Coatue Pt2. Open AI’s Kevin Weil Dives into All Things ChatGPT | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner

Open Source bi-weekly convo w/ Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner on all things tech, markets, investing & capitalism. This week, recording from the Coatue East Meets West stage, they welcome OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil to discuss all things OpenAI. Enjoy another episode of BG2! Show Notes: Coatue EMW 2025 Slides https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Srl8Y4pBoKtNVYZBxmfj2TEMYM5tp1mE/view Produced by Benny Beausoleil Music by Yung Spielberg Available on Apple, Spotify, www.bg2pod.com http://www.bg2pod.com Follow: Brad Gerstner @altcap https://x.com/altcap Bill Gurley @bgurley https://x.com/bgurley⁠ Kevin Weil @kevinweil https://x.com/kevinweil?lang=en BG2 Pod @bg2pod https://x.com/BG2Pod⁠

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

• 0:00Bill Gurley?

  You said today is the worst product for much you'll use today.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  The model that you use today is the worst AI model that you'll ever use for the rest of your life.

• 0:10Bill Gurley?

  Yeah.

• 0:23Brad Gerstner?

  Kevin, so you know, on this slide, in five years, as the ninth most valuable company in the world. Okay, so $300 billion in enterprise value today is measured by the markets. They have it going to 1.6 trillion. I remember when you joined OpenAI and I asked you the question, can OpenAI get to a trillion dollars? Right, in total value? And you said, that is, like, if I thought it was just a trillion dollars, I wouldn't be nearly as excited as I am about going to OpenAI. So when you just think about them.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  And by the way, less about market cap and

• 0:56Brad Gerstner?

  Right, right.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  You know, more about like the ambition and the opportunity and the impact.

• 1:00Brad Gerstner?

  Yeah, and so that's what I want you to do, just blue sky for us today. How long have you been at OpenAI now?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  About a year.

• 1:06Brad Gerstner?

  Okay, so you're a year into this. A year in, do you think the opportunity is bigger than you thought when you started? And walk, so explain, yeah, why?

• 1:16Bill Gurley?

  And if so, why do you think?

• 1:17Brad Gerstner?

  Talk us through that a little bit.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  I think it's, I think it's bigger for sure than I realized. I'm, I, I think it's been in Sam's head the whole time. So I don't, I'm not sure that there's been a revelation over the past year, but it's certainly opened my eyes.

• 1:31Bill Gurley?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  I mean, for one, I, we have grown faster than anything I've ever seen.

• 1:36Bill Gurley?

  Yeah.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  And I thought I had seen fast growth when I was at Instagram, for example.

• 1:42Bill Gurley?

  Yeah. And, and for those following at home on slide 24 in the deck, they show the user growth and we talked about it earlier, but it's just phenomenal.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so and as we've grown, we're also deepening usage with the platform. People are using it more. So just from that perspective, we're, I think, bigger today than I would have imagined.

• 2:05Bill Gurley?

  Walk people through that. They had a slide on that also. So, so, and you said some comments on stage about, you know, as people use it more, the minutes go up.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, we look at, we look at weekly active users. That's sort of the metric that we, that we goal ourselves by from a growth perspective. Obviously, a lot of other things that we look at as well, but, but from a weekly active user. The reason we do that versus monthly is we're actually, you know, we don't want someone that just comes. Once a month. Once a month. That doesn't, that means we're probably not adding all that much value in their life if they're coming once a month. And over time, I think it's going to be more natural for us to measure daily active users. Because really, if we're doing our job, then you're using ChatGPT on a daily basis and hopefully multiple times per day. Because it can help you multiple times per day with all the different things that you encounter in your life. There's sort of the, are you a monthly user? Are you a weekly user, a daily user?

• 2:57Speaker 01

  And then, you know, on a given day, how much time are you spending in the product? And you guys had a chart, your data, not ours, but, but that showed that people were using ChatGPT a whole lot more. You know, time in per day.

• 3:11Bill Gurley?

