Inside OpenAI | Logan Kilpatrick (head of developer relations)

Logan Kilpatrick leads developer relations at OpenAI, supporting developers building with the OpenAI API and ChatGPT. He is also on the board of directors at NumFOCUS, the nonprofit organization that supports open source projects like Jupyter, Pandas, NumPy, and more. Before OpenAI, Logan was a machine-learning engineer at Apple and advised NASA on open source policy. In our conversation, we discuss: • OpenAI’s fast-paced and innovative work environment • The value of high agency and high urgency in your employees • Tips for writing better ChatGPT prompts • How the GPT Store is doing • OpenAI’s planning process and decision-making criteria • Where OpenAI is heading in the next few years • Insight into OpenAI’s B2B offerings • Why Logan “measures in hundreds” — Brought to you by: • Hex—Helping teams ask and answer data questions by working together: https://www.hex.tech/lenny • Whimsical—The iterative product workspace: https://whimsical.com/lenny • Arcade Software—Create effortlessly beautiful demos in minutes: https://arcade.software/lenny Find the transcript and references at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-openai-logan-kilpatrick-head Where to find Logan Kilpatrick: • X: https://twitter.com/OfficialLoganK • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/logankilpatrick/ • Website: https://logank.ai/ Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Logan’s background (03:49) The impact of recent events on OpenAI’s team and culture (08:20) Exciting developments in AI interfaces (09:52) Using OpenAI tools to make companies more efficient (13:04) Examples of using AI effectively (18:35) Prompt engineering (22:12) How to write better prompts (26:05) The launch of GPTs and the OpenAI Store (32:10) The importance of high agency and urgency (34:35) OpenAI’s ability to move fast and ship high-quality products (35:56) OpenAI’s planning process and decision-making criteria (40:22) The importance of real-time communication (42:33) OpenAI’s team and growth (44:47) Future developments at OpenAI (47:42) GPT-5 and building toward the future (50:38) OpenAI’s enterprise offering and the value of sharing custom applications (52:30) New updates and features from OpenAI (55:09) How to leverage OpenAI’s technology in products (58:26) Encouragement for building with AI (59:30) Lightning round Referenced: • OpenAI: https://openai.com/ • Sam Altman on X: https://twitter.com/sama • Greg Brockman on X: https://twitter.com/gdb • tldraw: https://www.tldraw.com/ • Harvey: https://www.harvey.ai/ • Boost Your Productivity with Generative AI: https://hbr.org/2023/06/boost-your-productivity-with-generative-ai • Research: quantifying GitHub Copilot’s impact on developer productivity and happiness: https://github.blog/2022-09-07-research-quantifying-github-copilots-impact-on-developer-productivity-and-happiness/ • Lesson learnt from the DPD AI Chatbot swearing blunder: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lesson-learnt-from-dpd-ai-chatbot-swearing-blunder-kitty-sz57e/ • Dennis Yang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennisyang/ • Tim Ferriss’s blog: https://tim.blog/ • Tyler Cowen on X: https://twitter.com/tylercowen • Tom Cruise on X: https://twitter.com/TomCruise • Canva: https://www.canva.com/ • Zapier: https://zapier.com/ • Siqi Chen on X: https://twitter.com/blader • Runway: https://runway.com/ • Universal Primer: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-GbLbctpPz-universal-primer • “I didn’t expect ChatGPT to get so good” | Unconfuse Me with Bill Gates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-Ymdc6EdKw • Microsoft Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/ • Lennybot: https://www.lennybot.com/ • Visual Electric: https://visualelectric.com/ • DALL-E: https://openai.com/research/dall-e • The One World Schoolhouse: https://www.amazon.com/One-World-Schoolhouse-Education-Reimagined/dp/1455508373/ref=sr_1_1 • Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams: https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501144324 • Gran Turismo: https://www.netflix.com/title/81672085 • Gran Turismo video game: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/gran-turismo/ • Manta sleep mask: https://mantasleep.com/products/manta-sleep-mask • WAOAW sleep mask: https://www.amazon.com/WAOAW-Sleep-Sleeping-Blocking-Blindfold/dp/B09712FSLY Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding people who are high agency and work with urgency. If I was hiring five people today, like those are like some of the top two characteristics that I would look for in people. Because you can take on the world if you have people who have high agency and like not needing to get 50 people's different consensus. They hear something from our customers about a challenge that they're having and like they're already pushing on what the solution for them is. And not waiting for all the other things to happen that like people just go and do it and solve the problem. And I love that. It's so fun to be able to to be a part of those situations.

• 0:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today, my guest is Logan Kilpatrick. Logan is Head of Developer Relations at OpenAI, where he supports developers building on OpenAI's APIs and ChatGPT. Before OpenAI, Logan was a machine learning engineer at Apple and advised NASA on their open source policy. If you can believe it, ChatGPT launched just over a year ago and transformed the way that we think about AI and what it means for our products and our lives. Logan has been at the front lines of this change and every day is helping developers and companies figure out how to leverage these new AI superpowers. In our conversation, we dig into examples of how people are using ChatGPT and the new GPTs and other OpenAI APIs in their work and their life.

• 1:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Logan shares some really interesting advice on how to get better at prompt engineering. We also get into how OpenAI operates internally, how they ship so quickly, and the two key attributes they look for in the people that they hire. Plus, where Logan sees the biggest opportunities for new products and new startups building on their APIs. We also get a little bit into the very dramatic weekend that OpenAI had with the board and Sam Altman and all of that. And so much more. A huge thank you to Dan Shipper and Dennis Yang for some great question suggestions. With that, I bring you Logan Kilpatrick after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Hex. If you're a data person, you probably have to jump between different tools to run queries,

• 2:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  build visualizations, write Python, and send around a lot of screenshots and CSV files. Hex brings everything together. Its powerful notebook UI lets you analyze data in SQL, Python, or no-code, in any combination, and work together with live multiplayer and version control. And now, Hex's AI tools can generate queries and code, create visualizations, and even kick-start a whole analysis for you, all from natural language prompts. It's like having an analytics copilot built right into where you're already doing your work. Then, when you're ready to share, you can use Hex's drag-and-drop app builder to configure beautiful reports or dashboards that anyone can use. Join the hundreds of data teams like Notion, AllTrails, Loom, Mixpanel, and Algolia using

• 2:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  Hex every day to make their work more impactful. Sign up today at hex.tech/lenny to get a 60-day free trial of the Hex Team Plan. That's hex.tech/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Whimsicle, the iterative product workspace. Whimsicle helps product managers build clarity and shared understanding faster with tools designed for solving product challenges. With Whimsicle, you can easily explore new concepts using drag-and-drop wireframe and diagram components, create rich product briefs that show and sell your thinking, and keep your team aligned with one source of truth for all of your build requirements. Whimsicle also has a library of easy-to-use templates from product leaders like myself,

• 3:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  including a project proposal one-pager and a go-to-market worksheet. Give them a try and see how fast and easy it is to build clarity with Whimsicle. Sign up at whimsical.com/lenny for 20% off a Whimsicle Pro Plan. That's whimsical.com/lenny.

• 3:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  Logan, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me, Lenny. I'm super excited.

• 3:57Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to start with the elephant in the room, which I think the elephant is actually leaving the room because I think this is months ago at this point, but I'm still just really curious. What was it like on the inside of OpenAI during the very dramatic weekend with the board and Sam and all those things? What was it like? And is there a story maybe you could share that maybe people haven't heard about what it was like on the inside of what was going on?

