OpenAI DevDay | Sam Altman, Alexander Embiricos, Andrew Ambrosino, Peter Steinberger, Tibo Sottiaux, Kath Korevec, Casey Neistat

(09:00) - Sam Altman discusses how increasingly capable AI agents can simplify work and daily life while fostering an open ecosystem for developers. He also addresses OpenAI’s startup culture, expanding computing infrastructure, simplified model selection, rapid experimentation, and the unresolved scientific challenge of aligning superintelligent AI. (25:17) - Alexander Embiricos, an OpenAI product leader, discusses “dots,” proactive AI agents designed to act as personal delegates across workplace tools. He explains how personal and specialist dots can autonomously handle tasks, support individuals and enterprises, and make advanced AI more accessible through flexible interfaces and integrations. (41:54) - Andrew Ambrosino discusses leading OpenAI’s Codex desktop and Space teams and unifying Codex’s agentic capabilities with ChatGPT. He highlights cloud and local-machine integration, collaborative AI workspaces, dynamic interfaces, faster models, and OpenAI’s iterative, feedback-driven product development. (54:27) - Peter Steinberger discusses founding OpenClaw and pioneering personal AI agents that can proactively operate computers, use tools, and coordinate complex tasks. He explores agent-driven software development, changing online services, and a future where AI reshapes operating systems, commerce, and human workflows. (01:16:22) - Tibo Sottiaux discusses his work leading AI agent development at OpenAI, including Dots, Codex, and advances in computer use. He explains how persistent agents can learn users’ preferences, securely perform specialized organizational tasks, share long-term memory, and automatically balance speed, cost, and reasoning effort. (01:33:41) - Kath Korevec discusses her work as an OpenAI product manager for ChatGPT Sites, which reached 10 million sites within three months of launch. She highlights personal and professional uses, collaborative features within Spaces, new integrations and plugins, and plans to expand access to free users. (01:41:50) - Casey Neistat discusses his perspective as a filmmaker, YouTube pioneer, and ModRetro executive on retro technology, AI-assisted creativity, and the value of simple, purpose-built devices. He argues that AI will democratize game and video creation while human taste, expertise, and curation remain essential amid a growing flood of content. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TBPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Tuesday, September 29th, 2026. We are live from OpenAI Dev Day 2026.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  We're very excited to be here.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful day.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  Beautiful day in San Francisco. We don't get up here nearly enough, but what a fantastic day to be here. A bunch of interesting launches, a bunch of guests from OpenAI joining us. We have Sam Altman joining us in just about 10 minutes.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  Bunch of friends here. Amazing opportunity. If you're here, walk in the background.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  And get a screenshot of it. We'll get a little picture together. I see Jeff from Stripe over here hanging out. We're live, Jeff. We're talking about you. Great to see you. Come in the background. This is Mr. Agentic Payments over here.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  Captain Agentic Payments. We're live. Jeff, you're live. We're live. We just started. Anyways, we'll get back to the show. There we go. Anyways, having a lot of fun here.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  Great group. Before we get into a bunch of great guests, we should talk about the news. Anything going on?

• 0:58John Coogan?

  Well, there's Ramp, Time is Money, say both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Always a good chance to tell people about Ramp. The headline on Dev Day, just to kind of set the table. 2,500 attendees. It's been four years in a row now. 20 launches today. I think the number might be higher depending on how you slice them up. And the big numbers that they put on stage. ChatGPT is now used by more than 1.2 billion people every week. Over 35 million people build with ChatGPT working codex every week. And the big launch was personal AI agents, Dots, but also ChatGPT Spaces, GPT 6.1 Soul and a bunch of other stuff around sites, codex and work that we will get into.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  But let's take people through some of the other stories that we should cover. I'm sure we'll be covering this more tomorrow as well.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  We start with Aura loss, John?

• 1:50John Coogan?

  You want to go straight there?

• 1:51Jordi Hays?

  Let's get straight into it.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  There's so many other stories.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  Some unfortunate news. The Aura IPO seems to be taking a pause or a bit of a slowdown.

• 2:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. The headline is "Smart Ring Maker Aura Delays IPO Due to Market Uncertainty." Joe Weisenthal isn't really buying it. He says the S&P 500 is up 12% this year and companies are delaying their IPOs due to market conditions. I saw some commentary on this saying that their IPO was oversubscribed by 4.4X. That sounds great. The historical average is, I think, like 2.5X, something like that. So why'd they pull it? That's confusing. I talked to some of other folks who said, no, in more recent eras, you've seen IPOs go out at 10X oversubscribed, 15X oversubscribed.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  I think Figma was something like 30 or 40.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  It was a crazy, crazy multiple. Yeah. And also, I believe this IPO was going to be pure secondary. And so...

• 2:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not like they need the cash.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so it was more of like a marketing and excitement, a key moment for the company. It wasn't a necessary financing round right now. And so they can pull back and keep building.

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  So on one hand, amazing product.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  Have managed to have relatively little competition in the ring category despite much broader competition in wearables.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  It seems like it's a great business. I think investors generally are going to be a little apprehensive to own a name that is, in any other decade was at scale, but now feels like subscale relative to some of the other action.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:28Jordi Hays?

  In the market. And so I'm sure they'll be back. But yeah, unfortunate news.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Are there any rumors of direct competition from the bigger companies like Apple or Meta?

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. This always felt like something that Apple should have bought.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  Totally. Or competed with. I mean, a lot of... They didn't buy Pebble. They just launched the Apple Watch, but they did very well in that category.

• 3:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  But maybe it's just subscale.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  In many ways, it feels like it would be so, make a lot more sense than, let's say, like a Beats by Dre to just like fit in to the whole Apple ecosystem.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:59Jordi Hays?

  Right away. They could, you know, it almost doesn't need to be even reskinned, right? It feels like it fits into the ecosystem already. So...

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Also, they are facing a bunch of competition from ring makers and device makers that are more AI forward, like they have a microphone on them. But that feels like an easy...

• 4:15Jordi Hays?

  Very unclear if people actually really need or want that yet.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  Oh, true, true. You think that's why they're moving slower on it? Is that they...

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, I don't think, I think a lot of people, I think if they came out and said, "We're adding a microphone to your ring," a lot of people would be like, "You're getting, you're collecting enough of my data."

• 4:29John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  "I don't need a microphone to be healthy."

• 4:30John Coogan?

  "You already have my heart rate and blood oxygen levels."

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, some other commentary here over on X says the Nasdaq hit an all-time high seven days ago. So basically saying like, "Look, it's probably less market uncertainty and more of a disconnect between what investors would pay and where they want to price."

• 4:47John Coogan?

  They were looking to raise as much as 2.2 billion in the IPO, which had drawn about four times as many orders as there were shares available. Or is the highest profile firm to date to delay its offering. And they list out a couple others. The stock market, meanwhile, has broadly held up over the past few weeks despite the 10-year Treasury yields reaching their highest levels since 2007 now. It's up more today. There's a quote here from Joe Saluzzi. "I wouldn't say we're in a market that's scary, so this is a bit surprising. This isn't a market I would be scared of if I was IPO-ing."

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  I can handle the, I can handle the market uncertainty.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  This guy's just like, I don't know what they got, what they're fearing.

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  No, but again, like there's always, there's always a price that is clear.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  And clearly, they'd rather, you know, the bankers and the team would rather sit it out and just get it done at their price when they're ready.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  So for Runner and Lifeline, we're going to offer 36.5 million shares. Aura is planning to sell 13.5 million shares. And so those venture funds will have to wait to recycle the capital, I suppose.

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  Another news, Long Lake completed their acquisition of Amex Global Business Travel.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  How much did they pay?

• 5:58Jordi Hays?

  6.3 billion.

• 6:00John Coogan?

