

20:15

Why is this so key to building AI products?

20:20

Well, it gets back to what I was saying.

20:20

You  need to know whether your model is going to...

20:24

There are certain things that models will get  right. 99.

20:24

95% of the time and you can just be confident.

20:28

There are things that they're going  to be 95% right on and things they're going to be 60% right on.

20:32

If the model's 60% right  on something, you're going to need to build your product totally differently.

20:37

And by the way,  these things aren't static either.

20:37

So a big part of evals is if you know you're building for some  use case.

20:42

So let's take our deep research product, which is one of my favorite things that we've  released maybe ever.

20:50

The idea is with deep research for people who haven't used it, you  can give ChatGPT now an arbitrarily complex query.

21:04

It's not about returning you an answer  from a search query, which we can also do.

21:10

It's here's a thing that if you were going to  answer it yourself, you'd go off and do two hours of reading on the web and then you might need to  read some papers and then you would come back and start writing up your thoughts and realize you had  some gaps in your thinking.

21:20

So you go out and do more research.

21:23

It might take you a week to write  some 20 page answer to this question.

21:23

You can let ChatGPT just like chug for you for 25, 30 minutes.

21:30

It's not the immediate answers you're used to, but it might go work for 25, 30 minutes and do  work that would've taken you a week.

21:37

So as we were building that product, we were designing  evals at the same time as we were thinking about how this product was going to work and  we were trying to go through hero use cases.

21:57

Here's a question you want to be able to ask.

21:57

Here's an amazing answer for that question.

22:02

And then turning those into evals and then  hill climbing on those evals.

22:02

So it's not just that the model is static and we hope  it does okay on a certain set of things, you can teach the model.

22:12

You can make  this a continuous learning process.

22:12

And so as we were fine-tuning our model for deep  research to be able to answer these things, we were able to test is it getting better  on these evals that we said were important measures of how the product was working?

22:26

And  it's when you start seeing that and you start seeing performance on evals going up, you start  saying, "Okay, I think we have a product here."

22:35

You made a kind of a comment along  these same lines around evals that AI is almost capped in how  amazing it can be by how good we are at evals. Does that resonate?

22:43

Any more thoughts along those lines?

22:48

I mean, these models are their  intelligences and intelligence is so fundamentally multidimensional so you  can talk about a model being amazing at competitive coding, which may not be the same  as that model being great at front-end coding- ...

23:00

may not be the same as that model being  great at front-end coding or back-end coding or taking a whole bunch of code that's written in  COBOL and turning it into Python.

23:05

And that's just within the software engineering world.

23:11

So I think  there's a sense in which you can think of these models as incredibly smart, very factually aware  intelligences, but still most of the world's data, knowledge, process is not public.

23:28

It's behind  the walls of companies or governments or other things.

23:36

And same way, if you were going to  join a company, you would spend your first two weeks onboarding.

23:40

You'd be learning the  company-specific processes.

23:40

You'd get access to company-specific data.

23:43

The models are  smart enough, you can teach them anything, but they need to have the raw data to learn from.

23:51

So there's a sense in which I think the future is really going to be incredibly smart, broad-based  models that are fine-tuned and tailored with company-specific or use case-specific data so  that they perform really well on company-specific, or use case-specific things.

24:19

And you're  going to measure that with custom evals.

24:26

So what I was referring to is just like these  models are really smart, you need to still teach them things if the data's not in their training  set, and there's a huge amount of use cases that are not going to be in their training set because  they're relevant to one industry or one company.

24:39

I'm just going to keep following the  thread that you're leading us down, but I'm going to come back because I have  more questions around some of these things.

24:45

So you came to a space that I think a lot  of AI founders are thinking about is just, where's OpenAI not going to come squash me in  the future?

24:51

Or one of the other foundational models.

24:55

So it's unclear to a lot of people just  like, "Should I build a startup in this space or not?"

24:59

Is there any advice you have or any  guidance for where you think OpenAI, or just foundational models in general likely won't go and  where you have an opportunity to build a company?

25:10

So this is something that Ev Williams used to  say back at Twitter that's always stuck with me, which is, "No matter how big your company  gets, no matter how incredible the people are, there are way more smart people outside your  walls than there are inside your walls."

25:22

And that's why we are so focused on building a great  API.

25:27

We have 3 million developers using our API.

25:35

No matter how ambitious we are, how big we grow,  by the way, we don't want to grow super big, there are so many use cases, places in the  world where AI can fundamentally make our lives better.

25:47

We're not going to have the  people.

25:47

We're not going to have the know-how to build most of these things.

25:53

And I think, like I was saying, the data is industry-specific, use case-specific,  behind certain company walls, things like that.

26:04

And there are immense opportunities in every  industry and every vertical in the world to go build AI-based products that improve upon the  state of the art.

26:09

And there's just no way we could ever do that ourselves. We don't want  to.

26:14

We if we did want to, and we're really excited to power that for 3 million-plus  developers and way more in the future.

26:24

Coming back to your earlier point about the  tech changing constantly and getting faster, not exactly knowing what you'll have by the  time you launch something in terms of the power, the model.

26:34

I'm curious what allows  you to ship quickly and consistently in such great stuff?

26:40

And it sounds like  one answer is bottoms-up empowered teams versus a very top-down roadmap  that's planned out for a quarter.

26:49

What are some of those things that allow you  to ship such great stuff so often, so quickly? Yeah.

26:53

I mean, we try and have a sense of  where we're trying to go, point ourselves in a direction so that we have some rough sense  of alignment.

26:59

Thematically, I don't for second, and we do quarterly roadmapping.

27:09

We laid out a  year-long strategy.

27:09

I don't for a second believe that what we write down in these documents is  what we're going to actually ship three months from now, let alone six or nine. But that's  okay.

27:17

I think it's like an Eisenhower quote, "Plans are useless.

27:24

Planning is helpful,"  which I totally subscribe to, especially in this world. It's really valuable.

27:29

If you think  about quarterly road roadmapping for example, it's really valuable to have a moment where you stop  and go, "Okay. What did we do? What worked? What went well? What didn't go well?

27:39

What did we learn  and now what do we think we're going to do next?"

27:44

And by the way, everybody has some dependencies.

27:44

You need the infrastructure team to do the following things, partnership with research  here.

27:48

So you want to have a second to check your dependencies, make sure you're good to go  and then start executing.

27:53

We try and keep that really lightweight because it's not going to be  right.

27:58

We're going to throw it out halfway because we will have learned new things.

28:04

So the moment of  planning is helpful even if it's only partially.

28:12

So I think just expecting that you're going  to be super agile and that there's no sense writing a three month roadmap, let alone a  year long roadmap because the technology's changing underneath you so quickly.

28:21

We really  do try and go very strongly bottoms up, subject to our overall directional alignment. We  have great people.

28:28

We have engineers and PMs and designers and researchers who are passionate about  the products they're building and have strong opinions about them and are also the ones building  them.

28:40

So they have a real sense of what the capabilities are too, which is super important.

28:46

So I think you want to be more bottoms up in this way. So we operate that way.

28:52

We are happy  making mistakes.

28:52

We make mistakes all the time.

28:58

It's one of the things I really appreciate  about Sam.

28:58

He pushes us really hard to move fast, but he also understands that with moving fast  comes, we didn't quite get this right or that we launched this thing, it didn't work. We'll roll it  back. Look at our naming. Our naming is horrible.

29:14

That was a lot of questions people  had for you. Model names, yeah.

29:18

It's absolutely atrocious and we know it, and  we will get around to fixing it at some point, but it's not the most important thing and  so we don't spend a lot of time on it.

29:27

But it also shows you how it doesn't matter.

29:27

Again, ChatGPT the most popular, fastest growing product in history, it's the number one AI, API  and model.