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was. It was definitely a very stressful, stressful Thanksgiving week. I think like in broad context, like, you know, OpenAI had been pushing for a really long time since ChatGPT came out. And that was supposed to be like the first, one of the first weeks that like the whole company had like taken time away to like actually reset and have a break. So like very selfishly, I was super excited, spent time with my family, all that stuff.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  And then the Friday afternoon, we we got the message that all of the changes were happening. And I think it was super shocking because I think, and this is a perspective a lot of folks share, like there's, everybody has had and continues to have like such deep trust in Sam and Greg and our leadership team that it was like just very surprising. And we're also like a very, as far as company cultures go, like very transparent and very open. So like, you know, when there's problems or there's things going on, like we tend to hear about them. And again, it was the first time that a lot of us had had heard some of the things that were happening between the board and the leadership team. So very, very surprising. I think my, my sort of

• 5:23Speaker 00

  being someone who's not based in San Francisco, I was like, again, very selfishly, like kind of happy that it happened over the Thanksgiving break because a lot of folks actually had like gone home to different places. So it felt, it felt like I had a little bit of comfort knowing like I wasn't the only one not in San Francisco because like everybody was meeting up in person to do a bunch of stuff and, and be together during that time. So it was, it was nice to, to know that there was a few other folks who were, who were sort of out of the loop with me. I think the thing that surprised me the most was like just how quickly everybody got back to business. Like I flew to San Francisco the next week after Thanksgiving, which I wasn't planning to do to be with the team in person and like seeing literally Monday morning, I was kind of walking into the office being like expecting,

• 6:08Speaker 00

  I don't know, something like weird to be going on or happening or like, and really it was like. People laser focus and like back to work. And I think that that like speaks to like the caliber of of our team and like everybody who's just so excited about building towards the mission that we're building towards. So I think that was like the most, yeah, that was the most surprising thing of the whole, the whole incident. I think a lot of companies like would have had the potential to like truly be like derailed for some non trivial amount of time by this. And like, everybody was just right back to it, which I love.

• 6:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  I feel like it also maybe brought the team closer together. It feels like it was kind of traumatic experience that may bring folks together because it was something they all shared. Is there anything along those lines that's like, wow, things are a little different now?

• 6:52Speaker 00

  One of my takeaways was I'm actually very grateful that this happened when it happened. I think like today, the stakes are, you know, they're still relatively high. Like people have built their businesses on top of OpenAI. Like we have tons of customers who love ChatGPT. So if something bad happens to us, like we definitely impact our customers, but sort of on the world scale, like, you know, somebody else will build a model if OpenAI disappeared and continue towards this, this progress of general intelligence. I think, you know, fast forward like five or 10 years of something like this would have, would have happened. And we sort of hadn't gone through the hopeful upcoming like world transformation and sort of all those changes that are going to happen. I think it would have been a little bit, or

• 7:35Speaker 00

  potentially much worse of an outcome. So I'm glad that things happened when, when the stakes are a little bit lower. And I totally agree with you. It's like, the team has been growing so rapidly over the last like year since I joined. It's been, it's been crazy to, to think about like how many new folks there are. And I really think that this like really brought people together because most folks like historically, many of the folks when I joined, what kind of banded us all together was like the launch of ChatGPT, the launch of GPT-4. And like for folks who like weren't around for some of those launches, it was perhaps Dev Day, for folks who are on for Dev Day, like it was probably this event. So I think we've had these events that have really brought the, the company together cross functionally. So hopefully all the future ones will be like really exciting things like, you know, GPT-5, whenever that comes and stuff like that.

• 8:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. We're going to talk about GPT-5. Going in a totally different direction, what is the most mind blowing or surprising thing that you've seen AI do recently?

• 8:31Speaker 00

  The things that are getting me most excited are these like new interfaces around AI, like the the rabbit R1. I don't know if you've seen that, but it's a consumer hardware device, this company called TL Draw. I don't know if you've seen TL Draw.

• 8:44Lenny Rachitsky?

  I think you sketch something and then it makes it as a website.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's like only like a small piece of what TL Draw is actually working on. But like, there's all of these like new interfaces to interact with AI. And I think like I was having a conversation with the TL Draw folks a couple of days ago, like, really blows my mind to think about how chat is the predominant way that folks are using AI today. And like, I actually think like, and this is my, you know, my bull case for the folks at TL Draw, I'm super excited for them to build what they're building. But they're sort of building this infinite canvas experience. And you could imagine how as you're interacting with an AI on a daily basis, like, you know, you might want to jump over to your like infinite canvas, which the AI has sort of filled in all the details. And you might see like a reference to a file and to a video and like all of

• 9:29Speaker 00

  these different things. And it's such a cool way. Like, it actually makes a lot more sense for us as humans to like, see stuff in that type of format than I think like, just listing out a bunch of stuff in chat. So I'm really, really excited to see more people. I think like 2024 is the year of multimodal AI, but it's also the year that people really push the boundaries of some of these like new UX paradigms around AI.

• 9:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's funny, I feel like chatbots, like as a as a PM for many years, it feels like every brainstorming session we had about new features, it's like, hey, we should have built a chatbot to solve this problem. It's like the perennial like, oh, chatbot, of course, someone's going to suggest we do a chatbot. And now they're actually useful and working. And everyone's building chatbots, a lot of them based on OpenAI APIs. There's not really a question there, but maybe the question I was going to get to this later is just when people are thinking about building a product like, say, TL Draw. What should they think about where OpenAI is not going to go versus like here's what OpenAI is going to do for us? We shouldn't worry about them building a version of TLJ on the future. What's the kind of the way to think about where you won't be disrupted essentially by OpenAI, knowing also they may change their mind?

• 10:36Speaker 00

  That's a great question. I think like we're deeply focused on these like very, very general use cases, like the general reasoning capabilities, the general coding, the general writing abilities. I think where you start to get into some of these like very critical applications, and I think a great example of this is it's actually like Harvey. I don't know if you've seen Harvey, but it's this legal AI use case where they're they're building custom models and tools to help lawyers and people at legal firms and stuff like that. And that's a great example of like our models are probably never going to be as capable as as some of the things that Harvey's doing. Because like our our goal and our mission is really to solve this like very general use case. And then people can do things like fine tuning and build all their own custom, you know, UI and product features on top of that.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  And I think that's the, you know, I have a lot of empathy and like a lot of excitement for people who are like building these like very general products today. Like I talked to a lot of developers who are building like, you know, just general purpose assistance and like general purpose agents and stuff like that. I think it's cool and it's a good idea. I think like the challenge for them is like they are going to end up directly competing against us in those spaces. And I think there's there's enough room for a lot of people to be successful, but like it to me, like you shouldn't be surprised when, you know, we end up launching some like general purpose agent product. Because like, again, we're sort of building that with GPTs today and versus like, we're not going to launch like some of these like very verticalized products. Like we're not going to launch like an AI sales agent.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  Like that's just not what we're building towards. And companies who are and have some domain specific knowledge and they're really excited about that problem space. Like they can go into that and leverage our models and like end up continuing to be on the cutting edge without having to like do all that R and D effort themselves.

• 12:16Lenny Rachitsky?

  Got it. So the advice I'm hearing is get specific about use cases. And that could be either models that are tuned to be especially useful for a use case like sales. Or make an interface or experience solving a very, a more specific problem.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  And I think if you're going to try and solve this like very general, like if you're going to try to build like the next general assistant to compete with something like chat GPT, like it has to be so radically different. Like people have to really like be like, wow, this is solving like these 10 problems that I have with chat GPT and therefore I'm going to go and try your new thing. Otherwise, like, you know, we're just putting a ton of engineering efforts and research effort into making that like an incredible product. And it's just going to be like the normal challenges of building companies. Like it's just hard to compete against somebody like that.