  And they have like thousands of employees now or something like that?

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  Up to 30,000 employees across the company. Never, never have done a, like a riff at any of the companies. They're actually growing headcount. So again, more data that shows if you're actually applying AI well, you can actually grow.

• 6:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  Grow your payroll.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah. The other, the other big story, at least in the AI world, is that AMD sets $8 billion deal for AI research company. Of course, AMD bought World Labs, the Neo Lab, I suppose is the term, from Fei Fei Li. AMD agreed to acquire artificial intelligence research firm World Labs in all-stock deal valued at about 8.2 billion. An acquisition that reflects chipmaker's ambitions to control more of the AI stack. AMD, a semiconductor company, that recently touched a trillion-dollar valuation, said the deal would bring leading AI research and development talent

• 6:57John Coogan?

  and help the company develop better AI hardware, software and systems, especially for the growing field of physical AI and robotics. So I...

• 7:05Jordi Hays?

  Big moment. Big moment for Fei Fei and the whole team.

• 7:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  Like I think, I think it's very, I'm super excited to see what they do at AMD. I wonder how much they'll continue to focus on exactly what they've been doing to date.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  I mean, once...

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  Massive moment, massive moment for Andreessen Horowitz. Another, you know, multi-billion dollar acquisition after Cursor and OpenRack.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  The apology for him.

• 7:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He filled out, he filled out the apology form. Credit to him. But yeah, big, big moment. And yeah, it was always, Fei Fei and the team are incredibly impressive.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  It always felt, it was still, no matter how much I got explained, this sort of like near-term strategy, I never understood exactly how it would translate into billions of dollars of revenue today.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, people would say robotic training data, you simulate a world and then the robot can interact with it. And that's synthetic data for training humanoids or any robotic system. The more near-term one was you could sort of see the progression of world models to a point where you could create a video game on the fly and have all of the generation and all of the world creation happen on the fly with just a new technology. And you would see, you know, companies potentially license that technology, like people pay Unreal Engine to, you know, host or develop their games on top of. There was something that was happening there with consistency. Google has a product as well.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  But yeah, they were, there still hasn't been that like ChatGPT moment for adoption of world models, really. But...

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And you can imagine this is like a, like a future-facing bet.

• 8:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:45Jordi Hays?

  As in, hey, let's make a much bigger play into, into robotics.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Jensen, yeah, yeah. I mean, Jensen's been doing some more stuff with world models.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  Open source. We have Sam Altman joining for the third time. Welcome to the show.

• 8:59Jordi Hays?

  Man of the hour.

• 8:59John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 9:00Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  Congratulations. We're going to have you throw that headset on. Welcome to the show.

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for having me.

• 9:06John Coogan?

  How is Dev Day 2026 going?

• 9:07Jordi Hays?

  People seem very happy.

• 9:08John Coogan?

  I think they are. What were you doing 20 years ago?

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh... John knows if you... No, I was like working on a little startup.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  Didn't Loop launch 20 years ago, basically today?

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  That's incredible if that's accurate.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think September of 2006 was the launch. And I was thinking about it because, you know, as we enter the moment of personal agents, like a lot, there's obviously work applications, but a lot of the demos that I've seen people talk about are things that feel aligned to the original Looped vision. It's like, if my friends are in town, let's plan a barbecue, let's order the food, let's go to the restaurant, let's get the reservation. And I'm wondering, is this a full circle moment for you?

• 9:50Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting. It didn't feel like that until right when you said it. Now I guess it sort of is.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I'm wondering how you have been using Dots, how you think this will actually instantiate itself into people's lives. It's so easy to lean into the work side, but this feels like a reinvigorating moment for OpenAI as a consumer company.

• 10:09Jordi Hays?

  Look, sadly, all I do these days is work, so I've mostly been using it, and I hang out with my family. This is really the only two. But I have mostly been using it for work and it is amazing for that. And I feel like it has gotten me back like my attention and time and ability to like explore and do new things. And I love it for that.

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  I have not yet figured out how to like go use this to have more fun in my personal life, but I'm inspired to go do that.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  But you're, yeah, you're optimistic that people will ultimately do that. I feel like, you know, OpenAI has been called like the accidental consumer company.

• 10:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  And at the same time, the vision seems to be like actually get AI in the hands of people. And maybe let's not end up in a future where that means everyone working 24/7, right?

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  100%. I...

• 10:55Sam Altman?

  You know, I think the world's always confused when we talk about AI about whether we want or worried people are gonna have to work too much or too little.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:00Sam Altman?

  But I think it's great to give people like more time to hang out with their kids, do their hobbies, work on creative new projects. I think most people actually want that, and I really feel it with us.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:10Sam Altman?

  So I, yeah, I think people are gonna get that.

• 11:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. What has the last, I mean, the last time we talked was a couple of months ago, or maybe more than six months ago on the show. It's been a wild time. Like, a lot of things have gone right, it seems. The, there's some numbers that leaked today, but it seems like some things changed. How do you tell the story of the last six months or so?

• 11:37Sam Altman?

  I mean, I think the answer is it's all just one jagged exponential that keeps going, and probably the next six months will be even crazier.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Sam Altman?

  The, the technology has been capable for a while. It's clearly gotten much more capable. But it takes a while for a technology like this to diffuse through society. And I think in the last six months, people are using it much more. And now with these sort of always-on agents, I think people will again go through a period where they're like, wow, I can really use this in all kinds of ways. And this is like a significant new thing in my life that's helping me.

• 12:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, so is this a moment to sort of like pay down the capability overhang right now?

• 12:17Sam Altman?

  You know, when you were talking about how, you know, you can use this to like do the stuff that we were talking, thinking about 20 years ago and like book a restaurant and, you know, coordinate with my friends, I was kind of like laughing in my head because I was like, yes, you can do that, but it can also like solve the greatest unsolved problems that can be. And so the delta in capability between, you know, some of the stuff we're talking about now and what these models are so smart.

• 12:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:40Sam Altman?

  Can do is just gonna take us a while to figure all that out.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. What have you learned this year about the sequence of events? I was shocked by, if you had told me that there was gonna be Hugging Face and then Navier-Stokes, and then after that, I saw the first person said, I used ChatGPT to book me a haircut. I would have not predicted that those things happened in that order. Like, I maybe would have predicted that they all happen in the future.

• 13:03Sam Altman?

  Yeah.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  But I would have predicted, we get the haircut first, and, and I'm wondering if you've learned anything about not just predicting the future, but the sequence of events?

• 13:13Sam Altman?

  I mean, one of the obvious things is just people want their lives to be a little easier.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Sam Altman?

  And actually, I think more people are interested in just their lives being a little bit less hectic, a little easier than they are in whatever Navier-Stokes can do for them, or at least their direct experience.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 13:29Sam Altman?

  So, but I think the cool thing about this is that models that are this capable are going to be applied to make people's lives better in big and small ways, in ways that we can't even really imagine today. And, you know, I think the fact that we all talk about haircuts and booking haircuts is like a, it's a failure of imagination, but the way it gets corrected is all these people here.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 13:51Sam Altman?

  Like, as I've had a little bit of time today to talk to what people are building here, like, I am amazed at the creative spirit of what people are building for each other with this technology. And I think it's been, I think it's been one of the greatest surprises of the last six months is seeing like just how far people are pushing the developer tools to build this amazing new stuff.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Jordi Hays?

  Talk about some of the new functionality, being able to log in with ChatGPT and basically bring compute with you anywhere across the internet. Because to me, that was, that was, there was a bunch of great moments earlier, but to me, the moment that stood out is imagining as an independent developer that has been sort of held back by their ability to scale cool products because, hey, I can't just start losing $20,000 a day serving free users.

• 14:37Sam Altman?