29:32

So clearly it doesn't matter that much.

29:39

And we name things like o3 mini high. Man, I love it. Okay.

29:46

So you talked about  roadmapping and bottoms up and I'm really curious, is there a cadence or a ritual of aligning with  you or Sam or you review everything that's going out?

29:59

Is there a meeting every week or every  month where you guys see what's happening? On key projects.

30:02

So we do product reviews  and things like that, like you would expect.

30:08

There isn't a ritual because there isn't...

30:08

I  would never want us to be blocked on launching something, waiting for a review with me or Sam,  if we can't get there.

30:15

If I'm traveling or Sam's busy or whatever, that's a bad reason for us  not to ship.

30:21

So obviously for the biggest, most high priority stuff, we have a pretty close  beat on it, but we really try not to, frankly.

30:33

We want to empower teams to move quickly, and I  think it's more important to ship and iterate.

30:42

So we have this philosophy, we call iterative  deployment, and the idea is we're all learning about these models together.

30:48

So there's a real  sense in which it's way better to ship something even when you don't know the full set of  capabilities and iterate together in public.

31:00

And we co-evolve together with the rest of  society as we learn about these things and where they're different and where they're good  and bad and weird.

31:04

I really like that philosophy.

31:12

I think the other thing that ends up  being a part of our product philosophy is the sense of model maximalism.

31:19

The models are not perfect.

31:24

They're going to make mistakes.

31:24

You could spend  a lot of time building all kinds of different scaffolding around them.

31:29

And by the way, sometimes  we do because sometimes there are kinds of errors that you just don't want to make, but we  don't spend that much time building scaffolding around the parts that don't match that because  our general mindset is in two months there's going to be a better model and it's going to blow  away whatever the current set of limitations are.

31:52

So if you're building, and we say this to  developers too, if you're building and the product that you're building is right on the edge of the  capabilities of the models, keep going, because you're doing something right because you give it  another couple months and the models are going to be great, and suddenly the product that you have  that just barely worked is really going to sing.

32:12

And that's how you make sure that you're really  pushing the envelope and building new things.

32:18

I had the founder of Bolt on the podcast,  StackBlitz is the company name, and he shared this story that they've been working on this  product for seven years behind the scenes and it was failing. Nothing was happening.

32:27

And then all  of a sudden it was, sorry to mention a competitor, but Claude came out or a Sonnet 3.

32:32

5 came out and  all of a sudden everything worked and they've been building all this time and finally it worked.

32:38

And  I hear that a lot with YC, just like things that never were possible now are just becoming possible  every few months with the updates to the models. Yeah, absolutely.

32:50

Let me actually ask this, I  wasn't planning to ask this, but I'm curious if you have any quick  thoughts just why is Sonnet so good at coding, and thoughts on your stuff getting  as good and better at actual coding? Yeah.

33:01

I mean, kudos to Anthropic.

33:01

They've built  very good coding models. No doubt.

33:01

We think that we can do the same.

33:09

Maybe by the time this  podcast has shipped, we'll have more to say, but either way, all credit to them.

33:15

I think  intelligence is really multi-dimensional and so I think the model providers...

33:24

It used to  be that OpenAI had this massive model lead, 12 months or something ahead of everybody else. That's not true anymore.

33:31

I like to think we still have a lead.

33:36

I'd argue that we do, but it's  certainly not a massive one.

33:36

And that means that there are going to be different places where the  Google models are really good or where Anthropic models are really good, or where we're really  good and our competitors are like, "We got to get better at that."

33:50

And it actually is easier  to get better at a certain thing once someone's proved it possible than it is to forge a path  through the jungle and doing something brand new.

34:03

So I just think as an example, it was like  nobody could break 4 minutes in the mile, and then finally somebody did and the next year  12 more people did it.

34:09

I think there's that all over the place and it just means that competition  is really intense, and consumers are going to win and developers are going to win and businesses are  going to win in a big way from that.

34:20

It's part of why the industry moves so fast, but all respect to  the other big model providers.

34:24

Models are getting really good.

34:31

We're going to move as fast as we  can and I think we've got some good stuff coming. Exciting.

34:36

This makes me also think about, in many  ways other models are better at certain things, but somehow ChatGPT is the...

34:42

If you look at  all the awareness numbers and usage numbers, it's like no matter where you guys are in  the rankings, people seem to just think of AI ChatGPT almost as the same.

34:52

What do you think  you did right to win in the consumer mindset, at least at this point and awareness in the world?

35:01

I think being first helps, which is one of the  reasons why we're so focused on moving quickly.

35:01

We like being the first to launch new capabilities.

35:07

Things like deep research.

35:07

Our models, they can do a lot of things.

35:14

So they can take real-time  video input, you have speech to speech, you can do speech to text and text to speech.

35:20

They can  do deep research.

35:20

They can operate on a canvas, they can write code.

35:26

So ChatGPT can be this one-  stop-shop where all the things that you want to do are possible.

35:32

And as we go forward in it, we  have more agentic tools like Operator where it's browsing for you and doing things for you on the  web, more and more you're going to be able to come to this one place to ChatGPT, give it instructions  and have it accomplish real things for you in the world.

35:51

There's something fundamentally valuable  in that.

35:51

So we think a lot about that.

35:51

We try to move really fast so that we are always the  most useful place for people to come to.

36:03

What would you say is the most counterintuitive  thing that you've learned after building AI products or working at OpenAI, something  that's just like, "I did not expect that?"

36:14

I don't know, maybe I should have expected this,  but one of the things that's been funny for me is the extent to which you're trying to figure  out how some product should work with AI, or even why some AI thing happens to be true,  you can often reason about it the way you would reason about another human and it works.

36:35

So  maybe a couple examples.

36:35

When we were first launching our reasoning model, we were the first  to build a model that could reason, that could, instead of giving you just a quick system one  answer right away to every question you asked, it was the third Emperor of the  Holy Roman Empire, here's an answer.

36:58

You could ask it hard questions and it would  reason.

36:58

The same way that if I asked you to do a crossword puzzle, you couldn't just snap fill  in everything.

37:03

You would be, "Well, okay.

37:03

On this one across, I think it could be one of these  two, but that means there's an A here.

37:09

So that one has to be this, away, back track, step-by-step  build up from where you are."

37:12

Same way you answer any difficult logistical problem, any scientific  problem.

37:19

So this reasoning breakthrough was big, but it was also the first time that a model needed  to sit and think.

37:27

And that's a weird paradigm for a consumer product.

37:31

You don't normally  have something where you might need to hang out for 25 seconds after you ask a question.

37:35

So we were trying to figure out what's the UI for this?

37:42

With deep research where the model's  going to go and think for 25 minutes sometimes, it's actually not that hard because you're not  going to sit and watch it for 25 minutes.

37:49

You're going to go do something else.

37:53

You're going to  go to another tab or go get lunch or whatever, and then you'll come back and it's done  when it's like 20, 25 seconds or 10 seconds, it's a long time to wait, but it's not  long enough to go to do something else.

38:07

So you can think, if you asked me something  that I needed to think for 20 seconds to answer, what would I do?

38:15

I wouldn't just go mute and not  say anything and shut down for 20 seconds and then come back. So we shouldn't do that.

38:24

We shouldn't  just have a slider sitting there. That's annoying.

38:30

But I also wouldn't just start babbling  every single thought that I had.

38:30

So we probably shouldn't just expose the whole  chain of thought as the model's thinking, but I might go like, "That's a good question. All right."

38:38

I might approach it like that and then think.

38:43

You're maybe giving little updates  and that's actually what we ended up shipping.

38:49

You have similar things where you can find  situations where you get better thinking sometimes out of a group of models that all try and attack  the same problem, and then you have a model that's looking at all their outputs and integrating it  and then giving you a single answer at the end.