• 12:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. Okay. That's great. I was going to get that later, but I'm glad we touched on that. I imagine that's on the minds of many developers and founders. Kind of along the same lines, there's a lot of talk about how chat GPT and GPTs and many of the tools you guys offer are going to make a company much more efficient. They don't need as many engineers, data scientists, PMs, things like that. But I think it's also hard for companies to think about what should we actually, like, what can we actually do to make our company more efficient? I'm curious if there's any examples that you can share of how companies have taken, built a, say, a GPT internally to do something so that they don't have to spend engineering hours on it. Or generally just used OpenAI tooling to make their business internally more efficient.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a great question. And I wonder if, if you can put this in like the show notes or something like that, but there's a really great Harvard Business School study about, and I forgot which consulting firm they did it with. Maybe it was like Boston Consulting or, or something like that, but it, it might've been one of the other ones. And they talked about like the order of magnitude of efficiency gain for those folks who are using AI tools. And I, I think it was chat GPT specifically in those use cases that they were using comparatively against like folks who aren't using AI. I'm really excited also, just like as this more time passes between the release of this technology for us to get more like empirical studies. Cause like, I feel this for myself, like as somebody who's an engineer today, like I use chat GPT and like I can ship things way faster than I would be able to.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  I don't have any like good metrics for myself to put a, to put like a, a specific number on it, but I'm guessing like people are working on those studies right now. I think engineering is actually like one of the highest leveraged things that you could be using AI to do today. And like really unlocking like. Probably on the order of at least a 50% improvement, especially for some of the like lower hanging fruit, software engineering tasks, like the models are just so capable at doing that work. And it's crazy to think, and I'm guessing actually GitHub probably has a bunch of really great studies they publish around like co-pilots. And you could use those as an analogy for what people are getting from chat GPT as well. But those are probably like the highest leveraged things.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  I think now with GPTs, people are able to like go in and solve some of these more tactical problems. I think one of the general challenges with chat GPT is like, it gives like a decent answer for like a lot of different use cases, but oftentimes it's not like particular enough to like the voice of your company or like the nuance of the work that you're doing. And I think now with GPTs like, and people who are using the teams in chat GPT and enterprise in chat GPT, I can actually build those things, incorporate the nuance of their own company and make, make solving those tasks like much, much more domain specific. So we, we literally just launched GPTs a couple of months ago. So I don't think there's been any like good public success stories, but I'm, I'm guessing that

• 15:49Speaker 00

  that success is happening right now at companies and, and hopefully we'll hear more about that in the, in the months to come. As folks like get super excited about sharing those case studies.

• 15:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'll share an example. So I have this good friend, his name is Dennis Yang. He works at Chime and he told me about two things that they're doing at Chime that seem to be providing value. One is he built a GPT that helps write ads for Facebook and Google, just gives you ideas for ads to run. And so that takes a little load off the marketing team or the growth team. And then he built another GPT that delivers experiment results, kind of like a data scientist would like, here's the result of this experiment. And then you could talk to it and ask for like, hey, how, how much longer do you think we should run this for? Or what might this imply about our product and things like that? And I think it's really, like you said, is there anything else that comes to mind? Just like things you've heard people do, just like, wow, that was a really smart way of, so I get there's like engineering co-pilot type tooling.

• 16:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there anything else that comes to mind, just to give people a little inspiration of like, wow, that's an interesting way I should be thinking about using some of these tools.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  I've seen some interesting GPTs around like the planning use cases. Like you want to do like OKR planning for your team or something like that. There's, I just actually saw somebody tweet it like literally yesterday. I've seen some cool like venture capital ones of like doing diligence on like a deal flow, which is kind of interesting and like getting some different perspectives. I think all of those like horizontal use cases where like you can bring in a different personality and like get perspective on different things, I think is really cool. Like I've personally used in a GPT, the private GPT that I use myself that like helps with some of the like planning stuff for for different quarters and like just making sure that I'm being consistent in how I'm framing things, like driving back to like individual metrics, stuff that like

• 17:35Speaker 00

  when people do planning, like they often miss and like are bad at. And it's been super helpful for me to like have a GPT to like force me to think about some of those things.

• 17:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wait, can you talk more about this? What does this GPT do for you and how do you, what do you feed it?

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's, I forgot what article I saw it online, but it was like some article that was talking about like, what are the best ways to like set yourself up for success and planning? And I took a bunch of the like, I'll see if I can make it public after this and send you a link, but took a bunch of the examples from that and went in and put some of those suggestions into the GPT. And then when now, when I do any of my planning of like, I want to build this thing, I put it through and have it like generate a timeline, generate all the specifics of like, what are the metrics and success that I'm working for, like who, who might be some important cross-functional stakeholders? So like include in the planning process, all that stuff. And it's been, it's been helpful.

• 18:25Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow, that is very cool. That would be awesome if you made it public. And if we do, we'll link to it and we'll make it the number one most popular GPT in the store.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 18:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  Going in a slightly different direction, there's this whole genre of prompt engineering. It feels like it's one of these really emerging skills. I actually saw a startup hiring a prompt engineer, one of my, the startups I've invested in. And I think that's going to blow a lot of people's minds that there's this new job that's emerging. And I know the idea is this won't last forever, that in theory. AI will be so smart, you don't need to really think about how to be smart about asking it for things you needed to do. But can you just describe this idea of what is prompt engineering? This term that people might be hearing? And then even more interesting than just like, what advice do you have for people to get better at writing prompts? For say, chat GPT or through the API in general?

• 19:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, this, this is such an interesting space. And I think it's like another space where I'm excited for people to do like more like scientific empirical studies about because there's like so much like gut feeling best practices that like maybe aren't actually true in a certain ways. I think the, the reason that prompt engineering exists and comes up at all is because the models are so inclined because of the way that they're trained to give you just an answer to the question that you asked crap in crap out. If you ask like a, a pretty like basic question, you're going to get a pretty basic response. And actually, the same thing is true for humans. And you can think of a great example of this. When I go to another human and I ask like, how's your day going? They say, it's going pretty good.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Literally absolutely zero detail, no nuance, like not very interesting at all versus again, if you have some context with the person, if you have a personal relationship with them and I ask you, hey, Lenny Leo, how's your day going? Like, how did the last podcast go, et cetera, et cetera. Like you just have a little bit more context and, and agency to go and answer my question. I think this is like prompt engineering, my whole, my whole position on this is like prompt engineering is a very human thing. Like when we want to get some value out of a human, we do this prompt engineering. We, we try to effectively communicate with that human in order to get the best output. And the same thing is true of models. And I think it's like, again, because we're using a system that appears to be really smart.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  We assume that it has all this context, but it's really like, you know, imagine a human, a human level intelligence, but like literally no context, like it has no idea what you're going to ask it. It's never met you before. It has no idea who you are, what you do, what your goals are. And like, it's the reason that you get super generic responses sometimes is because people forget they need to put that context in the model. So I think this thing that is going to help solve this problem, and we already kind of do this in the context of DALL-E. Go to the image generation model that we have to Ali and you say, I want a picture of a turtle. What it does is it actually takes that description. It says, I want a picture of a turtle.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  And it changes it into this high fidelity, like, you know, generate a picture of a turtle with a shell with a green background and, you know, lily pads in the water and all this other, it adds all this fidelity. Because that's the way that the model is trained. It's trained on examples with super high fidelity. This will happen with text models. You can imagine a world where you go into chat GPT and you say, write me a blog post about AI. It automatically will go and be like, let me generate a much higher fidelity description of what this person really wants, which is, you know, generate me a blog post about AI that talks about the trade offs between these different techniques and some example use cases and references some of the latest papers and it does all that for you.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  And then you as the user will hopefully be able to be like, yep, this is kind of what I wanted. Let me edit this. Let me edit this here. And again, the inherent problem is like, we're lazy as humans. We don't want to type all, we don't really want to type what we mean. And I think AI systems are actually going to help solve some of that problem.

• 22:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  So until that day, what did, what can people do better when they're prompting, say, chat GPT? And I'll give you an example. Tim Ferriss suggested this really good idea that I've been stealing, which is when you're preparing for an interview, go to chat GPT and I'm, and so I did this for you. I was like, hey, I'm interviewing Logan Kilpatrick. He's head of developer relations at OpenAI on my podcast. Give me 10 questions to ask him in the style of Tyler Cowen, who I think is the best interviewer. He's so good at just like very pointed, uh, original questions. So what advice would you have for me to improve on that prompt to have better results? Cause the questions were like, fine. They're great. They're like, interesting enough, but they weren't like, holy shit, these are incredible. So I guess what advice would you give me in that example?