  I think it's so important to build an open ecosystem here, and we want people to take, well, to bring whatever they want into ChatGPT, run other apps there, but also to take their subscription and go use it elsewhere. And any harness you want, any service you want, like, this is, I have been disappointed to see other companies with AI subscriptions go in the other direction. Like, this is a thing you buy, and you should be able to take it with you anywhere, and you should be able to go use all of the wonderful things these people are building. And I think we're gonna push that much further.

• 15:05John Coogan?

  How do you think about the potential transition from OpenAI's products being very pole-focused, as, as, I mean, like, the app is there, unless I come to it with a question with a prompt, it doesn't do anything, to a world where my dot might message me? And then you get into, how much is it messaging me? How much is it pulling me in? What are the retention? There's, there's a lot of potential risks with that, right?

• 15:33Sam Altman?

  It, yeah, I mean, and there's clearly ways that people could misuse or growth hack the fact that AIs can, you know, ping you a lot.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Sam Altman?

  I'm sure we'll see some companies get that wrong. We're gonna try very hard to not do that. But I, my own experience over the last few weeks is I actually want more. Like, I think we've tuned the dial a little too conservatively for now. And the fact that everything my dot sends me is something I want means I think there's something still left on the table. But I can easily see how this goes around in the other direction, and we'll have to figure out we're gonna navigate that.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'll often open ChatGPT and realize there's like a very important email that I need to respond to. And like, I didn't, it somehow like got mixed up, and, and then you're like, you kind of wish it pinged you, right? What can you say, any, any advice for, let's say, public company CEOs that wanna maintain a startup's culture at scale? Because that's something like, you know, OpenAI is still a private company, but the impression of seeing how this company works is that it's not just like, yeah, we act like a startup at scale, like, it's actually like that. It's like incredibly scrappy, it's very small groups of people trying to do the impossible on impossible timelines.

• 16:47Jordi Hays?

  And something that, something that you're doing is, is working because it allows this like incredible velocity. It's not just the models.

• 16:55Sam Altman?

  Someone said to me a few days ago that joined OpenAI somewhat recently and had been at a big kind of slowish public company before, was that the key is to have the work and expectations per person go up over time. And the way that big companies go wrong is there's too many people with not enough to do, and they kind of like fight each other over like these fake levels of work. And if everybody is really busy with real impact, and there's the, the amount of work per person and stuff to do per person keeps increasing, then you can fight the like slow drag and politics of the big company.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  On the flip side of that, I feel like there's a lot of companies that are going through sort of a slopification, and they're fighting slop grenades. I've, I've wondered if the, like, the correct KPI is maybe we should all be producing the same amount of words in our emails?

• 17:46Sam Altman?

  Yeah.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  And it's okay if, if AI is involved, but you don't just wanna take every text message and turn it into a 20-page document, right?

• 17:52Sam Altman?

  Um, we fight super hard against the slop grenade.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:56Sam Altman?

  And the many slop grenades. And I think just like very strong cultural norms.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:02Sam Altman?

  That if you are writing something, and then you are having ChatGPT expand it, and then somebody else is gonna have it, ChatGPT summarize it back to your bullet points.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:10Sam Altman?

  The right answer is to just send the bullet points.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  Send the bullet points.

• 18:13Sam Altman?

  Yeah.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've told some people, just send me the prompt, and I can, I can expand it myself in my mind sometimes. How are you thinking about compute these days? There's so many different, you know, battles and different markets across consumer and enterprise. What is the plan for the next couple of years?

• 18:28Sam Altman?

  To build a lot more compute.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:30Sam Altman?

  One, one thing that OpenAI has that doesn't get as much attention is our chip program.

• 18:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:35Sam Altman?

  Which will start to come online in the first half of next, of 2027, and will scale a lot in future years.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:41Sam Altman?

  I think gives us a huge inference advantage for whatever, for whatever like watts we can find.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 18:46Sam Altman?

  In the world. And given the growth and demand we are seeing across consumer, developer, enterprise, really everywhere, and to say nothing of, like, people are gonna love dots, and then they're gonna say, well, can I have 10 dots, or 20 dots, or 100 dots, or whatever? We will have to make more efficient models, more efficient chips, and figure out how to build a lot more infrastructure.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  How do you see the user experience across the different models, the different cost and speed parameters being vended to the actual end user? Is that something you wanna maintain forever because developers love hearing about 6.1 Sol in ultra-fast mode? Or are there consumers, you know, I noticed Dots doesn't have.

• 19:25Sam Altman?

  Yeah.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  A model picker.

• 19:27Sam Altman?

  I think people are really tired of the model picker and the like model, you know, what it like this model, that model. Like, we wanna find a way to really simplify that. Like, the dream is that there is a single model, and it kind of makes great decisions for you, and you can maybe turn a speed dial when you really need it and a cost dial when you don't. But, you know, we were talking about like models that can book haircuts versus solve Navier-Stokes. I think this model should be able to figure out a lot of the trade-offs, and we should be able to do a good job with routing. I think we'll always offer choice to developers.

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sometimes you wanna drive a Ferrari to the grocery store.

• 20:02Sam Altman?

  Sometimes you do. So I think we'll always offer that choice, but most of the time you don't.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:07Sam Altman?

  You know, most of the time it's the minivan to the grocery store in the Ferrari at the track, and the model should like be able to make that smoother.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:13Jordi Hays?

  Do you feel like you have more or less clarity around the future than you did a decade ago? Because when, again, I always, I always encourage people to look back at, at your blog in the sort of 2015, 2016 era, because there was a bunch of things that you and, and other people that were writing at the time just like pretty much nailed entirely. And I go through life now, knowing that there's people out there that have like very accurate predictions around the future, and sometimes there's an incentive to share, sometimes there isn't. But, but how do you think about your own forecasting ability?

• 20:46Sam Altman?

  It's nice of you to say that. There's like plenty of things I was wrong about too.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Sam Altman?

  Like, you know, I try to leave the wrong predictions up, obviously.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Sam Altman?

  But I think the important point is like, you get some things right, some things wrong. I think we'll be very right about some things. I think we'll be very right that intelligence continues. I think we'll be very right about the rate of scientific discovery. I think we'll be very right about how people.

• 21:10Sam Altman?

  Kind of are gonna have the same things that they care about and drives in their lives 10 years from now they have from today. And even with this like amazing intelligence, a lot of parts of life are gonna stay the same. But then a lot of the details and kind of what order science goes in or whether it's, you know, haircuts or hugging face or Naveen Stokes first, I'm sure we'll be wrong about.

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  It feels like that the leadership skill or basically having the mentality of a venture investor and somebody that's made a bunch of very long-term bets makes people very well-suited for today in the sense that having that openness to if I get three things out of 10 right and I get them really right, then that's great. Like it sort of pays for all the other bets.

• 21:51Sam Altman?

  One of the things that I think is coolest about this new generation of people building with AI is you can try something so quickly and so cheaply that if you have, if you are a developer and you have 30 ideas, the canonical advice that was correct two years ago is pick one and put all of your effort into it because you can't build 30 things. You can now build all 30 things and you can get people to use them all. And then you can work more on the ones that work. So I think this mindset of lots of ideas, quick feedback and be open to a lot of things not working is great for this new era of how people build.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  I have one more question that we want to get you to hit the gong. On alignment, you've been deep in the weeds, I'm sure. There was a debate I saw, is it an engineering problem? Is it a science problem? Is there a different frame of mind that we should be approaching alignment with?

• 22:40Sam Altman?