39:06

I mean, sounds a little bit like brainstorming.

39:06

I  certainly have better ideas when I get in a room and brainstorm with other people because they  think differently than me.

39:12

So anyways, there's just all these situations where you can actually  reason about it like a group of humans or an individual human and it works, which I don't know,  maybe I shouldn't have been surprised but I was.

39:27

That is so interesting because when I see these  models operate, I never even thought about you guys designing that experience.

39:32

To me, it just  feels like this is what the LLM does.

39:32

It just sits there and tells me what it's thinking.

39:37

And I love  this point you're making of let's make it feel like a human operating and well, how does a human  operate?

39:43

Well, they just talk aloud.

39:43

They think, here's the thing I should explore.

39:48

And I love  that deep sequence to the extreme of that where they're just like, "Here's everything I'm doing  and thinking."

39:52

And people actually like that too, I guess.

39:56

Was that surprising to you, "Maybe that  could work too.

39:56

People seem to like everything?" Yeah.

40:01

We learned from that actually because when  we first launched it, we gave you the subheadings of what the model was thinking about, but not  much more.

40:09

And then deep seek launched and it was a lot and we went, I don't know if everyone  wants that.

40:14

There's some novelty effect to seeing what the model's really thinking about.

40:19

We felt  that too when we were looking at it internally.

40:23

It's interesting to see the model's chain  of thought, but it's not...

40:23

I think at the scale of 400 million people, you don't want  to see the model babble a bunch of things.

40:34

So what we ended up doing was summarizing  it in interesting ways.

40:34

So instead of just getting the subheadings, you're getting one or two  sentences about how it's thinking about it and you can learn from that.

40:43

So we tried to find a middle  ground that we thought was an experience would be meaningful for most people, but showing everybody  three paragraphs is probably not the right answer.

40:57

This reminds me of something else you said  at the summit that has really stuck with me, this idea that chat, people always make fun  of chat is not the future interface for how we interact with AI, but you made this really  interesting point that may argue the other side,

41:10

which is, as humans we interface by talking  and the IQ of a human can span from really low to really high and it all works talking  to them and chat is the same thing and it can work on all kinds of intelligence levels.  Maybe I just shared it, but I guess anything

41:20

Maybe I just shared it, but I guess anything there about just why chat actually ends up  being such an interesting interface for LLMs? Yeah.

41:29

I don't know, maybe this is one of those  things I believe that most people don't believe, but I actually think chat is an amazing interface  because it's so versatile.

41:35

People tend to go, "Chat. Yeah.

41:42

We'll figure out something  better."

41:42

And I think it's incredibly universal because it is the way we talk.

41:50

I can  talk to you verbally like we're talking now.

41:56

We can see each other and interact.

41:56

We can  talk on WhatsApp and be texting each other, but all of these things is this unstructured  method of communication and that's how we operate.

42:14

If I had some more rigid interface that  I was allowed to use when we spoke, I would be able to speak to you about far fewer  things and it would actually get in the way of us having maximum communication bandwidth.

42:22

So  there's something magical.

42:22

And by the way, in the past it never worked because there wasn't  a model that was good at understanding all of the complexity and nuances of human speech, and  that's the magic of LLMs.

42:32

So to me, it's like an interface that's exactly fit to the power of these  things.

42:38

And that doesn't mean that it always has to be just like I don't necessarily always want  to type, but you do want that very open-ended, flexible communication medium, it may be that  we're speaking and the model's speaking back to me, but you still want the very lowest common  denominator, no restrictions way of interacting. That is so interesting.

43:04

That's really changed  the way I think about this stuff is that point that chat is just so good for this very specific  problem of talking to superintelligence basically.

43:13

By the way, I think it's not that it's only chat  either.

43:13

If you have high volume use cases where they're more prescribed and you don't actually  need the full generality, there are many use cases where it's better to have something that's  less flexible, more prescribed, faster to specific task, and those are great too, and you can build  all sorts of those.

43:33

But you still want chat as this baseline for anything that falls out of  whatever vertical you happen to be building for.

43:46

It's like a catch-all for every possible  thing you'd ever want to express to a model.

43:50

I'm excited to chat with Christina  Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our long-time podcast  sponsors. Hi, Christina. Yes.

43:57

Thank you for having me on, Lenny.

43:59

What is the latest with OneSchema?

43:59

I know you  now with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Scale and Watershed.

44:05

I heard  that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from  especially tricky systems like ERPs? Yes.

44:15

So we just launched OneSchema FileFeeds,  which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes as long as you can export  a CSV to an SFTP folder.

44:19

We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds,  and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems  are too hard to integrate with.

44:29

We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations  without involving their engineering team at all.

44:37

I can tell you that if my team had  to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to  take this off my roadmap and instead, use something like OneSchema and not just to  build it, but also to maintain it forever. Absolutely, Lenny.

44:48

We've heard so many  horror stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of ad records.

44:52

We are  laser-focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions  that come up with integrations.

44:57

We have a built-in validation layer that stops  any bad data from entering your system, and OneSchema will notify your team  immediately of any data that looks incorrect.

45:08

I know that importing incorrect data can  cause all kinds of pain for your customers, and quickly lose their trust.

45:12

Christina, thank  you for joining us.

45:12

And if you want to learn more, head on over to oneschema. co. That's oneschema. co.

45:23

I want to come back to that you talked about  researchers and their relationship with product teams.

45:28

I imagine a lot of innovation comes  from researchers just like having an inkling and then building something amazing and then  releasing it, and some ideas come from PMs and engineers.

45:38

How do those teams collaborate?

45:38

Does every team have a PM?

45:38

Is it a lot of research-led stuff?

45:43

Give us a sense of just  where ideas and products come from mostly.

45:49

It's an area where we're evolving  a lot.

45:49

I'm really excited about it, frankly.

45:53

I think if you go back a couple of years when ChatGPT was just getting started,  obviously, I wasn't in OpenAI, but...

46:00

Obviously I wasn't an Open AI, but...

46:00

We  were more of a pure research company at the time.

46:08

Chat GPT, if you remember,  was a low-key research preview. For many years. Yeah.

46:14

It wasn't a thing that the team launched  thinking it was going to be this massive product. Oh, Chat GPT. Yeah.

46:21

And it was just a way that we were going  to let people play with and iterate on the models.

46:26

So we were primarily a research  company, a world-class research company, and as ChatGPT has grown and as we've built our  B-to-B products and our APIs and other things, now we're more of a product company than we were.

46:40

I still think we can't...

46:40

Open AI should never be a pure product company.

46:47

We need to be both a  world-class research company and a world-class product company, and the two need to really work  together, and that's the thing that I think we've been getting much better at over the last six  months.

46:56

If you treat those things separately and the researchers go do amazing things and  build models and then they get to some state and then the product and engineering teams go take  them and do something with them, we're effectively just an API consumer of our own models.

47:14

The best products though are going to be, it's like I was talking about with deep  research, it's a lot of iterative feedback.

47:23

It's understanding the products you're trying  to sell or the problems you're trying to solve, building evals for them, using those evals to go  gather data and fine-tune models to get them to be better at these use cases that you're looking  to solve.

47:32

It's a huge amount of back and forth to do it well.

47:38

And I think the best products  are going to be ENG product design and research working together as a single team to build novel  things.

47:43

So that's actually how we're trying to operate with basically anything that we build.

47:50

It's a new muscle for us because we're kind of new as a product company, but it's one that people  are really excited about because we've seen every time we do it, we build something awesome,  and so now every product starts like that.

48:07

How many product managers do  you have at Open AI?

48:07

I don't know if you share that number, but if you do. Not that many, actually. I don't know, 25.

48:11

Maybe  it's a little more than that.

48:11

My personal belief is that you want to be pretty PM light as an  organization just in general.