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a great example where like thinking in context of like who it is that you're asking questions about like I'm probably not somebody who has enough information about me on the internet where like the model actually has been trained and like knows the nuances of my background. I think there's like probably like much more famous guests where like it might be that there's enough context on the internet to answer the questions like you actually have to do some of that work. You need to say like if you're using a browser Bing, for example, you could say like here's a link to Logan's blog and like some of the things that he's talked about like here's a link to his Twitter like go through some of his tweets, go through some of his blogs and like see what his interesting perspectives are that we might want to surface on the on the blog or something like that. It's again, giving the model enough context to answer

• 23:39Speaker 00

  to answer the question. I think again, that that prompt actually might work really well for somebody who like has it like if you were interviewing like Tom Cruise or something like that sort of you who has a lot of information about them on the internet, it probably works a little bit better.

• 23:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  So the advice there is just give more context. It doesn't tell you, hey, I don't actually know that much about Logan, so give me some more information. It's just like, here we go. Here's a bunch of good questions.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  Exactly. Like it wants to like it so deeply wants to answer your question. Like it doesn't care that it doesn't have enough context. It's like the most eager person in the world you could imagine to answer the question. And without that context, it's just hard to do to give them anything of value. If we got T-shirts printed, they should say like context is is all you need. Context is the only thing that matters. Like it's it's such an important piece of getting a language model to do anything for you.

• 24:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  Any other tips? Just as people are sitting there, maybe they're good. They have chat GPT open right now as they're crafting a prompt. Is there anything else that you'd say would help them have better results?

• 24:37Speaker 00

  We actually have a prompt engineering guide, which folks should go and check out and has some of the examples. It depends on sort of the order of magnitude of like how much performance increase you can get. There's a lot of like really small silly things like adding a smiley face increases the performance of the model like telling the you know, you've seen, I'm sure folks have seen like a lot of these like silly examples, like telling the model to like take a break and then answer the question, all these kinds of things. And again, if you think about it, it's because the corpus of information That's trained these models is the same things that is that humans have sent back and forth to each other. So like you telling a human like when I go take a break and then I come back to work like I'm fresher and I'm able to answer questions better and like do work better.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  So very similar things are true for these models. And again, when I see a smiley face at the end of someone's message, like I feel empowered that like this is going to be a positive interaction. I should like be more inclined to give them a great answer and spend more effort on the thing that they asked me for.

• 25:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow. Wait, so that's a real thing. If you had a smiley face, it might give you better results.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  Again, it's like the the challenge with all this stuff is like it's very nuanced and and it's also like it's a small jump in performance. You could imagine like on the order of like one or two percent, which for a few sentence answer is like might not even be a discernible difference. Again, if you're generating like an entire saga of text, like the smiley face like could actually make a material difference for you. But for like something small and tactical, it might not.

• 26:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, good tip. Amazing. Okay. We've talked about GPTs. I think maybe it might be helpful to describe what is what is this new thing that you guys launched GPTs? And I'm curious just how it's going this because this is a really big change and element of OpenAI now with this idea that you could build your own like kind of mini. And I'm almost explaining it, your mini open chat, chat GPT. And then people can, I think you can pay for it, right? Like you can charge for your own GPT or is it all free right now?

• 26:30Speaker 00

  It's all free right now.

• 26:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, it's all free. Okay. In the future, I imagine people will be able to charge. So there's this whole store now. Basically, it's a whole app store that you guys have launched. How's it going? What's happening? What surprised you there? What should people know?

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's it's going great. And again, historically, the the thing that you would have to do, let's say, for example, you have like a really cool chat GPT use case. What you would have to do to share it with somebody else is like actually go in and like start the conversation with the model like prompted to do the things that you wanted to. And then you would share that link with somebody else before the action has actually happened and be like, here, now you can like essentially finish this conversation with chat GPT that I started. So GPTs kind of changes this where you take all that important context, you put it into the model to begin with, and then people can go and like chat with. Essentially a custom version of chat GPT. And the thing that's really interesting is, you know, you can upload files, you can give it custom instructions.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  You can add all these different tools, like a code interpreter is built in, which allows you to like, do like math essentially. You have browsing built in, image generation built in. And you can also like for more advanced use cases, if you're a developer, you can like connect it to external API. So you can connect it to the notion API or Gmail or all these different things and like have it actually take actions on your behalf. So there's, there's so many cool things that people are unlocking. And what's been most exciting to me actually is like the non-developer persona is now empowered to like go and solve these like really, really, really more challenging problems by giving the model enough context on what that problem is. To be able to solve it, going back to like context is all you need. Like this is very true in the context of GPTs.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  And if you give it enough context, like you can solve much more interesting problems. There's so many things that I'm excited about with this, like I think monetization when it comes to the store. Later this quarter, I think is going to be extremely exciting. Like when people can get paid based on who's using their GPTs. That's going to be a huge unlock and like open a lot of people's eyes to the, to the opportunity here. I also think like continuing to push on making more capabilities accessible to GPTs. For people who can't code is really exciting, like having to, even for me as like a, someone who was a software engineer, like, it's not super easy to like connect the notion API or the Gmail API to my GPT. I'm like, really, I'd love to just be able to like one click sign in with Gmail.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Then all of a sudden it's like my Gmail is accessible or like someone else can sign in with their Gmail and make it accessible. So I think over time, like all those types of things will come, but today it's really like, custom prompts is essentially like one of the biggest value adds with GPTs.

• 29:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. I'm, I have it pulled up here on the, on different monitor. And Canva has the top GPT currently, and I'm, I was trying to play with it as you're chatting just to see. I was going to make a big banner that said, it's the context, stupid. And it doesn't, I'm not doing something right, but I'm not paying that much attention to it because we're talking. But uh, this is very cool. Just maybe a final question there, is there a GPT that you saw someone built that was like, wow, that's amazing. That's so cool. Something that surprised you and I'll share, I'll share one. That was very cool, but is there anything that comes to mind and ask that?

• 29:32Speaker 00

  I think my my instinct is the Zapier, all of the stuff that Zapier has done with GPTs is like the most useful stuff that you can imagine. Like you can go so far with what and I don't know how it's like packaged for Zapier's GPT right now, but like you can actually as a third-party developer integrate Zapier without knowing how to code into your GPT. So like they're they're pushing a lot of this stuff. And then basically like all 5,000 connections that are possible with Zapier today, you can bring into your GPT and like essentially enable it to do anything. So I'm I'm incredibly excited for Zapier and for people who are building with them because like there's so many things that you can unlock

• 30:12Speaker 00

  using that platform. So I think that's probably like the most, the most exciting thing to me for people who aren't who aren't developers.

• 30:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. Zapier is always in there getting there, connecting things.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're great.

• 30:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  Uh, so the one that I had in mind, so I had a buddy of mine, Siki, who's the CEO of a company called Runway, built this thing called Universal Primer, which helps you learn. It's described as learn everything about anything. And it basically, I think, is kind of this Socratic method of helping you learn stuff. So it's like, explain how transformers work in LMs. And then it just kind of goes through stuff and then asks you questions, I think, and kind of helps you learn new concepts. And I think it's the number two education GPT.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  I love that. Siki is incredible. So.

• 30:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yes, that's true. Let me tell you about a product called Arcade. Arcade is an interactive demo platform that enables teams to create polished on-brand demos in minutes. Telling the story of your product is hard and customers want you to show them your product, not just talk about it or gate it. That's why product for teams such as Atlassian, Carta, and Retool use Arcade to tell better stories within their homepages, product change logs, emails, and documentation. But don't just take my word for it. Quantum Metric, the leading digital analytics platform, created an interactive product to her library to drive more prospects. With Arcade, they achieved a 2X higher conversion rate for demos and saw five times more engagement than videos.