  I think it's like all of those things, but it's certainly incorrect to talk about this only as an engineering problem. Anyone who says we have solved the science of alignment, I believe is wrong in a very dangerous way. Like, we need to make more research progress. I assume we will. We have been great at making this research progress. And of course, there's a lot of engineering work to do too. You know, we need to continue to figure out how to build better sandboxes and better monitoring tools. But eventually, if we are going to create models that are like much, much smarter than all of us, we have to actually solve the science of alignment.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  Have we considered moving away from the term sandbox? Because I have a five-year-old, if I put him in a sandbox, he's not gonna stay there. I think we might need a new term.

• 23:20Sam Altman?

  My kid unfortunately will just stay in the sandbox.

• 23:21John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Okay, so maybe, yeah, but, you know.

• 23:24Sam Altman?

  Different alignment. But yes, no, I think it's not a great term.

• 23:28Jordi Hays?

  Hold this up, John.

• 23:29Sam Altman?

  How do I do this?

• 23:30Jordi Hays?

  Just however you want, just with bigger.

• 23:33Sam Altman?

  I just like bang it?

• 23:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, bang it. There we go.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  There you go, with authority.

• 23:36Sam Altman?

  Thanks for having me on.

• 23:37John Coogan?

  We'd love for you to sign this as big as possible. Big signature right there on the gong. Thank you. This is going in the museum of business at the TBP and Ultra Dome. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 23:48Sam Altman?

  Thanks for having me. Great to see you. Thank you.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  Congratulations on a great Dev Day. We will move on to our next guest. We have a few more hopping on the show. We have Alexander Ambarikos jumping on in just a minute. We will sit with him on all things Codex. We need a slop grenade button.

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  Being able to...

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Oh, that's banned in the chat. That's great.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  We could sort of simulate that. If we have a remote, you know, remote guest on, we could say, hey, check out, I have an idea, I have an idea for you. What do you think of this? And then you throw like a six-page PDF at that.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. I was thinking a slop grenade would be like you go full back to Nickelodeon slime, and when you push the button, it just slams Tyler with it and he just keeps covering slop. I think that's the one we gotta go. I don't know if it's...

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow. Look at, look over here. You got a crowd chasing Sam around.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  They want more tokens.

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  Gotta be careful with this signed gong.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Yes. Oh, yeah, that's a hot commodity.

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  Over in Washington, CNBC reporter was trying and failing to interview tech CEOs at the White House. Alex Karp just took the microphone out of his hand and started asking them his own questions.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  No, he's literally, they're doing like a man on the street interview and just Karp took the wheel.

• 25:10John Coogan?

  That's, yeah, that's great. Well, there's more stories. We'll get to those in just a few minutes. But let's bring on Alexander. Welcome to the show. We're gonna have you throw that headset on. Do you need anything to drink? This is warmer water. Okay.

• 25:23Alexander Embiricos?

  Hey, guys. Good to see you.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  Welcome back to the show. Always great to see you. How is this Dev Day for you?

• 25:29Alexander Embiricos?

  I mean, apart from the outage, excellent.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Wait, outage, global outage going on or?

• 25:36Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, yeah. We had a bit of an outage during the demos. Like, you know, I haven't like deeply read up on what exactly happened, but like because we launched 6.1 Sol, it just immediately got hammered. We did that.

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. That's a lesson. That's like the Meta Connect last year. Boz accidentally set off like the key, the...

• 25:55John Coogan?

  Keyword. He basically said like, the wake word.

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  The wake word, but every device in the whole space started going off and then crashed everything. So.

• 26:03Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah. Positive framing is a champagne problem. But broadly, this Dev Day, I'm so excited. Like, when I joined the company like a little over two years ago, like this moment is the moment I've been looking forward to the entire time. You know, like we had this chat, we invented that paradigm. It was awesome, informational, couldn't do things for you. Okay. Then we had coding agents, agents that could do things. Awesome. That's the next level. But you still have to like really babysit it and figure out like, what am I gonna ask this agent to do? And so we're finally at the stage where I can go to someone and say, hey, if you want to do something manually, do it with Codex. If you want to delegate it, go use a dot, right? And this dot, it has your back. It figures out how to help you. It just helps you get so much more value out of this. So for me, like I've been, I've been looking forward to this for years.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Does it feel like?

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's the same, it's the same, sorry to jump in, but it's the same dynamic of like if you had a bunch of, if you basically had a bunch of people on your team that would just sort of flag information, but then not take any action. They're like, hey, this thing is happening. And you're like, okay, like, why don't you do something about it?

• 26:59Alexander Embiricos?

  Listen, I like that. But I would actually say like Codex is actually more like a principal engineer, but who doesn't like initially, unless you tell them exactly to do it, doesn't read like linear or like doesn't check Slack. And so the super smart principal engineer, but you know, you have to make sure you sort of give it the right instructions. Whereas a dot, it's like you have that principal engineer because your dot has its own computer, can do anything that you can do on a computer in the cloud. It can also connect to your computer. So if you have a really awesome local Codex setup, it can actually go use that. Except that, it has its own identity in Slack. And so it's available wherever you talk. And I don't know if you guys have seen this, but it's, or for anyone listening, the way that dots show up in Slack isn't just like a random name like Wisp. We tried that. We had, we had agents with random names and no one knew what was going on. It was

• 27:44Alexander Embiricos?

  a bit confusing. But they show up with like your username. So like I'm AE, it's like AE-dot in Slack. And so you have all these, these people and their delegates just doing stuff together. You know, principal engineer level capability. Or if you're not an engineer, just like, you know, maximum capability.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the demo that I saw just randomly through a friend was like, we were looking for Sam Altman's headshot and we were able to delegate that to a dot that was able to go find like a file in a file system. That's easy. But just that little retrieval would be a couple clicks on a web browser and now it's just a...

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  Not even a couple clicks. It's like searching around.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  Sometimes it's like, yeah, digging through stuff. And so, yeah, it feels like we're hitting this inflection point of like leaving just the developer workflows and getting into like everyone's workflows. And you always had the pro, like the prosumer of the enterprise who was like, oh yeah, they're a sales rep, but they also use Codex. And now it's like, there is a product that's approachable for everyone. It feels like there's the expansion of territory that's happening within businesses. And then there's also like different types of businesses that are able to actually get a great value, started with software development firms and, and software companies. Are video game developers the next leg up? Like, who are you seeing here at Dev Day that you're like, oh, I, I haven't actually talked to

• 29:02John Coogan?

  that many of your, that many folks in your industry. And, and maybe the progress in Astra is flowing through. I mean, that's what my experience was. I was modeling stuff in Blender. I haven't touched 3D rendering for a long time and I can, I'm building video games and stuff. And, and I saw that, okay, this is, we've crossed this, the spike of intelligence has spiked beyond what's relevant in this particular category. And I'm wondering where else you're seeing it or what's been the most visceral to you?

• 29:31Alexander Embiricos?

  So I agree that like, I think for video games, like the stuff we've been seeing people make with Astra, absolutely awesome. And so therefore, because dots run on Astra, we've just seen people having dots, just like autonomy building, like really fun games and stuff. So that's, that's awesome. And I agree with that. But actually, I think the, the audience that I'm the most excited for to like get even more capability is maybe like solopreneurs or like small business owners, actually. Because, you know, that's where you're, you're doing absolutely everything that your business needs. And you're just like swamped with all the stuff incoming. And that's where having a dot that just like has your back and is like managing all this stuff for you, doing the work that maybe you could have done before with Astra, but it was just like a lot of work to figure out that that work even needed doing is helpful. So I've heard, you know, obviously a lot of great anecdotes from, from engineers, like people waking up in the morning to kudos

• 30:16Alexander Embiricos?

  from their team because their team was collaborating with a dot and it helped them out. It's like, good job for having a dot that did this, which is so fun. But... You know, we also have a lot of great anecdotes from like people in completely other areas. So like, you know, running the launch, like dots going around realizing that, oh, this thing about the product changed. So we need to go update the blog or like, you know, your travel plans for this conference have changed. So let me just like organize things for you.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Walk me through the specialist dots. Like, is that a more of like a mental framing for the user to let them know that this capability is there? Is there actual like the harness matters narrative where you do want to go to that particular dot? Or is it, because I can imagine as a solo entrepreneur, it's just valuable to say, okay, I at least have like one arrow in the quiver for legal, one arrow in the quiver for finance, et cetera. But also these models are pretty general and the G and AGI sort of leads you to throw, you know, Codex, Astro, Ultra at every problem. So how do you think about coaching people through that dynamic?