48:21

I say this with love because I am a PM, but too many PMs  causes problems.

48:25

We'll fill the world with decks and ideas versus execution.

48:31

So I think  it's a good thing when you have a PM that is working with maybe slightly too many  engineers because it means they're not going to get in and micromanage.

48:45

You're going to  leave a lot of influence and responsibility with the engineers to make decisions.

48:51

It means you  want to have really product-focused engineers, which we're fortunate to have.

48:56

We  have an amazingly product focused, high agency engineering team.

49:00

But when you have  something like that, you have a team that feels super empowered, you have a PM that's trying  to really understand the problems and gently guide the team a little bit but has too much  going on to get too far into the details, and you end up being able to move really fast.

49:17

So that's kind of the philosophy we take.

49:23

We want Product ENG leads and product engineers  all the way through.

49:23

We want not too many PMs, but really awesome, high quality ones, and  so far that seems to be working pretty well.

49:36

I imagine being a PM at Open AI is a dream come  true for a lot of people.

49:36

At the same time, I imagine it's not a fit for a lot of  people.

49:41

There's researchers involved, very product minded engineers.

49:45

What do you look  for in the PMs that you hire there for folks that are like, "Maybe I shouldn't go work  there.

49:50

I shouldn't even think about that."

49:54

I think, I've said this a few times, but high  agency is something that we really look for, people that are not going to come in and wait  for everyone else to allow them to do something, they're just going to see a problem and go  do it.

50:03

It's just a core part of how we work.

50:11

I think people that are happy with ambiguity,  because there is a massive amount of ambiguity here, it is not the kind of place, and we have  trouble sometimes with more junior PMs because of this, because it's just not the place where  someone is going to come in and say, "Okay, here's the landscape, here's your area, I want  you to go do this thing."

50:28

And that's what you want as an early career PM.

50:33

I mean, no one here  has time and the problems are too ill-formed and we're figuring them all out as we go.

50:42

And so  high agency, very comfortable with ambiguity, ready to come in and help execute and move  really quickly.

50:49

That's kind of our recipe.

50:55

And I think also happy leading through influence  because...

50:55

I mean it's usual as a PM, people don't report to you, your team doesn't report to you,  et cetera, but you also have the complexity of a research function, which is even more sort of  self-directed and it's really important to build a good rapport with the research team.

51:15

I think the  EQ side of things is also super important for us.

51:24

I know at most companies, a PM  comes in and they're just like, "Why do we need you?"

51:26

And as a PM you have  to earn trust and help people see the value, and I feel like at Open AI it's probably a very  extreme version of that where they're like, "Why do we need this person?

51:36

We have researchers,  engineers, what are you going to do here?"

51:40

Yeah, I think people appreciate it done right, but  you bring people along.

51:40

I think one of the most important things a PM can do well is be decisive.

51:44

So there's a real fine line.

51:44

You don't want to be making...

51:52

I mean it's kind of like, I don't love  the PM as the CEO of the product illusion all the time, but just like Sam in his role would be  making mistakes if he made every single decision in every meeting that he was in.

52:08

And he would also  be making mistakes if he made no decisions in any meetings that he was in, right?

52:13

It's understanding  when to defer to your team and to let people innovate.

52:22

And when there is a decision to be made  that people either don't feel comfortable with or don't feel empowered to make, or a decision  that has too many different disparate pros and cons that are spread out across a big group and  someone needs to be decisive and make a call, it's a really important trait of a CEO.

52:39

It's something Sam does well, and it's also a really important trait of a PM  kind of at a more microscopic level.

52:43

So because there's so much ambiguity, it's not  obvious what the answer is in a lot of cases, and so having a PM that can come in and...

52:52

And  by the way, this doesn't need to be a PM, I'm perfectly happy if it's anybody else, but I kind  of look to the PM to say, if there's ambiguity and no one's making a call, you better make sure  that we get a call made and we move forward.

53:07

This touches on a few posts I've done of just,  where is AI going to take over work that we do versus help us with various work?

53:12

So let  me come at this question from a different direction of just how AI impacts product teams  and hiring, things like that.

53:16

So first of all, there's all this talk of LM's doing our coding  for us, and 90% of code is going to be written by AI in a year.

53:26

Dario at Anthropic said that.

53:26

At  the same time, you guys are all hiring engineers like crazy, PM's like crazy.

53:31

Every function is  dead, but you're still hiring every single one.

53:37

I guess just, first of all, let me just ask  this, how do you and the team, say engineers, PMs, use AI in your work?

53:42

Is there anything  that's really interesting or things that you think people are sleeping on in how  you use AI in your day-to-day work? We use it a lot.

53:52

I mean, every one of us is  in Chat GPT all the time summarizing docs, using it to help write docs with GPTs that  write product specs and things like that, all the stuff that you would imagine.

54:02

I  mean talk about writing evals, you can actually use models to help you write evals  and they're pretty good at it.

54:07

That all said, I'm still sort of disappointed by us, and I  really mean me, in, if I were to just teleport my five-year-old self leading product at some  other company into my day job, I would recognize it still.

54:28

And I think we should be in a world,  certainly a year from now, probably even more now, where I almost wouldn't recognize it because  the workflows are so different and I'm using AI so heavily, and I'd still recognize  it today.

54:39

So I think in some sense, I'm not doing a good enough job of that.

54:43

Just to give an example, why shouldn't we be vibe coding demos right, left and  center?

54:49

Instead of showing stuff in Figma, we should be showing prototypes that people are  vibe coding over the course of 30 minutes to illustrate proofs of concept and to explore  ideas.

55:02

That's totally possible today, and we're not doing it enough.

55:08

Actually, our chief people  officer, Julia, was telling me the other day, she vibe coded an internal tool that she had at a  previous job that she really wanted to have here at Open AI and she opened, I don't know, Windsurf  or something, and vibe coded it. How cool is that?

55:28

And if our chief people officer is doing it,  we have no excuse to not be doing it more. That's an awesome story.

55:34

And some people may not have heard this term vibe coding.

55:37

Can you describe what that means?

55:40

Yeah, I think this was Andrej's term. Karpathy. Yeah. Andrej Karpathy. Yeah.

55:46

So you have these tools  like Cursor and Windsurf and GitHub Copilot that are very good at suggesting what code you might  want to write.

55:52

So you can give them a prompt and they'll write code and then as you go to edit  it, it's suggesting what you might want to do.

56:00

And the way that everyone started using that  stuff was, give it a prompt, have it do stuff, you go edit it, give it a prompt, and you're  kind of really going back and forth with the model the whole time.

56:12

As the models are getting  better and as people are getting more used to it, you can kind of just let go of the wheel a little  bit.

56:18

And when the model's suggesting stuff, it's just like, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Keep going. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

56:28

And of course the model makes mistakes or it  does something that doesn't compile, but when it doesn't compile, you paste the error in and you  say, go, go, go, go, go.

56:32

And then you test it out and it does one thing that you don't want it to  do, so you enter in an instruction and say, go, go, go, go, go, and you just let the model  do its thing.

56:42

And it's not that you would do that for production code that needed to be  super tight today yet, but for so many things, you're trying to get to a proof of concept,  you're getting to a demo and you can really take your hands off the wheel and the model  will do an amazing job, and that's vibe coding.

57:05

That's an awesome explanation.

57:05

I think the  pro version of that, which is, I think, the way Andre even described it as you  talk, there's a step like whisper or super whisper or something like that where you're  talking to the model, not even typing. Yeah, totally. Oh man.

57:19

So let me just ask, I guess, when  you look at product teams in the future, you talked about how you guys should  be doing this more, instead of designs, having prototypes, what do you think might be  the biggest changes in how product teams are structured or built?

57:32

Where do you think  things are going in the next few years?