• 31:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  On top of that, they built the demo 10 times faster than before, creating a product. Demo has never been easier. With browser-based recording, Arcade is the no-code solution for building personalized demos at scale. Arcade offers product customization options, designer-approved editing tools, and rich insights about how your viewers engage every step of the way. Ready to tell more engaging product stories that drive results? Head to arcade.software/lenny and get 50% off your first three months. That's arcade.software/lenny. I want to talk about just what it's like to work at OpenAI and how the product team operates and how the company operates. So you worked at, your two previous companies were Apple and NASA, which are not known for moving fast.

• 32:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  And now you're OpenAI, which is known for moving very fast, maybe too fast for some people's taste, as we saw with the whole board thing. And so what I'm curious is just what is it that OpenAI does so well that allows them to build and ship so quickly? And at such high a bar, like, is there a process or a way of working that you've seen that you think other companies should try to move more quickly and ship better stuff?

• 32:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's so many interesting trade-offs and all of this like tension around like how how quickly companies can move. I think for us, like, again, if you think about Apple as an example, or you think about NASA as an example, just like older institutions, like lots of like, you know, over time, the tendency is things slow down. There's like additional checks and balances that are put in place, which sort of drag things down a little bit. So we're we're young and like a new company, so like, we don't have a lot of that like institutional legacy barriers that have been put in place. I think the biggest thing, and I, there's a good Sam tweet somewhere in the ether about this from, I think, 2022 or something like that.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  But like, finding people who are high agency and work with urgency is like one of the most, you know, if I was hiring five people today, like, those are like some of the top two characteristics that I would look for in people. Because it's, you can, you can take on the world if you have people who have high agency and like not needing to either like, you know. Get 50 people's different consensus because like you have people who you trust with high agency and they can just go and do the thing. I think is like one of the most.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  It is the most important thing. I I'm pretty sure if you if you were to distill it down and like I I see this in folks that I work with like folks are so high agency like they see a problem and they go and tackle it like they hear something from our customers about a challenge that they're having and like they're already pushing on what the solution for them is and not like waiting for all the other things to happen that like I think traditional companies are are sort of stuck behind because of like, oh, let's check with all these like seven different departments. So like, you know, try to get feedback on this. Like, people just go and do it and solve the problem. And I love that. It's so fun to be able to to be a part of those situations.

• 34:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  That is so cool. I really like these two characteristics because I haven't heard this before. Is the two maybe the two most important things you guys look for? High agency, high urgency? To give people a clear sense of what these actually look like when you're hiring. You shared maybe this example of customer service. Someone's hearing some bug and then going to fix it. Is there anything else that can illustrate what that looks like? High agency? And then similar question on urgency other than just like move, move, ship, ship, ship?

• 35:01Speaker 00

  I think like the assistance API that we released for Dev Day, like. We continued to get this feedback from developers that people wanted these higher levels of abstraction on top of our existing APIs and like a bunch of folks on the team just like came together and were like, hey, let's let's put together what the plan would look like to build something like this. And then very quickly came together and actually built the actual API that now powers so many people's assistant applications that are out there. And I think that's a great example of like, you know, it wasn't like this, like top down, like, oh, someone's sitting there being like, oh, let's do these five things. And then like, okay, team, go and do that. It's like people really seeing these problems that are coming up and like, knowing that.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  They can come together as a team and like solve these problems really quickly. And I think the assistance API and there's like a thousand and one other examples of of teams taking agency and doing this. But I think that's a that's a great one. Um, at the top of my head.

• 35:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  That makes me want to ask just how how does planning work at OpenAI? So in this example is just like, hey, we think we need to build this. Let's just go and build it. I imagine there's still a roadmap and priorities and goals and things that that team had. How does? How does roadmapping and prioritization and all of that generally work to allow for something like that?

• 36:13Speaker 00

  I think this is one of the more challenging.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  He says at OpenAI, like, there's, there's so many, like, everyone wants everything from us. And like today, especially in the world of chat GPT and how large and well-used our API is like, people will just come to us and say like, hey, we want all of these things. I think there's like a bunch of like core guiding principles that we look at, like, one, going back to the mission, like, is this actually like going to help us get to AGI? So there's a huge focus on like, you know, there's this like potential shiny reward right in front of us, which is like, you know, like optimize user engagement or whatever it is. And like, is that really the thing? Like, maybe the answer is yes, like, maybe that is what is going to help us get to AGI sooner. But like, looking at it through that lens, I think is like always the first step of deciding any, any of these problems.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  I think on the developer side, there's also these like core tenants of like reliability, like, hey, you know, it would be awesome if we had additional APIs that did all these cool things, like new, new endpoints, new modalities, new abstractions, but like, are we giving customers a robust and reliable experience on our API? And like, that's often like the first question. And I think there have been times where we've fallen short on that. And like, you know, there was a bunch of other things that we've been thinking about doing and like really bringing the focus and priority back to that reliability piece. Cause at the end of the day, nobody cares if you have something great if they can't use it robust and reliably. So there's like these core tenants. And I think like, again, we have like very, other than

• 37:43Speaker 00

  all the principles about how we're making the decision. I think like the actual planning process is like pretty standard. Like we come together, there's like H1, Q1 goals. We all sprint on those. I think the real interesting thing is like how stuff changes over time. Like you'd think we're going to do these like very high level things and like, you know, new models, new modalities, whatever it is. And then like as time goes on, there's like all of this turmoil and change. And it's interesting to have like mechanisms to be like, hey, how do we, how do we update our understanding of the world and our goals as everything sort of, the ground changes underneath of us as is happening in the craziness of the AI space today?

• 38:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's interesting that it sounds a lot like most other companies. There's H1 planning, there's Q1 planning. Are there metrics and goals like that? Do you guys have OKRs or anything like that? Or is it just here, we're going to launch these products?

• 38:33Speaker 00

  I think it's like much higher level. I actually don't think OpenAI is like a big OKR company. Like, I don't think teams do OKRs today, and I don't have a good understanding of like, why that's the case, whether or not. I don't even know if OKRs are like still the industry. You're probably talking to a lot more folks about like, yeah, who are making those decisions. So I'm curious, is that something that you're seeing from folks? Like, is it still common for people to do OKRs?

• 38:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, absolutely. Many companies use OKRs, love OKRs. Many companies hate OKRs. I am not surprised that OpenAI is not an OKR-driven company. Along those lines, I don't know how much you can share about all the stuff, but how do you measure success for things that you launch? I know there's this ultimate goal, AGI. Is there some way to track we're getting closer? What else do you guys look at when you launch? Say, GPT Store or Assistants or anything that's like, cool, that was exactly what we're hoping for. Is it just adoption?

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, but adoption is a great one. I think there's like a bunch of metrics around like, you know, revenue, number of developers that are building on our platform, all those things. And a lot of these, and I don't want to dive, I'll let Sam or someone else on our leadership team like go more into the details. But I think like a lot of these are like actual abstractions towards something else. Like, even if revenue is a goal, it's like revenue is not actually the goal. Revenue is a proxy for getting more compute, which is then like actually what helps us get towards getting more GPUs so that we can, you know, train better models and like actually get to the goal. So there's all these like intermediate layers where like even if we say something is the goal and like you hear that in a vacuum and you're like, oh, well, OpenAI just wants to make money. And it's like, well, really money is the mechanism to get

• 40:04Speaker 00

  better models so that we can achieve our mission. And I think there's, there's a bunch of interesting, interesting angles like that as well.

• 40:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  I don't know if I've heard of a more ambitious vision for a company to build artificial general intelligence. I love that. I imagine many companies are like, what's our version of that? Before we leave this topic, is there, is there anything else that you've seen OpenAI do really well? That allows it to move this fast and be this successful? You talked about hiring people with higher agency and high urgency. Is there anything else that's just like, oh, that's a really good way of operating? I imagine part of it is just hiring incredibly smart people. Like, I think that's probably an unsaid thing, but yeah, anything else?