• 31:25Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, I mean, so there's two things going on here. So we've got dots and we've got specialist dots.

• 31:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:29Alexander Embiricos?

  And the reason we're leading with dots first is like just very related to our mission, right?

• 31:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 31:33Alexander Embiricos?

  Benefits of AGI to all humanity. And you know, when I think about product, I want that to be palpable. Like, I want every person to have direct access to something that is empowering them, extending them.

• 31:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:42Alexander Embiricos?

  Helping them move faster. And so those are dots and those dots, you know, each person has one, you'll have more in the future. And it works, you know, extending you, so using your connectors, for instance, right? So that's great. But when you think about how you like scale the amount to which this capability is deployed within enterprise, there's actually a shift that we're starting to see happening that these are a part of, right? One of those shifts is like moving from local work on someone's computer to moving and working in the cloud.

• 32:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 32:06Alexander Embiricos?

  Right? And so specialist dots have their own computer, just like dots. The other shift is actually moving away from working with like an individual's identity to moving with an IT managed, centrally governed, well-controlled identity. And we actually had an announcement going out today about how we're working with Microsoft on that as well. And so if you are a team or an organization and you have a specific type of like functional work that you would like to like accelerate the whole team with.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:30Alexander Embiricos?

  That's where you deploy a specialist dot. So it could be something like procurement or accounting. Those are some of the early places we've seen a lot of success.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:36Alexander Embiricos?

  But ultimately broadly, we see that it'll be useful in many more functions and departments.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  Personally, I feel like, I don't know, maybe I'm just like too much of a normie, but I feel like this is the frame of mind that I want to be in. Obviously, there's like the merge where you, the AI becomes you. And if I want to send you a message, it comes from me, but the AI is like puppeteering me. And I actually prefer the idea of like, I have an assistant and they are their own entity and they have their own phone number and email eventually, and I can share information with them and they are on my team, but I am still me. And I think that that is something that I would bet on that being relatable to a lot of.

• 33:13Alexander Embiricos?

  Totally.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  But we'll see, I don't know. Yeah.

• 33:14Alexander Embiricos?

  I actually made some like pretty funny mistakes as we were building this product. That we had to like roll back. Yeah, yeah. And so like, okay, I totally agree with what you said and then I'll tell you about the mistake I made.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  Someone like Astro Dot, what is, what's he writing about me from a performance report?

• 33:29Alexander Embiricos?

  That actually, there's a lot of layers of defense that's not going to make that information. But no, it's more like what we've realized is that, again, there's this kind of like this bifurcation, right? Like, I want my dots to augment me and so maybe I want to collaborate on an email and then I'm good. I just did that from within the ChatGPT app and then I hit send, right? And that should just look like me, but you know, I approved that email to be sent. And I made a mistake about that, well, I'll tell you about it. And then on the other hand, you know, we had, we had for a while, all these agents just sort of acting sort of as sending messages as us, this like sent by ChatGPT thing internally.

• 33:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:58Alexander Embiricos?

  And it was like, fine, but it kind of like started to get noisy.

• 34:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:01Alexander Embiricos?

  And so that's when we kind of iterated our way towards, no, we're going to have like a strongly separate identity. They're going to look different.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:06Alexander Embiricos?

  We've got these characters.

• 34:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:07Alexander Embiricos?

  We're going to have like a name that like clearly is like owner dash bot.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:11Alexander Embiricos?

  Right? And that just like clarified everything that was going on in communication.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 34:16Alexander Embiricos?

  So it's awesome.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  And I love, I love the idea of like, look, sometimes the amount of back and forth and compute that's going to be dedicated to some negotiation. If we're trying to find even just a time to get lunch, they might be, our dots might be going back for a long time, but it's not going to ever be like, you opened your messages to me and it's a flood of messages because they were going back and forth. It happened below the fold and then you can, you know, you can abstract that away as much as you need to.

• 34:43Alexander Embiricos?

  Agreed.

• 34:44John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 34:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to set up a dot where every time I get like a startup pitch deck, that's just clearly AI generated, it'll generate a playable video game.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  And I can just go through, go through the deck in the form of like, you know.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  Possible.

• 34:58Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, but that's totally a thing you could do.

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  No, I know. I'm joking, but it's actually.

• 35:02Alexander Embiricos?

  So here's an interesting thing about, about space, right? And sites, which is like, a lot of the tools that we use to do work today are optimized for human authoring. Okay, so what I mean by that is like, you know, like think documents, right? Like you go into a document and it's like, you can type into it, right? And the way that your document can look is like pretty simple. It's like text, right? And like, yeah, various document editors have like fancy ways for you to go in and like move the images around and stuff, but it all generally kind of sucks.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Alexander Embiricos?

  Because the tool is well-designed for humans. Like, I think those tools are good.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Alexander Embiricos?

  Even though they're a little inflexible. But now that we have dots and we're collaborating with them, we have AI, like HTML authoring is like basically free.

• 35:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Alexander Embiricos?

  Right? And so like, I love how space incorporates like HTML visualization.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:43Alexander Embiricos?

  So you could just be like, hey, like build me this artifact that I can click around or like literally put a game in the dock or whatever in the page. And it's super interactive and I think this is like sort of the paradigm shift that we're starting to.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the road to and the benefits of actual direct integrations? Because at the end of the day, like if I have some service that's, that I want to interact with, like there are APIs, there's ways, there's computer use at this point, like everything is somewhat connected. What's the benefit of actually directly engaging with OpenAI, doing a proper connection? What are the benefits? What are the costs?

• 36:18Alexander Embiricos?

  Well, I mean, there's, there's a few layers here.

• 36:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Alexander Embiricos?

  I think it starts with, yeah, now that our agents can use the same tools that we use, i.e. computers.

• 36:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:27Alexander Embiricos?

  Then there's kind of this baseline, right? Like your agent, if you want it to and allow it to, it can go to anything. And I do want to emphasize that like dots have many layers of like safety protections and one of them is custom rules, right? So if you're a company and you want to limit what exactly dots can do with various tools, like there's a very easy affordance for you to go in and do that.

• 36:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:43Alexander Embiricos?

  But okay, so that's your baseline, right? The next layer that I think we could talk about is like connectors. And mostly it's just like, it makes things faster. It lets your product be a little bit more opinionated.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:52Alexander Embiricos?

  Just improves the experience for everyone.

• 36:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:54Alexander Embiricos?

  The other sort of form of integration that I'm not sure if this is what you're getting at, but that I'm really excited about is plugin extensions.

• 37:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:01Alexander Embiricos?

  So, you know, we've long had this idea that like you, or there's actually a fun debate in this industry, right? Which is like, to what extent should UI be generated just in time for the user?

• 37:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:10Alexander Embiricos?