57:36

I think you're definitely going to live in a  world where you have researchers built into every product team.

57:41

And I don't even mean just  at foundation model companies because I think the future...

57:48

Actually, frankly one thing that  I'm sort of surprised about about our industry in general is that there's not a greater use  of fine-tuned models. A lot of people...

57:52

These models are very good, so our API does a lot of  things really well, but when you have particular use cases, you can always make the model perform  better on a particular use case by fine-tuning it.

58:12

It's probably just a matter of time.

58:12

Folks aren't  quite comfortable yet with doing that in every case.

58:18

But to me, there's no question that that's  the future.

58:18

Models are going to be everywhere just like transistors are everywhere, AI is going to  be just a part of the fabric of everything we do, but I think there are going to be a lot of  fine-tuned models because why would you not want to more specifically customize a  model against a particular use case?

58:36

And so I think you're going to want sort of  quasi researcher machine learning engineer types as part of pretty much every team because  fine-tuning a model is just going to be part of the core workflow for building most products.

58:46

So that's one change that maybe you're starting to see at foundation model companies that  will propagate out to more teams over time.

58:57

I'm curious if there's a concrete  example that makes that real, and I'll share one that comes to mind as you talk,  which is, when you look at Cursor and Windsurf, something I learned from those founders is  that they use a Sonnet, but then they also

59:10

have a bunch of custom models that help along  the edges that make the specific experience that's not just generating code even better like  auto-complete and looking ahead to where things are going. So is that one or any other examples  of which you... What is a fine-tuned model?

59:19

So is that one or any other examples  of which you...

59:19

What is a fine-tuned model?

59:26

Do you think teams will be building  with these researchers on their teams? Yeah.

59:29

I mean, so when you're a model, you're  basically giving the model a bunch of examples of the kinds of things you want it to be  better at.

59:36

So it's, "Here's a problem, here's a good answer.

59:40

Here's a problem, here's  a good answer," Or, "Here's a question, here's a good answer times a thousand or 10,000."

59:44

And suddenly you're teaching the model to be much better than it was out of the gate at that  particular thing.

59:50

We use it everywhere internally.

1:00:00

We use ensembles of models much more internally  than people might think.

1:00:00

So it's not, "I have 10 different problems.

1:00:07

I'll just ask baseline  GPT four oh about a bunch of these things."

1:00:14

If we have 10 different problems, we might solve  them using 20 different model calls, some of which are using specialized fine-tuned models,  they're using models of different sizes because maybe you have different latency requirements  or cost requirements for different questions.

1:00:32

They are probably using custom prompts for each  one.

1:00:32

Basically you want to teach the model to be really good at...

1:00:37

You want to break the problem  down into more specific tasks versus some broader set of high level tasks.

1:00:42

And then you can use  models very specifically to get very good at each individual thing.

1:00:49

And then you have an ensemble  that tackles the whole thing.

1:00:49

I think a lot of good companies are doing that today.

1:00:56

I still  see a lot of companies giving the model single, generic, broad problems versus breaking the  problem down, and I think there will be more breaking the problem down using specific models  for specific things, including fine tuning.

1:01:15

And so in your case, because this is really  interesting, is that you're using different levels of Chat GPT, like a 1 0 3 and  stuff that's earlier because it's cheaper.

1:01:24

There'll be parts of our internal stack.

1:01:24

I'll give you an example.

1:01:24

Customer support, with 400 plus million weekly active users,  we get a lot of inbound tickets.

1:01:32

I don't know how many customer support folks we have,  but it's not very many, 30, 40, I'm not sure, way smaller than you would have at any comparable  company, and it's because we've automated a lot of our flows.

1:01:52

We've got most questions using  our internal resources, knowledge base, guidelines for how we answer questions, what kind  of personality, et cetera.

1:01:59

You can teach the model those things and then have it do a lot of its  answers automatically, or where it doesn't have the full confidence to answer a particular  question, it can still suggest an answer, request a human to look at it and then that  human's answer actually is its own sort of fine tuning data for the model.

1:02:22

You're telling  it the right answer in a particular case. We're using... At various places.

1:02:29

Some of these  places, you want a little bit more reasoning, is not super latency sensitive, so you want a  little more reasoning, and we'll use one of our O series models.

1:02:36

In other places, you want a quick  check on something and so you're fine to use four oh mini, which is super fast and super cheap.

1:02:42

In  general, it's like specific models for specific purposes and then you ensemble them together to  solve problems.

1:02:48

By the way, again, not unlike how we as humans solve problems, a company is arguably  an ensemble of models that have all been fine tuned based on what we studied in college and what  we have learned over the course of our careers.

1:03:08

We've all been fine tuned to have different sets  of skills and you group them together in different configurations and the output of the ensemble is  much better than the output of any one individual.

1:03:20

Kevin, you're blowing my mind.

1:03:20

That  sounds exactly correct.

1:03:20

And also, different people, you pay them  less, they cost less to talk to, some people take a long time to answer,  some people hallucinating. This is... I'm telling you.

1:03:35

This is a mental model  but really does work in thinking... Oh, right. Yeah. This is great.

1:03:41

Some people are  visual, they want to dry out their thinking, some people want to talk word cell.

1:03:45

Wow,  this is a really good metaphor.

1:03:45

So again, coming back to your advice here because  I love that we circled back to it, you're finding a really good way to think about  how to design great AI experiences and LMs, I guess, specifically is think  about how a person would do this.

1:04:01

Well, it's maybe not always the answer is to think  about how a person would do it, but sometimes to gain intuition for how you might solve a problem,  you think about what an equivalent human would do in those situations and use that to at least  gain a different perspective on the problem. Wow, this is great.

1:04:21

Because some of this really is talking  to a model.

1:04:21

There's a lot of prior art because we talk to other humans all  the time and encounter them in all sorts of different situations, and  so there's a lot to learn from that.

1:04:34

Okay, so speaking of humans, I want to chat about  the future a little bit.

1:04:34

So you have three kids, and a community member asked me this hilarious  question that I think it's something a lot of people are thinking about.

1:04:44

So this is  Patrick [inaudible 01:04:47].

1:04:44

I worked with him at Airbnb.

1:04:48

He says ask what he's  encouraging his kids to learn to prepare for the future.

1:04:53

I'm worried my 6-year-old by  the year 2036 will face a lot of competition trying to get into the top roofing or  plumbing programs and need a backup plan. That's funny.

1:05:02

So our kids, we have a  10 year old and eight year old twins, so they're still pretty young.

1:05:07

It's amazing how  AI native they are.

1:05:07

It's completely normal to them that there are self-driving cars.

1:05:17

That  they can talk to AI all day long.

1:05:17

They have full conversations with Chat GPT and Alexa  and everything else.

1:05:23

I don't know, who knows what the future holds?

1:05:30

I think things like coding  skills are going to be relevant for a long time, who knows?

1:05:36

But I think if you teach your  kids to be curious, to be independent, to be self-confident, you teach them how to think, I  don't know what the future holds, but I think that those are going to be skills that are going to  be important in any configuration of the future.

1:05:54

And so it's not like we have all the answers, but  that's how Elizabeth and I think about our kids.

1:06:02

And do you find that AI...

1:06:02

There's a  lot of talk about AI tutoring.

1:06:02

Is that something you guys are doing?

1:06:05

I know they're using Chat GPT, I love all the photos you post where they're  playing with prompts and stuff, but I guess is there anything there you're experimenting with  or you think is going to become really important?

1:06:16

This is something that...

1:06:16

It's maybe the most  important thing that AI could do.

1:06:16

Maybe that's a grand statement.

1:06:26

There are lots of important  things that AI can do, including speeding up the pace of fundamental science research and  discovery, which maybe is actually the most important thing AI can do.