• 40:45Speaker 00

  I think there's a non-trivial benefit to using Slack. And I think like maybe, maybe that's controversial and maybe some people don't like Slack. But OpenAI has such a Slack-heavy culture and like it really the like instantaneous, real-time communication on Slack is so crucial. And like I, I, I just love being able to like tag in different people from different teams and like get everybody coalesce. So like everybody is always on Slack. So it's like, even if you're remote or you're on a different team or in a different office, like so much of the company culture is like ingrained in Slack. And it allows us to like really quickly coordinate where like it's actually faster to send them a Slack message sometimes than it would be to like walk over to their desk because they're on Slack and they're going to, they're going to be using it.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  And I saw, uh, if you saw the recent Sam and, and Bill Gates interview, but Sam was talking about how Slack is his number one most used app on his phone. And like, I don't even look at the time thing on my phone. It works and like, I don't want to know how long I'm using Slack, but I'm sure the Salesforce people are looking at the numbers and they're like, this is exactly what we wanted, so.

• 41:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  I also love Slack. I'm a big promoter of Slack. I think there's a lot of Slack hate, but such a good product. I've tried so many alternatives and nothing compares. I think what's interesting about Slack for you guys is one of the, like, you don't know if someone in there is just an AGI that is not actually a person that's just there working at the company.

• 42:01Speaker 00

  I, I know they're real people. There is no, no AGIs yet, but I think like, yeah, even, even Slack is building a bunch of like really cool AI tools, which like I'm excited to, and that's why like there's so much cool AI progress. And like at the end of the day, it's so exciting from being like a consumer of all these new AI products. Like Google's a great example. Like I'm so happy that Google's doing really cool AI stuff because like I'm a Google Docs customer and like I love using Google Docs, like a bunch of their other products. And like, it's awesome that people are building such, such useful things around these models.

• 42:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  How big is the OpenAI team at this point? Whatever you can share, just to give people a sense of the scale.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the last public number was something around like 750, um, near the, near the end of, of last year, 780 or something like that, near the end of last year. And we're growing, we're still growing so quickly. So I don't want to, I won't be the messenger to share the specific updated numbers. We're like, the team is growing like crazy and we're also hiring like across all of our engineering teams. So folks are, and, and PM teams. So if folks are interested, we'd love to, we'd love to hear from folks who are, um, who are curious about joining.

• 43:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  Maybe one last question here. So you're growing, maybe getting to a thousand people, clearly still very innovative and moving incredibly fast. Is there anything you've seen about what OpenAI does well to enable innovation and not kind of slow down new big ideas?

• 43:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a couple of things, one of which is the actual research team who like, you know, sort of seeds the most of the innovation that happens at OpenAI is intentionally small. They're not like, you know, most of the growth that OpenAI has seen is around like our customer phasing roles, our engineering roles to like provide the infrastructure to protect GPT and things like that. The research team is like, again, intentionally kept small and there's all of this talk. And it's really interesting. I just saw this thread from one of our, one of our research folks who was talking about how in a world where you're constrained by the amount of GPU capacity that you have as a researcher, which is the case for OpenAI researchers, but also researchers everywhere else, like each new researcher that you add is actually like a net productivity loss

• 44:04Speaker 00

  for the research group, unless that person is like upleveling everyone else in like such a profound way that like it increases the efficiency. Like if you just add somebody who's going to go and like tackle some completely different research direction, you now have to share your GPUs with that person and everyone else is now slower on their experiments. So it's a really interesting like trade off that the, that research folks have that I don't think like product folks, like if I add another engineer to like our API team or to our, some of the chat GPT teams, like you can actually write more code and do more. And like, that's actually like a net beneficial improvement for everybody. And that's always not the case in the case of researchers, which is interesting in a GPU constrained world, which hopefully we won't always be in.

• 44:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to zoom out a bit and then there's going to be a couple of follow up questions here. Where are things heading with OpenAI? What's, what's kind of in the near future of what people should expect from the tools that you guys are going to have in launch?

• 44:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, new, new modalities, I think chat GPT like continuing to push. All of the different experiences that are going to be possible like today, like chat GPT is really just like text in text out. Or I guess like three months ago, it was just text in text out. We started to change that with now you can do the voice mode and now you can generate images and now you can take pictures. So I think like continuing to expand like the way in which you interface with AI through chat GPT is coming. I think GPTs is our first step towards the agent future. Like again, today, when you use a GPT, it's really you send a message, you get an answer back almost, almost right away. And that's kind of the end of your interaction. I think as GPTs continue to get more robust, like you'll actually be able to say, hey, go and do this thing. And like, just let me know when you're done.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  Like it might take, I don't need the answer right now. I want you to like really spend time and be thoughtful about this. And like, again, that's if you think back to all these human analogies, like that's what we do with humans. Like I don't expect somebody when I ask them to do something meaningful for me to like do it right away and like give me the answer back right away. So I think pushing more towards those experiences is what is going to unlock like so much more value for people. And I think the last thing is GPTs as this mechanism to get like the next, you know, few hundred million people into chat GPT and into AI. So I think like if you have conversations with people who aren't close to the AI space, oftentimes you talk about, even if they've heard of chat GPT.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  A lot of people haven't heard of chat GPT, but if they have, they're like, they show up in chat GPT and they're like, you know, I don't really know what I'm supposed to do with this. This blank slate, I can kind of do anything. It's like not super clear how this solves like my specific problem. But I think the cool thing about GPTs is you can package down like here is this one very specific problem that AI can solve for you and, and do it really well. And like, I can share that experience with you and now you can go and try that GPT, have it actually solve the problem and be like, wow, like it did this thing for me. I should probably spend the time to investigate like these five other problems that I have to see if AI can also be a solution to those. So I think so many more people are going to come online and start using these tools because very like narrow, vertical tools are what's going to be like a huge unlock for them.

• 47:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  So in the last case, a classic horizontal product problem where it does so many things and people don't know what exactly it should do for them. So that makes a ton of sense, just being a lot more template oriented, use case specific, helping people onboard makes tons of sense. A common problem for so many SaaS products out there. Uh, the other ones you mentioned, which was really interesting, basically more interfaces to more easily interact with OpenAI Voice. You mentioned audio and things like that. That makes tons of sense. And then this agents piece where the idea is instead of just it's a chat, it's like, hey, go do this thing for me. Kind of along those lines. GPT-5, we touched on this a bit. There's a lot of speculation about the much better version.

• 47:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  People just have these wild expectations, I think, for where GPT is going. GPT-5 is gonna solve all the world's problems. I know you're not gonna tell me when it's launching and what it's gonna do, but I heard from a friend that there's kind of this tip that when you're building products today, you should build towards a GPT-5 future, not based on limitations of GPT-4 today. So to help people do that, what should people think about that might be better in a world of GPT-5? Is it just like it's faster, it's just smarter? Is there anything else that might be like, oh, wow, I should really rethink how I'm approaching my product?

• 48:22Speaker 00

  If folks have looked through the GPT-4 technical report that we released back in March when GPT-4 came out, GPT-4 was the first model that we trained where we could reliably predict the capabilities of that model beforehand based on the amount of compute that we were going to put into it. And you could actually, we did like a scientific study to show like, hey, this is what we predicted and here is what the actual outcome was. So it'll be, one, I think, just as somebody who's interested in technology, but interesting to see like, does that continue to hold for GPT-5? And hopefully we'll, we'll share some of that information when, whenever that model comes out. I also think you can probably draw a few observations. One of them, which is

• 49:02Speaker 00

  GPT-4 came out, the, the consensus from the world is everything is different. Like all of a sudden, everything is different. This changes the world. This changes everything. And then slowly but surely, we come back to reality of like, this is a really effective tool and it's going to help solve my problems more effectively. And I think that is like the, undoubtedly the lens in which people should look at all of these model advancements. Like GPT-5 is like surely going to be extremely useful and like solve some whole new echelon of problems. Hopefully they'll be faster, hopefully they'll be better. Or in all these ways, but like fundamentally, the same problem that exists in the world are still going to be the same problems. You now just have a better tool to solve those problems.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  And I think like going back to like vertical use cases, like I think people who are solving very specific use cases are just now going to be able to do that much more effectively. Like, I don't think that's like going to, people have these unrealistic expectations that like GPT five is going to be like doing backflips in the background in my bedroom. While it also like writes all my code for me and like talks on the phone with my, with my mom or something like that. I'm like, that's not the case. Like it is just going to be this like very effective tool, very similar to GPT four. And it's also going to become like very normal, very quickly. And I think like that is actually a really interesting piece. If you can plan for the world where people become very, very used to these tools very quickly.