  Yeah.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  And that's awesome. That's super exciting. That just means that we're actually helping people solve problems and they're not just using it. You know, like you go back a couple of years when, when it launched. It was really good at various sorts of writing. If you're going to do copywriting, if you were going to, you know, have it summarize emails or things like that. And you look today and it's so much broader. It can help in so many other areas. People are uploading, you know, that, actually, my own son had a health thing. Yes. Had to have a minor surgery, which was not that big of a deal. At least it was not supposed to be that big of a deal. And, but there was a tiny chance that there was something more serious, you know? And so he has the surgery, he's eight. Yes. Next day, he's playing a soccer game.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  He doesn't know any better. Yes. But then we're still waiting for like the biopsy of this thing to come back. Yes. And we end up getting a, a, a paper in the mail, a letter in the mail. That has a whole bunch of like complex medical stuff on it. Right, right. I'm like, you know, halfway educated. I couldn't make sense of it. I didn't know what it means. And I called the doctor and I couldn't get ahold of her. She was in a surgery, I think.

• 4:21Bill Gurley?

  Right.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  You know, she's busy. He's got a million things going on. And I'm looking at this and there's a bunch of like scary looking medical terms.

• 4:27Bill Gurley?

  Yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  And so the first thing I do, of course, is take a picture of it, upload it to chat GPT and say, hey, should I be worried about this? And it comes back immediately. No, you're fine. This is like completely benign. Don't worry about it. You're you're all good. But I actually wasn't able to get ahold of the doctor for seventy two hours.

• 4:43Bill Gurley?

  Right.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  That would have been a really bad seventy two hours for me as a parent, sitting there stressing about this note that I can hardly read.

• 4:50Bill Gurley?

  What you're describing, you know, as someone who's gone from once a day to twenty times a day, like you. You learn what it can do. You learn the kinds of things it can do. Like you can take a photo of an appliance. And ask it how to set the clock or something like.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:10Bill Gurley?

  And so you you one of the reasons I think it expands is people come to understand all the the things it can do.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:19Bill Gurley?

  And all the kinds of prompts, you know, another one is like, like I used to do a Google search, go to a webpage, find a number. And then put that into a formula and multiply it on a calculator. It can just do all that.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:30Bill Gurley?

  Like you could say.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:32Bill Gurley?

  Go get this and and run this.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  And now you can connect it to your email and your docs and your calendar and it can start to be useful in so many other ways. This, you know, what you used to have to go search through twenty docs for. Now you can go just ask for answers. So it's just. It's so much more useful and I totally agree. The way to sort of understand it because it's also constantly evolving, right? The models get.

• 5:54Bill Gurley?

  Yes.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Step changes better every two or three months is you just start using it. You know, the the the number one advice I have for people when they like ask what they should do with chat GPT is just start using it. Because when you start using it for things and you you take, you know, little little tiny risks and try it for new things that you're not sure if it can do. You realize in most cases it can.

• 6:14Bill Gurley?

  Yeah.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  And then it just becomes more and more helpful to you over time. And I think the numbers reflect that.

• 6:18Bill Gurley?

  When you see, so you're running product, your goal is to drive engagement, drive utility, thrill your customers. So when.

• 6:27Brad Gerstner?

  Talk to us about the things you're actively doing to take somebody from a monthly to a weekly, from a weekly to a daily. I'm sure a lot of this is happening organically, as Bill describes, but I'm sure you're pressing on the flywheel. And then if we're at a billion monthlies today, like, how do you set a measure for success for you and your team? Right? Like, do you have a goal, a big audacious goal? I want to get to 2 billion in three years? Like, how are you thinking about that?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  We do less sort of mechanical things of how do I get a monthly to a weekly? It's more like we have an incredible research team, absolutely world-class research team, that's constantly iterating on models, making the models suddenly able to do things that computers have never been able to do before in the history of computers. And so we think a lot more about how do we how do we stay really tight with the research team? Because it's just this incredible nucleus of like creativity and discovery. And how do we stay really close to them so that we can constantly be building products just on the edge of what the models can do?

• 7:30Brad Gerstner?