1:06:35

But one of the  most important things would be personalized tutoring.

1:06:40

And it kind of blows my mind that  there is still...

1:06:40

I know there are a bunch of good products out there.

1:06:46

Khan Academy does great  things.

1:06:46

They're a wonderful partner of ours.

1:06:46

Vinod Khosla has a non-profit that's doing some really  interesting stuff in this space and is making an impact.

1:06:58

But I'm kind of surprised that there  isn't a 2 billion kid AI personalized tutoring thing because the models are good enough to do it  now, and every study out there that's ever been done seems to show that when you have...

1:07:16

Like,  education is still important, but when you combine that with personalized tutoring, you get multiple  standard deviation improvements in learning speed.

1:07:31

And so it's uncontroversial, it's good for kids,  it's free.

1:07:31

Chat GPT is free, you don't need to pay, and the models are good enough.

1:07:38

It still just  kind of blows my mind that there isn't something amazing out there that our kids are using and your  future kids are using, and people in all sorts of places around the world that aren't as lucky as  our kids to be able to have this sort of built-in, solid education. Again, Chat GPT is free.

1:07:57

People  have Android devices everywhere.

1:07:57

I really just think this could change the world and I'm  surprised it doesn't exist and I want it to exist.

1:08:08

This kind of touches on something I want  to spend a little time on, which is a lot of people also worry a lot about AI, where it's  going, they worry about jobs it's going to take, they worry about the super intelligence squashing  humanity in the future.

1:08:16

What's your perspective on that and just the optimistic case  that I think people need to hear?

1:08:27

I mean, I'm a big technology optimist.

1:08:27

I  think if you look over the last 200 years, maybe more, technology has driven a lot  of the advancements that have made us the world and the society that we are today.

1:08:39

It drives economic advancements, it drives geopolitical advancements, quality of  life, longevity advancement.

1:08:45

I mean, technology's at the root of just about everything,  so I think there are very few examples where this is anything but a great thing over the longer  term.

1:08:58

That doesn't mean that there aren't... ...

1:09:00

a great thing over the longer term.

1:09:00

That  doesn't mean that there aren't temporary dislocations or where there aren't individuals  that are impacted, and that matters too.

1:09:05

So it can't just be that the average is good.

1:09:10

You've got to also think about how you take care of each individual person as best you can.

1:09:13

It is something that we think a lot about and as we work with the administration, as we work with  policy, we try and help wherever we can.

1:09:21

We do a lot with education.

1:09:28

One of the benefits here is  that ChatGPT is also perhaps the best reskilling app you could possibly want.

1:09:36

It knows a lot  of things.

1:09:36

It can teach you a lot of things if you're interested in learning new things.

1:09:40

These are very real issues.

1:09:40

I'm super optimistic about the long run, and we're going to  need to do everything we can as a society to ensure that we make this transition as  graceful and as well-supported as we can.

1:09:59

To give people a sense of where things might be  going.

1:09:59

That's a big question in a lot of people's minds.

1:10:03

So someone asked this question that I love,  which is, "AI is already changing, creative work in a lot of different ways, writing and design  and coding, what do you think is the next big leap?

1:10:13

What should we be thinking is the next  big leap in AI-assisted creativity specifically, and then just broadly, where do you think things  are going to be going in the next few years?" Yeah.

1:10:23

This is also an area where I'm a big  optimist.

1:10:23

If you look at Sora, for example.

1:10:29

I mean we talked about ImageGen earlier and the  absolute fount of creativity that people are putting across Twitter and Instagram and other  places.

1:10:35

I am the world's worst artist like the worst.

1:10:42

Maybe the only thing I'm worse at than art  is singing.

1:10:42

Give me a pencil and a pad of paper and I can't draw better than our eight-year-old.

1:10:51

But give me ImageGen and I can think some creative thoughts and put something into the model  and suddenly have output that I couldn't have possibly done myself. That's pretty cool.

1:11:05

Even you look at folks that are really talented.

1:11:13

I was talking to a director recently about  Sora, someone who's directed films that we would all know, and he was saying, for a film  that he's doing, take the example of some sort of sci-fi-ish, think of Star Wars, and you've got  some scene where there's a plane zooming into some Death Star-like thing.

1:11:35

And so you've got the  plane looking at the whole planet, and then you want to cut to a scene where the plane's kind of  at the ground level, and all of a sudden you see the city and everything else.

1:11:45

How are we going  to manage that cut scene? And that transition?

1:11:51

And he was saying, "In the world of two years  ago, I would have paid a 3D effects company a hundred grand and they would've taken a  month, and they would've produced two versions of this cut scene for me.

1:12:08

And I would've  evaluated them.

1:12:08

We would've chosen one, because what are you going to do?

1:12:12

Pay another  50 grand and wait another month.

1:12:12

And we would've just gone with it. And it would be fine. Movies  are great. I love them. And there've been..."

1:12:25

Obviously, we can do great things with the  technology that we've had, but you now look at what you can do with Sora.

1:12:30

And his point  was, "Now, I can use Sora, our video model, and I can get 50 different variations of this cut  scene just me brainstorming into a prompt and the model brainstorming a little bit with me.

1:12:41

I've  got 50 different versions.

1:12:41

And then of course, I can iterate off of those and refine them and take  different ideas.

1:12:47

And now I'm still going to go to that 3D effects studio to produce the final one,  but I'm going to go having brainstormed and had a much more creative approach with an outcome that's  much better.

1:12:59

And I did that assisted by AI."

1:13:07

My personal view on creativity in general is that  it's no one's going to...

1:13:07

You don't type into Sora like, "Make me a great movie."

1:13:13

It requires  creativity and ingenuity, and all these things, but it can help you explore more.

1:13:19

It can help  you get to a better final result.

1:13:19

So, again, I tend to be an optimist in most things, but  actually, I think there's a very good story here.

1:13:31

I know Sam Altman, I think it was him who tweeted  recently, the creative writing piece that you guys are working on where it's...

1:13:34

He is very  bad at writing creative stuff, and he shared an example where it's actually really good.

1:13:39

I imagine that's another area of investment.

1:13:43

Yeah, there's some exciting  stuff happening internally with some new research techniques.

1:13:47

We'll have  more to say about that at some point.

1:13:47

But yeah, Sam sometimes likes to show off  some of the stuff that's coming, which is smart.

1:13:58

By the way, it's very  indicative of this iterative deployment philosophy.

1:14:03

We don't have some breakthrough and  keep it to ourselves forever, and then bestow it upon the world someday.

1:14:10

We kind of just talk  about the things we're working on and share when we can and launch early and often, and then  iterate in public.

1:14:15

I really like that philosophy.

1:14:22

I love all these hints that a few things  coming.

1:14:22

I know you can't say too much.

1:14:25

You talked about how there might be a coding  leap coming in the near future maybe by the time this comes out.

1:14:29

Is there anything  else people should be thinking about, might be coming in the near future?

1:14:32

Any things  you can tease that are interesting? Exciting?

1:14:38

Man, this hasn't been enough for you?

1:14:41

Only everything is getting better every day. Yeah.

1:14:43

I'm like, man, I hope we get some of  this stuff out before the episode launches so- This is your new timebox. ... I don't piss people off.

1:14:49

The amazing thing  to me is we were talking earlier about how far models have come in just a couple of years.

1:15:00

If  you went back to GPT-3, you'd be disgusted by how bad it was, even though Lenny of two years ago  was mind-blown by how good these were.

1:15:05

And for a long time, we were iterating every six to nine  months on a new GPT model.

1:15:14

It was like GPT-3, GPT-3.

1:15:21

5, 4, and now with this o-series  of reasoning models, we're moving even faster.

1:15:29

Every roughly three months, maybe  four months, there's a new o-series model, and each of them is a step up in capability.