• 50:25Speaker 00

  I actually think that's like an edge and like assuming that this thing is going to like absolutely change everything. And in many ways, I think it's actually like a, um, a downside is like the wrong mental framing to have of these tools as they come out.

• 50:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  Kind of along these lines, you guys are investing a lot into B two B offerings. I think half the revenue last I heard was B two B and then half is B to C. I don't know if that's true, but that's something I heard. What is it that you get if you work with OpenAI as a company, as a business? What is the, what is, what is unlocked? It's just called OpenAI Enterprise? What's it called? And what do you get as a part of that?

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think a lot of our B to B to B customers are using the API to like build stuff. So I think that's one angle of it. I think if you're a chat GPT B to B customer, we sell teams, which is the ability to like get multiple subscriptions of chat GPT packaged together. We also have an enterprise version of chat GPT. There's a bunch of like enterprisey things that enterprise companies want around like SSO and stuff like that related to chat GPT enterprise. I think the coolest thing is actually being able to like share some of these like prompt templates and GPTs internally. So again, you can make like custom things that work really well for your company with like all of the information that's relevant to solving problems at your company and like share those internally.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  And to me, that's like, you know, you want to be able to collaborate with your teammates, other cool things you create using AI. So that's a huge unlock for companies. I think that those are like the two biggest value adds. There's like higher limits and stuff like that on some of those models. But I think being able to share like your very domain specific applications is the most useful thing.

• 51:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  And I think if you're a company listening and you think a lot of employees are using ChatGPT, basically, the simplest thing you could do is just roll it up into a business account with single sign on. And that probably saves you money and makes it easier to coordinate and administer.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's also like a bunch of security stuff too. Like if you want to control, like you don't want people to use certain GPTs from the GPT store because you're like worried about security or privacy and stuff like that. You don't want your private data going in places. It makes a lot of sense to to sign up for that so that you have a little bit more control over what's happening.

• 52:29Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, got it. Yeah, there's a launch happening tomorrow, I think, after we're recording this. Can you talk about what is new, what's coming out? I think this is going to come out a couple of weeks after recording, but just what should people know that's new, that's coming out from OpenAI and tomorrow in our time, in our world?

• 52:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, updated. So there's a few different things. A couple of quick ones are updated GPT for turbo model. Update the preview model that we released that dead day. There's an updated version of that. It fixes this. If folks have seen online, people talking about this sort of laziness phenomenon in the model, we we improve on that and it fixes a lot of the cases where that where that was the case. So over the model will be a little bit less lazy. The the big thing is this is the third generation embedding model. So we were talking off camera before recording about all of the cool use cases from embedding. So if folks have used embeddings before, it's essentially the the technology that powers like many of these like question, question and answering with your own documentation or your own corpus of knowledge.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  And like you were saying, you actually have a website where people can ask questions about recordings of the podcast.

• 53:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  Lennybot, lennybot.com, check it out.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, lennybot.com. And my my assumption was that lennybot.com is actually powered by embedding. So you take all of the corpus of knowledge, you take all the recordings, your blog post, you embed them. And then when people ask questions, you can actually go in and see the similarity between the question and the corpus of knowledge and then provide an answer to somebody's question and reference like an empirical fact, like something that's true from your knowledge base. I'm like, this is super useful and people are doing a ton of this is like trying to ground these models in reality in what they know to be true. Like, we know all the things from your podcast to be at least something that you've said before and to be true in that sense. And we can bring them into the the answer that that the model is actually generating in response to a question. So that'll be super cool.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  And these new V3 embeddings models. Again, you know, state of the art performance. The cool thing is actually the non-English performance has increased super significantly. I think historically, people really were only using embeddings for like it only worked really well for for English. And I think now you can you can use it across like so many new languages because it's it's just so much more performant across those across those languages and it's like five times cheaper as well, which is wonderful. I there's there's no better feeling than making things cheaper for people. I I love it. I think now it's like you can embed. I'm pretty sure it was like sixty two thousand pages of text for one dollar, um, which is which is very, very cheap.

• 55:02Speaker 00

  So lots of really cool things you can do with embeddings and excited to see people embed more stuff.

• 55:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  What a deal. Final question before we get to our very exciting lightning round. Say you're a product manager at a big company or even a founder. What do you think are the biggest opportunities for them to leverage the tech that you guys are building? GPT four, all the other APIs. How should people be thinking about here's how we should really think about leveraging this power in our existing product? Or new product, whichever direction you want to go.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think going back to this theme of like new experiences is really exciting to me. Like I think consumers are just going to be like like you're going to have an edge on other people. If you're providing AI that's not accessible on a chatbot, like people are using a ton of chat and like it's a really valuable service area. Like it's clearly valuable because people are using it. But I think products that like move beyond this chat interface really are going to have such an advantage and and also like thinking about how to take your use case to the next level. Like I've I've tried a ton of chat examples that are like very, very basic and like providing a little bit of value to me. But I'm like, really, this should go like much further and like actually build your core experience from the ground up.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  Like I've used this product that allows you to essentially like manage or like view the conversations that are happening online around like certain topics and stuff like that. So I can go and look online like what are people saying about GPT four? And like that, what I just said out loud, what are people saying about GPT four is like the actual question that I have and like in a normal product experience today, like I have to go into a bunch of dashboards and like change a bunch of filters and stuff like that. And what I really want is just like, ask my question, what are, what are people doing? What are people saying about GPT four? Like get an answer to that question in like a very data grounded way. And I've seen people like solve part of this problem where like, oh, let me like, oh, here's a, here's a few examples of what people are saying. And like, well, that's not really what I want. Like I want this like

• 57:05Speaker 00

  summary of what's happening. And I think it just takes a little bit more engineering effort to make that happen. But I think it's like, that is the magical unlock of like, wow, this is an incredible product that I'm going to continue to use instead of like, yeah, this is kind of useful, but like, I really want more.

• 57:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. I'll give a shout out to a product. I'm not an investor, but I know the founder called visualelectric.com, which I think is doing exactly this. It's basically a tool specifically built for creatives, I think specifically graphic design to help them create imagery. So, you know, there's like Dolly, obviously, but this takes it to a whole new level where it's kind of this canvas, infinite canvas that you could just generate images, edit, tweak them and continue to iterate until you have the thing that you need.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  I'm gonna try this out. Is, is it similar to Canva?

• 57:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's, it's even more niche, I think, for more sophisticated graphic design, I think, is the use case. But I'm not a designer, so I'm not, I'm not the target customer, but I will say my wife is a graphic designer. She had never used AI tools. I showed her this and she got hooked on it. She paid for it without even telling me that she was going to become a paid customer. And she just started, she created imagery of her dog all in all this art. And now it's like on our TV, she, the art she created is now sitting, it's like a we have a framed TV. And that's the image on our TV. So, anyway.

• 58:21Speaker 00

  I love that. What was it called again?

• 58:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Visualelectric.com. Anyway, anything else you wanted to touch on or share before we get to a very exciting lightning round?

• 58:31Speaker 00

  I've made this statement a few times online or other places, but like for people who are, have cool ideas that they should build with AI, like this is the moment, like there are so many cool things that need to be built for the world using AI and like. Again, if I or other folks on the team at OpenAI can be helpful in like getting you over the hump of like starting that journey of building something really cool, like please reach out. Like there's just, the world needs more cool solutions using these tools and would love to hear about like the awesome stuff that people are building.