  Right.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Because our feeling is if we're building just on the edge of what models can do, then we suddenly have this product that can do things that no one's ever seen a product do before. And even if it's not perfect right when it starts, because we tend to, we believe in iterative deployment. We release early, we release often. Like, better to make lots of small mistakes. And, you know, we kind of collectively as society, like, understand how, what AI is good at, what is bad at, how we work through it. We'd rather do that. And if you build a product that can do amazing things, even if it's only 70%, you know, right at that thing, in two or three months, the next model's going to come along and it's going to be 95% good at that thing. And all of a sudden, you know, you've got something great.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  But people, we've sort of brought everybody along with us and learned from them at the same time. Like, learn from the way that they're using it. So there's a, I think the The thing that we've really tried to get right, and we're not perfect at this, but I think we're a lot better than we used to be, is the really tight loop between research and product.

• 8:35Bill Gurley?

  Yes.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Because when we have that loop right and we're solving products, the problems that people have, feedback goes back to research, the research team goes, oh, it can't do that very well. Oh, we can fix that.

• 8:47Bill Gurley?

  Right.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  And then the product gets better and we have that, like, that's when magic happens.

• 8:51Bill Gurley?

  You said something prophetic on stage today and simple, but it really caught me. You said, you said, "Today is the worst product for us you'll use today."

• 9:03Speaker 01

  The model that you use today is the worst AI model that you'll ever use for the rest of your life.

• 9:09Bill Gurley?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Which is really, it's a simple thing and it's really kind of obviously true when you think about it. But it just changes the way you think about building products. Because I think if you think about it the right way, it makes you much more open to building products that only kind of work. You know, whether you're us building ChatGPT and other products, or whether you're an enterprise, you know, building some internal tool or,

• 9:32Speaker 01

  because if the model only, if a model can kind of do it, then it's going to be great at it in a few months.

• 9:38Bill Gurley?

  What things are you most excited about that are on the horizon?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  I'm really excited about the, in order for ChatGPT to be truly useful, you need to go from it just answering questions that you have to it actually doing things for you in the real world to like, you know, ideally even proactively, to understand the things that you're going to need to do and help you do them, or you know, suggest them queue up a bunch of actions for you before you even get there. That's why we've been really focused on adding things like connections into Google Docs and you know, the products and services that you use every day. We've been really focused on personalization and memory so that, you know, ChatGPT gets to know you and what your preferences are, how you like to interact with it.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  In my case, I've like made sure that it knows

• 10:30Speaker 01

  about my wife and what she does. You know, she's a seed investor. My kids, how old they are. Because then when I ask it, you know, "Hey, we have some free time. What should we go do? Or we're going to go on this trip," it doesn't just recommend random hotels. It recommends hotels that are that are great for my family.

• 10:47Bill Gurley?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  And that, you know, that kind of thing, each one is small. But it adds up.

• 10:52Brad Gerstner?

  Right.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  And especially if you think about getting proactive and, and, you know, really getting to know you and helping with something that is gonna, you're gonna realize you need to do four hours from now. Personalization is gonna be a big deal.

• 11:04Bill Gurley?

  No doubt. Well, one quick question on the, on the kind of interactivity between different apps. There was some kerfuffle last week, I think Salesforce changed their terms of service in a way that would make it more difficult for other people to, to build models. How do you, how do you think that's gonna play? Do you think people will put up walls or not? You know, will they be friendly with you, you know, running a widget on top of their app or not?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good question. I think we're gonna kind of feel our way there as a, as an industry, as a society. It's one of the reasons that we believe so much in iterative deployment, where we release early, release often. Cause AI is gonna change just about everything.

• 11:50Bill Gurley?

  Yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  It's gonna change the way the web works. It's gonna change the way we interact with services. It's gonna, you know, and we don't wanna do that unilaterally. We gotta, you know, I think the way to do this smoothly is to kind of iterate together on it.

• 12:02Bill Gurley?

  Total sense.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  And so, you know, the, we figure the more we release and put this stuff out in the world, the, the world, we all kind of get a sense, it's not like we know all the answers, right? We all kind of get a sense of where things are going and we can co-evolve in the right way.

• 12:16Bill Gurley?

  I want you to have access to my contacts, my address book, my email, my texts, my everything.

• 12:22Brad Gerstner?