  And we're doing a lot of interesting work here and there's like some, some cool stuff coming out soon around that. But my opinion is that for UI that I'm going to click around in, I generally want it to be somewhat predictable. So I know where the button is, I can achieve mastery over this tool. But we don't want to be the only people deciding that. We want other people to be able to build their own UIs for our users. And so something super cool is that now if you're a ChatGPT user, you can install a plugin that has a plugin extension that actually renders like custom UI, custom pages just in the ChatGPT app. So if you're a developer listening to this, you have the ability to go reach your customers directly. And the meetings plugin that we just launched today is an example of this. It's like a fully arms-length plugin integration.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Then what, I, I, so I feel the same way about on-the-fly UI generation, custom UI. I'm excited about that. At the same time, I can, I can sit here and talk to somebody who's extremely bullish on voice interfaces and they think that like everything should be vended over conversational voice interface. And I feel like OpenAI has kept enough irons in the fire across all these different paradigms. Is there a tension there? Is that deliberate? Is there an idea that to reach everyone, to hit 1.2 billion Mao or wow? Like you don't, you don't want to actually go all in and narrow. You need to meet people where they are across multiple modalities?

• 38:28Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, I would, I would say so, like this is something Thibault said earlier today. It's like, at some point, it's about the active intelligence and the interface stops mattering.

• 38:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:35Alexander Embiricos?

  And you know, my, my like slight way of reframing that would be like, it's like, the interface should just be whatever you want.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:40Alexander Embiricos?

  Right? So like, I'm a product manager, so I spend a lot of my day in Slack and so I mostly talk to my dot in Slack, actually, right?

• 38:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Alexander Embiricos?

  But then when I'm commuting, like I was coming in today, I knew I was going to have a bunch of conversations. I was just talking to my dot like about the day and what I need to be prepared for was like grilling me on some hard questions.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Alexander Embiricos?

  You know, Holly earlier at the demo, the keynote today was talking about how, like actually the anecdote was kind of me. Like I saw her in this phone booth all the time and I was going to give her some feedback and like, why are you in so many meetings? Like, shouldn't we be like not in meetings?

• 39:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:05Alexander Embiricos?

  And then she's like, no, I'm talking to my dot and I realized this and I'm like, wow, this is crazy. We've like unearthed a completely new paradigm.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Alexander Embiricos?

  But going back to your thing about irons in the fire, like I think that. Some of these things are kind of emergent. Like, I really love talking to my dot over voice. But the way that that happened is the voice team that was working on dots did an amazing job. But it was kind of like we combined these two capabilities. And because both irons were very hot, they combined really well.

• 39:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 39:35Alexander Embiricos?

  But if you had started from scratch, I don't think we would have gotten to such a great outcome.

• 39:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:38Jordi Hays?

  What? I've noticed that I don't think people here have this problem. But as I was thinking about, you remember this viral video, this guy Jim from Charleston AI? Did you see this?

• 39:50Alexander Embiricos?

  Ooh, you might have to refresh my memory.

• 39:52Jordi Hays?

  Basically, he has a retail store in Charleston.

• 39:55John Coogan?

  Physical store that you walk in.

• 39:56Jordi Hays?

  You can walk in and he'll teach you like how to use Codex and ChatGPT work.

• 40:00Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah.

• 40:00Jordi Hays?

  And I've just noticed this thing where normal people outside of the tech industry don't just know that you can ask the AI, can you do this thing?

• 40:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:09Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, it feels like as there's 20 new launches today and it feels like the biggest bottleneck is like effective product marketing to the sort of long tail of users on how to use these different tools. Because when somebody asks me, hey, can I do this thing with ChatGPT? I say, well, have you asked ChatGPT that? Like, it'll sort of explain the general capability set and then maybe like even prompt you on how to prompt it, etc. But it feels like outside of San Francisco, that's like the biggest bottleneck to like adoption and diffusion is just people not realizing that the best teacher for the thing is not even necessarily a YouTube video about it. It's like being able to go back and forth.

• 40:46Alexander Embiricos?

  Well, I mean, two things on that. First, thanks for having me on the show. You know, this is marketing. The second point, though, I think is like, at least when I hear that, you know, I think this is actually a product problem as well.

• 40:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:54Alexander Embiricos?

  Like, if the product, I mean, it's so powerful, right? These open-ended sort of chat interfaces, you can ask whatever you want. But it's, it's hard to realize that you can, you can try that. Like, I find that very understandable. And so that's part of why I'm so excited about dots in this era of active intelligence is that, well, maybe I don't have to realize that I can ask for help for finding the headshot. You know, it'll just notice that someone was urgently asking me for the headshot. And so it might just go ahead and proactively research, like, where is the headshot? And they come to me like, hey, someone asked you for the headshot. I happen to know where the headshot is already.

• 41:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:30Alexander Embiricos?

  Do you want me to send it?

• 41:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:31Alexander Embiricos?

  Right? And so I think we were about to achieve this like step function change in how much value people are getting from existing models.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Alexander Embiricos?

  Like, dot is built on GPT-6 Astra.

• 41:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Alexander Embiricos?

  And yet it's going to unlock so much value for people.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I know. It's an exciting time. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 41:44Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your dev day. And we will move on to our next guest. Andrew Ambrosino is coming on from OpenAI. We will bring him on, have him throw on this headset and introduce himself. Because I believe this is your first time on the show, correct?

• 42:00Speaker 04

  This is my first time.

• 42:01John Coogan?

  Well, welcome.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  Welcome.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  Good to meet you guys. Thank you so much for hopping on. Give us a little tour of your day to day, your role. Introduce yourself for everyone.

• 42:11Speaker 04

  So since the original Codex app, I've led that team who runs desktop from the Codex app to now. And I've also picked up leading the space team.

• 42:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:19Speaker 04

  From the space product.

• 42:20Jordi Hays?

  You needed some more on your plate.

• 42:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:23Speaker 04

  Wasn't enough, man.

• 42:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:24Speaker 04

  Desktop was solved.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  Give us a, give us an overview of your experience with like the merge, putting everything together. There's been so many hard decisions, so many Band-Aids to rip off, I feel like. What's it actually been like? What's gone well? What do you wish you could redo?

• 42:38Speaker 04

  This is my merge shirt.

• 42:39John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. Maybe introduce the idea of the merge, because there is that Sam Altman blog post from a decade ago about the merge. And that's a different thing.

• 42:46Speaker 04

  That's a different thing.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Well, there's been a series of merges.

• 42:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:52John Coogan?

  Should we merge them all together?

• 42:53Speaker 04

  We should merge them.

• 42:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:54Speaker 04

  We split, we merge.

• 42:55John Coogan?

  Do that eventually.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  No, I mean, we had this great app with Codex.

• 42:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 04

  And we had ChatGPT that served a billion users.

• 43:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:01Speaker 04

  And we needed to find a way to join these two worlds and bring the agentic side of Codex in this app into ChatGPT with chat work.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  Of course, when we launched it originally, there were still like a lot of things that didn't match up. And so we've been working on merging those. We had two great merges today that are a little bit under the radar, actually.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 43:20Speaker 04

  One of them is that we completely rewrote ChatGPT.com in the last five weeks.

• 43:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 43:27Speaker 04

  To be the Codex app.

• 43:28John Coogan?

  Wait, your pinned tweet.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:30John Coogan?

  It says, I'm going dark for six weeks or something like that, right? That's what this was?

• 43:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  Okay, now we know.

• 43:36Speaker 04

  So now we've got, we've got the same Codex desktop experience you're used to, the ChatGPT desktop experience is now ChatGPT.com.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  Okay, got it.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  And then the second merge that we've done is now by default, ChatGPT work on the desktop.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:49Speaker 04

  Works on the cloud.

• 43:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 43:51Speaker 04

  And still has access to your local machine.

• 43:52John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  So you've got these threads everywhere.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:55Speaker 04

  Codex Cloud we launched today.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  Well, what that means is like by default, you will be able to do something that needs a file system, that needs some local-ish compute, even though it's in the cloud.

• 44:04Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  You won't have that, you won't have that tension between like, am I just in a ChatGPT thread? That's sort of like short-lived versus I gotta go to my computer. Now, by default, you have more cloud access.