• 59:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  I would have asked you this at the end, but how would people reach out? What's the best way to actually do that?

• 59:06Speaker 00

  Twitter, LinkedIn, my email should be findable somewhere. I don't want to say it and I get spammed with a bunch of emails. Like you should be able to find my email if you need it online somewhere. But yeah, Twitter and LinkedIn is usually like the easiest place.

• 59:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  And how do they find you on Twitter?

• 59:21Speaker 00

  It's just Logan Kilpatrick, or I think my name shows up as logan.gpt or

• 59:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  Logan GPT.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  @officiallogank.

• 59:27Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, awesome. Okay. And we'll link to it in the show notes. Amazing. Well, Logan, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

• 59:34Speaker 00

  I'm ready.

• 59:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

• 59:39Speaker 00

  I think the first one, and it's one that I read a long time ago and came back to recently is The One Room Schoolhouse by Sal Khan. Incredible. Yeah, I don't want to, it's a lightning round, so I won't say too much, but like incredible story. And AI is what is going to enable Stal Khan's vision of like a teacher per student to actually happen. So I'm really excited about that. And the other one is that I always come back to is Why We Sleep. I, yeah, sleep, sleep and sleep science are so cool. If you don't care about your sleep, like it's one of the biggest up levels that you can do for yourself.

• 1:00:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed?

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  I'm a sucker for like a good inspirational human story. So I watched with my family recently over the holidays, this Gran Turismo movie, and it's a story about somebody who like this kid from London who grew up like doing like sim racing, which is like a virtual race car and did this competition, ended up becoming like a real professional race car driver through some competition. And it's just like really cool to see, yeah, someone go from driving a virtual car to driving a real car and like competing in a 24 hour Le Mans and all that stuff.

• 1:00:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  I used to play that game and it was a lot of fun, but I don't think I have any clue how to drive a real car, race car. So that's inspiring. Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates that you're interviewing?

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm always curious to hear what people's like the thing that they so strongly believe that people disagree with them on.

• 1:01:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  What do you look for in an answer that seems like, wow, that's a really good signal?

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  I'm oftentimes, it's just an entertaining question to ask in some sense, but it's also, it's interesting to see like what somebody's like deeply held strong belief is. I think that's and, you know, not, not to like judge whether or not I believe in that, but like just curious to like see why, why people feel that way.

• 1:01:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  What is a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really like?

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  On the narrative of sleep, I have this, I have this really nice sleep mask from this company called, and not being paid to say this, but it's called like Manta Sleep or something like that. It's a weighted sleep mask and it feels incredible when I, I don't know, maybe I just have a heavy head or something like that, but it feels, it feels good to wear a weighted sleep mask at night. I really appreciate it.

• 1:02:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  I have a competing sleep mask that I highly recommend. I'm trying to find it. It's in, I've emailed people about it a couple of times in my newsletter for gift guides. Okay. My favorite is called the WOW, Wawa Sleep Mask. W A

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  What do you like about it?

• 1:02:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  O A, W A O A W. I'll link to it in the show notes. It makes a lot of room. It's like very large and there's space for your eyes. So like your eyelashes and whatever eyes are pressed on. And it's just, it just fits really nicely around the head. And my wife, we both wear eye masks at night. It just, speaking of sleep, really helps us sleep.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love it.

• 1:02:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. It doesn't have the weight in this piece, so it might be worth trying, but everyone I've recommended this to is like, that changed my life. Thank you for helping me sleep better. And so we'll link to both of them. Look at that, sleep mask. Look at us. That adult. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to, share with friends or family, either in work or in life?

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've got it. It's on a post-it note that I write behind my, my camera and it's measure in hundreds. I love this idea of measuring things in hundreds. And it's for folks who are like at the beginning of some journey. I talk to people all the time. They're like, yeah, I've tried this thing and it hasn't worked. And if your mental model is to measure in hundreds, I measure in hundreds, the five times that you failed at something you failed and tried zero times. And I love that. It's like such a great reminder that Everything in life is like built on compounding and multiple attempts at stuff. And if you don't try enough times, like you're never going to be successful at it.

• 1:03:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that. I could see why you're successful at OpenAI and why you're a good fit there. Final question. So I asked, I asked ChatGPT for a very silly question. Give me a bunch of silly questions to ask Logan Kilpatrick, head of developer relations at OpenAI. And I went through a bunch. I have three here, but I'm going to pick one. If an AI started doing standup comedy, what do you think would be its go to joke or funny observation about humans?

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  I think today, I think if you, if you were to do this, like, I think the go to question would be something along like the, so an AI walks into a bar and, and likely because, again, it's trained on some distribution of training data. I'm like, that's like the most common joke that comes up. And that's probably like, I'm wondering if you came up with a joke right now, whether or not that would show up in, in one of the examples.

• 1:04:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love it. What would be the joke, though? We need the joke. We need the punchline. I'm just joking. I know you can't come up with amazing.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  That's what we have ChatGPT for.

• 1:04:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  We're already irrelevant. Amazing. Logan, thank you so much for being here. Two final questions, even though you've already shared this information, but just for folks to remind them, where can folks find you if they want to reach out and ask you more questions? And how can listeners be useful to you?

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, Twitter and LinkedIn, Logan Kilpatrick or logan.gpt on Twitter. Please, please shoot me messages. Like, I get a ton of DMs from people and it's always like really, really interesting stuff. I think the thing that I can, that I would love to have help on is like, if people find bugs and things that don't work well in ChatGPT, like I oftentimes like see people be like, ah, this thing didn't work really well. And the, the key, and I think we as OpenAI need to do a better job of like messaging this to people, but having like shared chats or like actual like tangible reproducible examples are like the two things that we need in order to like actually fix the problems that people have. Like the model laziness was a good example where it was kind of hard to. Figure out what was going on because people would be like, oh, the model's lazier.

• 1:05:40Speaker 00

  But like, it's hard to figure out like, what were the prompts they were using? What was the examples, all that stuff? So send those examples as you come up on things that don't work well and we'll, we'll make stuff better for you.

• 1:05:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. And I'll also just remind people, if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, okay, cool. A lot of cool ideas for OpenAI and ChatGPT. What you need to do is actually just go to chat, chat dot openai.com and try the stuff out. There's a lot of just like theorizing, but I think once you actually start doing it, you start to see things a little differently. And at this point in every day, I mean, they're doing something like asking for ideas or questions, doing research on a newsletter post. And it's just like a tab I'm always coming back to. And I know there's a lot of people just like talking about this sort of thing. And I just want to remind people, just like, go sign in, play with it, ask it questions on something you're working on and just see how it goes and keep, keep coming back to it. Is there anything else you want to share along those lines to inspire people to give this a shot?

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  I love it. I think that the phrase of like, you know, people being worried about humans being replaced by AI. And I've seen this narrative online that it's like, it's not AI that's going to replace humans. It's like other humans that are being augmented and like using AI tools that are like going to be more competitive in the job market and stuff like that. So go and try these AI tools. Like this is the best time to learn. Like you're going to be more productive and like empowered in your job and, and the things that you're excited about. So, um, yeah, excited to see what people use ChatGPT for.

• 1:07:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  And then you could expense your account. I think it's 10 or 20 bucks a month. A lot of companies are paying for this for you. So ask your boss if you can just have it expensed and make sure you use the latest version. Anyway, Logan, thank you again so much for being here.

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  This is awesome, Mike. Thanks for having me and thoughtful questions. Hopefully those weren't all from ChatGPT.

• 1:07:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Nope, only the last one. I did have a bunch of others I was, had in the, in the belt or in the pocket. I don't know if the metaphor is in the back pocket. That's the metaphor. But I did not get to them because we had enough great stuff. So, no, that was all me. Human AI.

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:07:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  Thanks, Logan.

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  Lenny.ai.

• 1:07:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  Lennybot.com. Check it out. Okay. Thanks, Logan. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.