  Yeah, and that's your data. You should be able to take it to whatever AI you wanna take your data to. You're paying for that data. Well, on those lines, Kevin, like one of the things that Bill and I have talked a lot about on this pod is our concern about kind of like regulatory capture, regulatory intervention. Folks who are alarmist and saying this is dangerous, we need to slow it down, we need to, you know, we need to really regulate it. And along those same lines, you know, like whether or not we're gonna have open source models or every model is going to be closed. It seems to me that OpenAI has been on this journey over the course of, let's call it the last year or two. Where there was a belief, I think, that OpenAI was in the,

• 13:05Brad Gerstner?

  you know, go to Washington and regulate everything and kind of slow it down. And now I think it's like more clear, the distinction that's being drawn. OpenAI is talking about launching an open source model here shortly. You seem to be in the camp of, you know, it's too early to regulate. Get out there, accelerate, make sure that we distribute around the world. And America's models are doing well. Is that a fair characterization, you think, of where OpenAI is today?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  I think no matter what, it's important to be engaging, right? Like, like I said, this is a, AI is going to change everything. And we gotta, I think we do better when we co-evolve. And so, and it's one of the reasons I was saying earlier, like, people should just be trying the models. I think the same is true of our, of our lawmakers and folks like that. They should be just like getting to use AI. You start using it and you're like, oh, this isn't so scary. This is helpful.

• 13:59Brad Gerstner?

  Right.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  And you understand the nuances. You understand what it's good at, what it's not good at.

• 14:02Brad Gerstner?

  Right.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  You get a sense for how it's improving. I think that's really important, like context really matters. So that's, you know, that's one of the things we do when we're in DC is part of it is just like getting together and kind of giving people a sense of, here's where it is today and here's where we think it's going.

• 14:18Brad Gerstner?

  Right.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  So that people can make informed decisions.

• 14:20Brad Gerstner?

  I don't know if you read Sam Altman's blog that was out this week called The Gentle Singularity. I would encourage everybody to actually go read it. And it's this idea, Bill, that it's not this scary thing that, you know, all of a sudden is going to show up, which I think a lot of people were thinking about with AGI, that there was going to be this moment that everything was going to change.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:41Brad Gerstner?

  Sam's like, the world has already changed dramatically over the course of the last 24 months. But people aren't, you know, it's not changed that much about our daily lives. We just switched from using Google to get 10 blue links to using ChatGPT to get answers to our questions. I'm now uploading my blood test information to ChatGPT because I want it to tell me things that are useful about it.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:03Brad Gerstner?

  I still am at the point where I find those things pretty extraordinary.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:06Brad Gerstner?

  I can't believe that it can do these things and that I'm getting it for next to free. But it has come, that level of profound change has come without that big of like, you know, societal disruption. Yeah. And I, you know, I think we definitely are in the camp that it is way too early to obstruct American AI with, you know, useless regulations. Like, we don't even know what we should be regulating. It's like regulating the auto industry, right? Out of existence early. It took us 40 years to realize we needed seat belts and airbags and that we needed speed limits and things like that. And we'll need all those things for AI. But I think it's way too early to be doing that.

• 15:51Brad Gerstner?

  And so it's been a welcome, I think, development on our end to see, you know, OpenAI increasingly vocal about the need to make sure that, you know, we stay open and we stay.

• 16:03Bill Gurley?

  Kevin, one thing you, and I know you didn't give any specifics, but I think you had a question from the audience about the hardware device. And you did share some philosophical thoughts. I think the audience would be thrilled to hear what you said earlier.

• 16:18Brad Gerstner?

  This is about the acquisition of Johnny Ive's, you know, business and what you guys intend to do in hardware.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, I just said, and I think this is just true of hardware as it is of software, just that AI is going to change everything about the way that we do our jobs, the way that we, you know, get our, get stuff done in our personal lives. And I think basically every product, service, device, et cetera, that we use will be, will need to be reinvented.

• 16:48Brad Gerstner?

  Yes.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  And that doesn't mean that the incumbents can't reinvent it. I think sometimes they will.

• 16:52Brad Gerstner?

  Right.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  But I don't, I doubt in every case they will. Certainly, history doesn't tell us that that would be true. And so I think that means there's a huge opportunity for reinvention. And that's, that's an opportunity for us in places where we think we can play a role, where we think we have a perspective, we'll go compete. It also means great opportunities for startups.

• 17:13Brad Gerstner?