• 44:16Speaker 04

  Yes, one of the things that we really like about all of our new products today, whether that's the dots, the Codex Cloud, ChatGPT work.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:24Speaker 04

  All of this stuff is running in the cloud and has access to your local machine if it needs it. So if you've got files on your local machine, if you're logged into all your browsers on your local machine, the whole system, we are, we are working on this merge.

• 44:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:35Speaker 04

  And we, we are next working on the toggle merges.

• 44:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:40Jordi Hays?

  So, so, so question for you. How do you, how do you balance trusting your own instinct around product decisions? Because obviously you would never make a big product decision that you thought was going to lead to a worse experience with like real-time user feedback around how things were. Because people, you know, we were just talking with Andrew, like the, the, people build up like a habit around different flows and different ways that the product can be oriented. And then they sort of get, build an attachment to it. And so even if it needs to change, it can be, it can be jarring. But you're, you guys are sort of like drinking from the fire hose of user feedback every single day. And whether you're taking like going offline for five or six weeks or whatever you did, I'm sure you're getting like tags and comments and messages constantly being like, do this, do that, do this, do that.

• 45:25Speaker 04

  Lots of tags, yeah. I think when it comes down to it, we, we want to put these capabilities into people's hands. And so it becomes obvious that even if for whatever reason, we can't make it, you know, we can't bring chat and work together quite yet. What we knew was that what we were getting out of Codex had to be brought to everybody. And now we feel similarly with space, with dots, all of this stuff. We try to put the capabilities into people's hands. We dog food it extensively internally. So we've got thousands of people who rely on the stuff to do every part of their job. So we get good feedback loop there. But it's all a work in progress. The stuff is moving incredibly quickly, as you know. Lots of tags on, on X all the time and we love that.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  Can you walk me through how there's this culture of like side project? What was it? Side quest was the buzzword. Sometimes they get killed off.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  No more side quests.

• 46:22John Coogan?

  No more side quests, but sometimes they get brought back. Like, like all the computer use stuff that's going on.

• 46:26Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 46:26John Coogan?

  Huge like leap forward out of nowhere, but you go back two years ago. I remember Operator.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  That was like, was it a side quest? Or was it really important work to do because it set you up for this moment? And I'm wondering if there's pre-history for any of the new products today, like space or anything else that you've touched on where you've like, oh yeah, like actually we, we, we revisited some work we did previously in a product. It wasn't quite there. The model got better. We were ready to launch.

• 46:53Speaker 04

  I think most of the stuff that we released today is like a take five.

• 46:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  Even, even just of things that we did internally.

• 47:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:01Speaker 04

  There were so many variations of dots that we saw internally, played around with somewhere local, somewhere cloud. Like, there were so many variations of the stuff that we used. Space has gone through a number of iterations. We had part of chat called Canvas that we had up for a while.

• 47:17John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  We've had a lot of internal knowledge-based products. So we've, we've gone through the revs on, on that. Codex Cloud is obviously a full 2.0. The original Codex was cloud, then we got into the local agent era. And now we're back putting the, you know, the full local agent on cloud environment. So I think everything that you see today is one of those Operator stories or that, you know, Operator to Atlas to Codex, right?

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  Sometimes I think that the, the models are changing so fast that it's hard to get the product timing on these things exactly right to the model when the model is best at it.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  So sometimes we're, you know, slightly too early, slightly, right? And, but I think like the stuff that we have out today feels, feels magical.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. So tell us more about space. What is the vision, especially for where that product goes? How it fits into like a, just a typical person's workflow in the modern era?

• 48:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, we, we find ourselves bouncing around between applications all day, right? We're, you know, in this, in the Codex desktop app, ChatGPT desktop app. All sorts of documents, we're sharing things across Slack. And so we wanted to make something that felt very agent-native and felt like a way to collaborate with other teammates.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  Their dots as well, right? Something that you can kind of curate this set of teamwork.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  You're, you're tagging each other in. You're able to use it in a way that feels like an extension of ChatGPT. And so this is really the entry of Codex and ChatGPT into a multiplayer, more collaborative era.

• 48:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:48Speaker 04

  And we're going to do a lot more here.

• 48:49John Coogan?

  How do you think about actually like the balance between how, how heavy your hand is on the instantiation of UI on the fly? Like, I noticed this weird thing just happened randomly and just, just, I believe default ChatGPT. I was asking like, is it a particularly hot summer? And it pulled historical weather data from my local weather station and it created this chart. And when I would scroll over it, it had haptic feedback where the phone would vibrate. And I was like, is that someone at OpenAI like being like, we should put haptics in this thing? Or did the model do that? And then if I love that, am I able to sort of productize that within my organization to be like,

• 49:32John Coogan?

  the way we do charts at this company, there's haptic feedback? Like, how does this flow from what you get for free versus what you put your finger on the scale with versus what an individual user might want as a pattern? That's kind of what I'm.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  This is what I'm, I am very passionate about, this subject. And I think, you know, a few months ago with, with Codex, we brought this visualize skill.

• 49:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  That kind of makes UI on the fly. It's, it can either be a full game, right?

• 49:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  In space, you can make a chess game and play it with other people if they have access to the page.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  That's kind of crazy. That is.

• 50:05Jordi Hays?

  Finally.

• 50:06Speaker 04

  Finally. The people, the people are asking for it.

• 50:10John Coogan?

  It's like, we're split on this decision. Let's play chess for it.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  I think the one that you were describing-

• 50:13Jordi Hays?

  Let me know when I can 1v1 someone in Rust.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 50:17Jordi Hays?

  MW2. Out the box.

• 50:19Speaker 04

  Well, and the DOT computer actually has a few games preloaded onto it.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 50:24Speaker 04

  Which is kind of fun. The DOT can play Solitaire. You can watch it.

• 50:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 50:27Speaker 04

  If you want to use a token-

• 50:28Jordi Hays?

  Can I just set it off just to play, if I just want it to entertain itself and play in the background?

• 50:33Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:33Jordi Hays?

  I can do that, too.

• 50:33John Coogan?

  No, you can-

• 50:34Jordi Hays?

  If I'm not there, okay.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  I've had Codex play Slay the Spire from start to finish.

• 50:39Speaker 04

  I think the one that you're talking about with the weather, that one-

• 50:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:42Speaker 04

  Is an extra challenge because you can't have your instant chat model-

• 50:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:46Speaker 04

  Writing a full web app every time.

• 50:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 50:48Speaker 04

  Right?

• 50:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:49Speaker 04

  And so this is the one that we've worked on a lot.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:52Speaker 04

  And it's, you know, the research is finally kind of there to make it feel excellent.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But then, of course, like eventually that gets flowed back to the models. The models get faster. I mean, we saw the, what is it? Eight times faster is ultrafast?

• 51:06Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 51:07John Coogan?

  How do you think that that will change workflows for enterprises? Like, I mean, I think there's like a little bit of a groan at the pricing, but Tyler was just like, "Time is money."

• 51:16Speaker 04

  It is.

• 51:17John Coogan?

  "I want to hit this all day long." How do you think people are responding to like the speed trade-offs? Is that like a new core skill for people in understanding how to size, how to size workloads and actually get the-

• 51:31Speaker 04

  Allocate resources.

• 51:32John Coogan?

  Allocate resources? Or is this something that it should be abstracted, it is quickly being abstracted?

• 51:39Speaker 04

  I like to say "time is money, save both."

• 51:41John Coogan?

  Okay, there we go. Fantastic.

• 51:43Speaker 04

  Off the cuff.

• 51:44John Coogan?

  It's a great line.

• 51:45Speaker 04

  No, I think, you know, ultrafast has been one of those things that for us, like you just, you can't go back, right?