1:15:37

And so the capabilities of these models are increasing at a massive pace.

1:15:45

They're also  getting cheaper as they scale.

1:15:45

You look at where we were even a couple of years  ago.

1:15:52

I think the original, I don't know, what was it, GPT-3.

1:15:58

5 or something  was like 100 x the cost of GPT-4o mini today in the API.

1:16:04

A couple of years,  you've gone down two orders of magnitude in cost for much more intelligence.

1:16:10

And so I  don't know where there's another series of trends like that in the world.

1:16:17

Models are  getting smarter, they're getting faster, they're getting cheaper, and they're getting  safer too.

1:16:20

They hallucinate less every iteration.

1:16:27

And so the Morse Law and transistors becoming  ubiquitous.

1:16:27

That was a law around doubling the number of transistors on a chip every 18 months.

1:16:37

If you're talking about something where you're getting 10 x every year, that's a massively  steeper exponential.

1:16:42

And it tells us that the future is going to be very different than  today.

1:16:51

The thing I try and remind myself is, the AI models that you're using today is  the worst AI model you will ever use for the rest of your life.

1:17:03

And when you actually  get that in your head, it's kind of wild.

1:17:08

I was going to actually say the  same thing, and that's the thing that always sticks with me when I watch  this thing.

1:17:10

You're talking about Sora, and I imagine many people hearing that are  like, "No, no. It's not actually ready. It's not good enough.

1:17:18

It's not going to be as good  as a movie I see in the theater."

1:17:18

But the point is what you just made that this is the worst  it's going to be. It will only get better. Yeah, model maximalism.

1:17:25

Just keep building  for the capabilities that are almost there, and the model's going to catch up and be amazing.

1:17:34

Escape to where the puck is going to be. Yeah.

1:17:38

This reminds me, I was just using...

1:17:38

I was duplifying everything the other day and I was just like, "What is taking so long." As one does. Just like cut... What was that? I said, as one does. As one does these days.

1:17:46

I was just like, "It's taking a minute to generate this image  of my family in this amazing way."

1:17:48

Come on, what's taking so long.

1:17:53

You just get so  used to magic happening in front of you. Yeah, totally. Okay, final question.

1:17:58

This is going to go in a  completely different direction.

1:17:58

A lot of people asked about this.

1:18:03

So famously, you led this  project at Facebook called Libra, which is now called Novi.

1:18:09

A lot of people always wondered,  "What happened there?

1:18:09

That was a really cool idea."

1:18:14

I know some people have a sense there's  regulation challenges, things like that.

1:18:14

I don't know if you've talked about this much.

1:18:19

So I guess,  could you just give people a brief summary of just what is Libra?

1:18:22

This project you working on, and  just what happened, and how you feel about it? Yeah.

1:18:26

I mean, David Marcus led it, and  I happily work for him and with him.

1:18:26

I think he's a visionary and also a mentor  and a friend.

1:18:32

Honestly, Libra is probably the biggest disappointment of my career.

1:18:39

When  I think about the problems we were solving, which are very real problems.

1:18:45

If you look  at, for example, the remittance space, people sending money to family members in other  countries, it is maybe...

1:18:49

I mean it's incredibly regressive, right?

1:18:55

People that don't have the  money to spend are having to pay 20% to send money home to their family.

1:19:01

So outrageous  fees, it takes multiple days, you have to go then pick up cash from... It's all bad.

1:19:07

And here we are with 3 billion people using WhatsApp all over the world, talking to each  other every day, especially friends and family, and exactly the kind of people who'd send money  to each other.

1:19:20

Why can't you send money as immediately, as cheaply, as simply as you send  a text message?

1:19:27

It is one of those things when you sit back and think about it, that should just  exist.

1:19:34

And that was what we set out to try and do.

1:19:41

Now, I don't think we played all of our cards  perfectly.

1:19:41

If I could go back and do things, there are a bunch of things I would do differently.

1:19:46

We tried to get it all at once.

1:19:46

We tried to launch a new blockchain.

1:19:53

It was a basket of  currencies originally.

1:19:53

It was integration into WhatsApp and Messenger, and I think the  whole world kind of went like, "Oh my God, that's a lot of change at once."

1:20:01

And it happened  also to be at the time that Facebook was at the absolute nadir of its reputation.

1:20:06

And so that  didn't help.

1:20:06

It was also not the Messenger that people wanted for this kind of change.

1:20:14

We  knew all that going in, but we went for it.

1:20:21

I think there are a bunch of ways that we could  do that that would've introduced the change a little bit more gently, maybe still gotten  to that same outcome, but fewer new things at once and introduced the new things one at a  time. Who knows?

1:20:32

Those were decisions we made together. So we all own them. Certainly, I  own them.

1:20:38

But it fundamentally disappoints me that this doesn't exist in the world today  because the world would be a better place if we'd been able to ship that product.

1:20:48

I would  be able to send you 50 cents in WhatsApp for free.

1:20:54

It would settle instantly.

1:20:54

Everybody would  have a balance in their WhatsApp account. We'd be transact... I mean, it should exist. I don't know.

1:20:58

To be honest, the current administration is super friendly  to crypto.

1:21:05

Facebook's reputation, Meta's reputation is in a very different  place.

1:21:08

Maybe they should go build it now.

1:21:13

I was looking at the history  of it, and apparently, they sold the tech to some private  equity company for 200 million bucks.

1:21:19

Yeah, yeah, and- They had to buy it back.

1:21:23

There are a couple of current blockchains  that are built on the tech because the tech was open-sourced from the beginning.

1:21:28

Aptos and Mistin are two companies that are built off of this tech.

1:21:34

So  at least all of the work that we did, did not die and lives on in these two companies,  and they're both doing really well.

1:21:38

But still, we should be able to send each other  money in WhatsApp, and we can't today. Hear, hear.

1:21:49

Well, thanks for sharing that story,  Kevin.

1:21:49

Is there anything else you want to share or maybe a last negative advice or insight before  we get to our very exciting lightning round?

1:21:58

Ooh, the lightning round. Let's just go do that. Let's do it.

1:22:01

With that, Kevin, we reached our  very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Yeah. Let's do it. Okay.

1:22:06

What are  two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

1:22:12

Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick, a really good  book about AI and how to use it in your daily life as a student, as a teacher. He's super thoughtful.

1:22:17

Also, by the way, a very good follow on Twitter.

1:22:24

The Accidental Superpower by Peter Zion.

1:22:24

Very  good if you're interested in geopolitics and the forces that sort of shape the dynamics happening.

1:22:30

And then I really enjoyed Cable Cowboy, I don't know who the author is, but the biography of John  Malone. Just fascinating.

1:22:38

If you like business, especially if you want to get into...

1:22:43

I  mean the man was an incredible dealmaker and shaped a lot of the modern cable  industry.

1:22:49

So that was a good biography.

1:22:53

These are all first-time  mentions, which is always a great, Oh, good. Next question.

1:22:56

Do you have a favorite recent  movie or TV show that you really enjoyed?

1:23:02

I wish I had time to watch a TV show, so I'm- Just Sora videos. Yeah, right. I don't know.

1:23:07

When I was a  kid, I read the Wheel of Time series and now Amazon has it as they're in the third  season of it, so I want to watch that. I haven't yet.

1:23:20

Top Gun 2 was an awesome  movie.

1:23:20

I think that's no longer new.

1:23:28

That shows when the last  time you watched a movie was. But I like the idea. I want more Americana.

1:23:31

I want  more being proud of being strong.

1:23:31

And I thought Top Gun 2 did a really good job of that.

1:23:39

Pride and  patriotism, I think the US could use more of that.

1:23:48

Is there a favorite product that you've  recently discovered that you really love, other than your super intelligence internal tool  that you all have access to? I'm just joking. That's right. Internal AGR. Yeah, that's right.