  Yes.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  And by the way, I do think it means good opportunities for incumbents if they can move quickly and sort of overcome the innovator's dilemma. That's a really hard thing to do.

• 17:22Bill Gurley?

  No doubt.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  So I just think if you look at the, the products that you spend your time in on a daily basis and compare it to, you know, five years from now. I think they're gonna be dramatic.

• 17:34Bill Gurley?

  Is there any, are you allowed to share any time window where we might find out more?

• 17:39Speaker 01

  You'll have to find out.

• 17:41Bill Gurley?

  Okay.

• 17:42Brad Gerstner?

  You know, we, we had you do a flyby today. We're gonna have you come on the pod and we'll do a full-blown podcast together.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Sounds good.

• 17:49Brad Gerstner?

  We're here celebrating the 10th anniversary of East Meets West.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:53Brad Gerstner?

  We were saying earlier, it's an event that we all look forward to go, to coming to. I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you this final question, kind of big picture. They forecasted out five years, right? Like what, what's possible for, for OpenAI? Skip the time window, whether it's three years or five years or seven years. What's your degree of confidence that, given the value that OpenAI and ChatGPT is delivering into the world? And we haven't even got into really enterprise and everything you're doing with enterprise. You just announced a big deal with the government, the Defense Department, et cetera. What's your level of confidence that you guys will reach 100 billion of revenue in the future? And kind of be that, you know, AI-defining company?

• 18:38Brad Gerstner?

  Because at, at 100 billion in revenue, it seems to me that this company could be on a path to being the most valuable company in the world, right? Five to 10 trillion dollar business in the fullness of time, which frankly would not surprise me for the winner in the age of AI. Right? The winner in consumer and a big company in enterprise. But now you've been here a year, right? You joined something that you thought was going to be the biggest thing of your career. You've been at extraordinary, large and successful companies. What's your level of confidence?

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Look, I think the opportunity is all there in front of us. I've said like three times now how I think AI is gonna change everything.

• 19:14Bill Gurley?

  Everything.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  And the path is there and it's up to us to execute.

• 19:18Brad Gerstner?

  Yeah.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  It's why, I mean, this place, OpenAI moves faster than any company I've ever worked at in my life.

• 19:24Bill Gurley?

  Wow.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  And I thought I had worked at places that move pretty fast.

• 19:27Bill Gurley?

  That's a big.

• 19:27Brad Gerstner?

  Twitter, Instagram.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:29Bill Gurley?

  That's a big extraordinary.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Nothing, nothing compares. I think it's, you know, we have amazing people on the team. We really try and, and push decision-making and responsibility down into the teams. I think in an AI world, you need to do that.

• 19:42Bill Gurley?

  Yeah.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  The IMLs are so new, you don't top down know all of the capabilities. You see them kind of coming through the mist. And we're better at finding all of the opportunities when we have a lot of smart people thinking about what they can do with the model in their area. And ditto, by the way, publicly, it's why we release early and often. We try and get it in people's hands because then they also get a chance to figure out what the models can be. So I have a lot of confidence in us. We got to execute. Like, we've got to be on top of our game because we have a very serious set of competitors and that's real. But, but man, I like. All right. I think we can do it.

• 20:21Brad Gerstner?

  It's also like, I just feel good. Like, when you look at this team, you, Sarah, Fiji, Greg Brockman, Sam, et cetera. It's such, even though the company's small, Bill, it's an extraordinarily deep bench of talented people who've done this in other places. Not only does it come down to execution as investor, like, I of course want them to succeed as an investor, but in terms of defining the company that's going to do the right things in this moment, I feel good to have this company in the lead because, you know, these are great people that I think are going to do the right things. And so it's great to have you helping lead the way.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  You're nice to say it. I think, you know, we tend to get unfair, the people that you named, you know, I'm beyond excited for Fiji to start, all the other people you named, like, we tend to get unfair amounts of credit. It's, I could give you 100 names of the people that are doing the real work and are like actually the reason OpenAI is successful. And, you know, hopefully we can tell their stories over time, too.

• 21:19Brad Gerstner?

  We will. All right. Thanks for being here.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Hey, Matt. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Yeah.

• 21:32Brad Gerstner?

  As a reminder to everybody, just our opinions, not investment advice.