1:24:00

Well, I think vibe coding with products like  Windsurf is just super fun.

1:24:00

I'm having a great time doing that.

1:24:07

I still just love that  our chief people officer vibe coded some tools.

1:24:11

Maybe the other one is Waymo.

1:24:11

Every  chance I get, I'll take a Waymo.

1:24:11

It's just a better way of riding, and it still feels like  the future.

1:24:18

So they've done an amazing job. That's awesome.

1:24:24

By the way, I had the founder of  Windsurf on the podcast.

1:24:24

It might come out before this or after this.

1:24:27

And also Cursor's CEO is  coming on the podcast either before or after this. Oh, cool.

1:24:32

I have a ton of respect for what those  guys are doing.

1:24:32

Those are awesome products.

1:24:36

Just changing the way everyone  builds product. No big deal. Yeah. A couple more questions.

1:24:39

Do you  have a favorite life motto that you often repeat yourself, find  really useful in work or in life? Yeah.

1:24:47

So actually, this is interestingly  enough, it is more of a philosophy, but then I thought Zuck encapsulated it one time  on a Facebook earnings call.

1:24:52

So I actually had this made into a poster. It sits in my room.

1:24:58

But  somebody was asking Mark.

1:24:58

This is literally on an earnings call, so it's like an analyst on an  earnings call asking him.

1:25:05

It was some quarter when Facebook had grown a lot.

1:25:10

This was back in  the 20 teens sometime, I think.

1:25:10

But he's like, "So what did you do?

1:25:16

What was it that you  launched?

1:25:16

What was the one thing that drove all this growth for you?"

1:25:20

And he said something to  the effect of, "Sometimes it's not any one thing, it's just good work consistently over a long  period of time."

1:25:26

And that's always stuck with me. And I think it is.

1:25:33

I mean I run ultra marathons.

1:25:33

It's like it's just about grinding.

1:25:33

I think people too often look for the silver bullet when a lot of  life and a lot of excellence is actually showing up day in and day out, doing good work, getting  a little bit better every single day, and you may not notice it over a week or even a month.

1:25:52

And  a lot of people then kind of get dismayed and stop.

1:26:00

But actually, you keep doing it.

1:26:00

The gains  keep compounding.

1:26:00

And over the course of a year, two years, five years, it adds up like crazy.

1:26:04

So  good work consistently over a long period of time. I love that.

1:26:12

I got to make a  poster of this now.

1:26:12

That is- We'll get you one. I so resonate with that. Okay, I'll take it. That  is so good. Okay, final question.

1:26:15

I'm going to ask if you have any prompting tricks, and I'm going  to set it up first.

1:26:21

But think about if you have a trick that you could recommend to people  for prompting LLMs better.

1:26:24

I had a guest, Alex Komorowski, come on the podcast.

1:26:29

He's from Stripe and writes his weekly reflections on what's happening in the  world.

1:26:33

A lot of them are AI-related.

1:26:36

And he once described an LLM as a zip file of all  human knowledge.

1:26:36

All the answers are in there, and you just need to figure out the right  question to ask to get the answer to every problem basically.

1:26:46

And so it just reminded me  how important prompt engineering is and knowing how to prompt well.

1:26:51

You're constantly  prompting ChatGPT.

1:26:51

What's one tip, one trick that you found to be helpful  in helping you get what you want?

1:27:00

Well, I'll say, first of all, I want to kill the  idea that you have to be a good prompt engineer.

1:27:05

I think if we do our jobs, that stops being  true.

1:27:05

It's just one of those sharp edges of models that experts can learn.

1:27:10

But then,  just over time, you shouldn't need to know all that.

1:27:14

The same way you used to have to  get deep into, "What's your storage engine in MySQL? Are you using InnoDB 4. 1?"

1:27:19

There's  still use cases for that if you're at the deep edge of MySQL performance.

1:27:28

But most people  don't need to care.

1:27:28

And you shouldn't need to care about minute details of prompting if  AI is really going to become broadly adopted.

1:27:39

But today, we're not totally there.

1:27:39

I think  by the way, we are making progress there.

1:27:39

I think there is less prompt engineering than  there had to be before.

1:27:44

But in line with some of the fine-tuning stuff I was talking  about and the importance of giving examples, you can do effectively poor man's fine-tuning by  including examples in your prompt of the kinds of things that you might want and a good answer.

1:28:04

So  like, "Here's an example and here's a good answer.

1:28:09

Here's an example, and here's a good answer.

1:28:09

Now, go solve this problem for me."

1:28:09

And the model really will listen and learn from that.

1:28:13

Not as well as if you do a full fine-tune, but much more than if you don't provide any examples.

1:28:19

And I think people don't do that often enough. That's awesome.

1:28:24

One tip that I heard,  I'm curious if this works is you tell it, "This is very, very important to my  career."

1:28:28

Make it really understand like, "Someone will die if you don't  answer me correctly." Does that work? It's really weird.

1:28:36

There's probably a good  explanation for this.

1:28:36

But you can also say things.

1:28:43

So, yes, I think there is some validity to  that.

1:28:43

You can also say things like, "I want you to be Einstein.

1:28:50

Now, answer this physics problem for  me," or, "You are the world's greatest marketer, the world's greatest brand marketer.

1:28:56

Now here's  a naming question."

1:28:56

And there is something where it sort of shifts the model into a certain  mindset that can actually be really positive.

1:29:10

I use that tip all the time actually. I  always...

1:29:10

When I'm coming up with questions for interviews and I use it occasionally to  come up with things I haven't thought of, I actually type, "You're the  world's best podcast interviewer." Right.

1:29:21

I have Kevin Weil coming on the  pod... Yeah, it actually works.

1:29:25

By the way, back to our other point that we  made a few times.

1:29:25

You do do that sometimes with people. You sort of put them...

1:29:30

You frame  things, you get them into a certain mindset, and the answer is completely different.

1:29:36

So I think  there are human analogs of this one more time.

1:29:41

Kevin, this was incredible.

1:29:41

I was just  thinking about a way to end this. The way I feel like...

1:29:45

I feel like not only are  you at the cutting edge of the future.

1:29:45

You and the team are kind of actually the edge  that is creating the future.

1:29:51

And so it's a real honor to have you on here and to talk  to you and to hear where you think things are going and what we need to be thinking  about, so thank you for being here, Kevin.

1:30:06

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

1:30:06

I  get to work with the world's best team, and all credit to them, but really appreciate  you having me on. It's been super fun.

1:30:17

I forgot to ask you the two final  questions.

1:30:17

Where can folks find you if they want to reach out, and  how can listeners be useful to you?

1:30:23

I am @kevinweil, K-E-V-I-N-W-E-I-L on pretty much  every platform.

1:30:23

I'm still a Twitter DAU after all these years.

1:30:32

I guess an X DAU, LinkedIn, wherever.

1:30:32

And I think the thing I would love from people, give me feedback.

1:30:39

People are using ChatGPT.

1:30:39

Tell me where it's working really well for you and where you want us to double down.

1:30:45

Tell  me where it's failing.

1:30:45

I'm very active and engaged on Twitter.

1:30:50

I love hearing from people,  what's working and what's not, so don't be shy.

1:30:55

And I learned following you helps you figure out  all the stuff that you're launching.

1:30:55

You share all the things that are going out every day, or week,  month, so that's also a benefit.

1:31:00

And by the way, 400 million weekly active users all  emailing you feedback. Here we go. Yes, let's do it.

1:31:08

It's going to work out great. Okay. Well,  thank you, Kevin. Thanks for being here.

1:31:12

All right, man, thanks so much. See you soon. Bye, everyone.

1:31:13

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1:31:13

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1:31:20

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1:31:26

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1:31:31

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