• 51:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  There's, it's, you know, it's not exactly the same as intelligence doing something that quickly, but it sure feels like it when you, you know. Especially when we do these dynamic UI things, right? You're, you know, you're working on a page with your DOT. You tag it in and you say, "Hey, can you drop an interactive chart of our Dow usage, or Dow growth over time?" Right? And it just, it's there, right?

• 52:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:13Jordi Hays?

  It's like you're doing like a whiteboard session, but you can do it with all the data, live data-

• 52:17Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 52:18Jordi Hays?

  From your business.

• 52:19Speaker 04

  Right. And it goes off and it does the research and your data sources. It writes the little app for you and then you can just say like, "Hey, share this with my team."

• 52:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  That feels so good with ultrafast.

• 52:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 52:34John Coogan?

  What else is, what else are you working on specifically to onboarding? We were just talking about like the boom of solopreneurs. Like, who is the, who is the core demo that you find the earliest adopter? What industries are on the cusp of getting online? We were just talking about the, like the 3D modeling capabilities. Feels like what we saw in, you know, vibe-coded SaaS products coming to the video game world. But what are you seeing on the horizon in terms of companies and developers here today that might stick out to you as somebody who wasn't here a couple of years ago, but is now?

• 53:15Speaker 04

  Oh, it's hard to say. I mean, I feel like it's just really taken off. I don't know if you've, you've seen the chart from OpenAI internally, too, with, which is just basically, you know, engineering was here, research is here, and every other one is like quickly following in sync.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:29Speaker 04

  I think there's just some of the things that you do together, like pulling data.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:36Speaker 04

  You know, researching things in Slack, planning events together.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 53:39Speaker 04

  I mean, this entire Dev Day is planned using, using coding agents, right?

• 53:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  They don't look like coding agents anymore, but under the hood they are.

• 53:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:47Speaker 04

  So I think we're seeing really just a lot of everything.

• 53:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. How many, how many weeks will you be out of a lock-in until the next six-week lock-ins?

• 53:55Speaker 04

  I think, yeah.

• 53:56John Coogan?

  Are you going right back in?

• 53:57Speaker 04

  That's a great question.

• 53:58John Coogan?

  You just repin the tweet?

• 53:59Speaker 04

  I think tomorrow.

• 53:59John Coogan?

  Okay, tomorrow.

• 54:00Speaker 04

  I think tomorrow I'm going to do another lock-in for six weeks and we'll see what's at the end of that.

• 54:04John Coogan?

  Well, that's fantastic.

• 54:05Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  Anything else, Jordi?

• 54:07Jordi Hays?

  No, this is great.

• 54:08John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 54:09Jordi Hays?

  This must be crazy.

• 54:10John Coogan?

  This is fantastic.

• 54:11Jordi Hays?

  Walking around right now.

• 54:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:12Speaker 04

  It really is.

• 54:13Jordi Hays?

  Trying to have luck out there.

• 54:14Speaker 04

  All right, thanks, guys.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much. Up next, we have Peter Steinberger returning to TBPN, founder of OpenClaw. Welcome back to the show. It's been too long. Last time we, we talked-

• 54:29Jordi Hays?

  I don't think really much has happened since then either. Other, other way.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  Flip it around.

• 54:34Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 54:34John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 54:37Jordi Hays?

  We're live.

• 54:37Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  How's life?

• 54:41Peter Steinberger?

  Have you ever been on a roller coaster that just doesn't start? Like, I feel like at some point I see the ups and downs. I'm like, "Yay!" And it's still exciting.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is the roller coaster more wild online with the chattering class or internally with what you're working on?

• 54:59Peter Steinberger?

  I think I built up a little bit of a, how do you call it? A shell.

• 55:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's good.

• 55:08Peter Steinberger?

  There's always too much chat online and some of it is amazing, some of it is just like, "Oh, you're just, you know, so little."

• 55:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally, totally.

• 55:18Peter Steinberger?

  But I cannot stay away from it. It's just too addictive.

• 55:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. So let's go-

• 55:24Jordi Hays?

  It's definitely, it's definitely a new, it's definitely a new skill set.

• 55:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:26Jordi Hays?

  Like, having, having a-

• 55:28Peter Steinberger?

  Surviving online? Yeah. I'm sure, I'm sure you don't know nothing about that.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the same thing.

• 55:34Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but it's actually insane how angry people get and how emotional people get about like software and just various like software products, right? And you've been on, you've been on the receiving end of like, again, that full roller coaster, right? Where it's, it's pretty surreal. The last time you were on the show was just like you were calling in from, I think, were you still calling in from Europe, maybe?

• 55:59Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah.

• 55:59Jordi Hays?

  But then I think you almost immediately flew over here and you've probably been here ever since.

• 56:03Peter Steinberger?

  It took a little bit. I had, I had some London detours. We have a cool office there from OpenAI. And now I'm, I'm here in this crazy IT town.

• 56:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'd like to go back because I think there's so much of your, your previous work that leads into the announcements today, the moment in AI broadly, personal agents, obviously. But can you just retell us the story of like, where did the idea for OpenClaw come from? Like, what was the initial spark? Like, what got you started there?

• 56:35Peter Steinberger?

  My spark is annoyance.

• 56:36John Coogan?

  Annoyance?

• 56:37Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, like I do stuff from, you're talking about emotions. I also have emotions. It doesn't work on my computer. It doesn't work as fast or as well as I would. I get annoyed.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Peter Steinberger?

  But now in this day and age, it's like you don't have, you can use the annoyance.

• 56:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:49Peter Steinberger?

  And just like, "Let's fix it."

• 56:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:51Peter Steinberger?

  And then the fact that I couldn't really just talk to my computer-

• 56:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:57Peter Steinberger?

  That annoyed me. I was like, "This is so, this all feels so crafty. Isn't there a better way?" And then I just explored those better ways. And I keep exploring those, those better ways, you know? I talked about it inside, like, my whole thesis is that whatever workflow we think we have right now, it's already outdated. We cannot, we cannot catch up with the models. You, just think about like how much new things you can do because now Luna is like too cheap to meter. Now you have ultrafast. It's like, "Wait, so I don't have to do 50 terminal windows because I can actually stay in focus?" Oh, it completely changes things again, you know? And it's like, we can't keep up building.

• 57:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think, as you look back on the boom of OpenClaw? What do you think the key ingredients were? Was it the connectors? Was it the connections? Was it being able to communicate to your computer from anywhere?

• 57:47Peter Steinberger?

  I think I just showed people a different way-

• 57:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:50Peter Steinberger?

  How to use AI.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:51Peter Steinberger?

  And so many were stuck in this world, "Oh, it can, it can summarize my email." No, it can like install stuff on your computer or like buy, buy things for you or like do whatever you want that you can do on your computer if you just only give it the right tools.

• 58:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:09Peter Steinberger?

  And I packaged it in a way that was weird and interesting. And it also felt a little bit different, you know? Instead of like giving you a wall of text, it felt a little bit more like lobsterish, humanish. But like, like, it was interesting.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:27Peter Steinberger?

  It showed people a new way.

• 58:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:29Peter Steinberger?

  And it had some unique ideas, like, "What about if your AI could actually just be proactive?"

• 58:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:34Peter Steinberger?

  You know, and yeah, even though like some of it was like token burning.

• 58:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:37Peter Steinberger?

  But some of it was genuinely cool. It surprised people. So I think this day and age, it's, it's all about ideas and imagination.

• 58:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where do you think-

• 58:47Jordi Hays?

  It was such, I mean, it was such an amazing moment because it, it felt like the, the sort of hacker culture that this entire town was built on-

• 58:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:55Jordi Hays?

  Like exploded again in this awesome way.

• 58:58John Coogan?

  People getting back into hardware.

• 58:59Jordi Hays?

  The main thing is like, you know, you, you kicked off an entirely new paradigm. You set like the whole industry on fire in many ways. Everyone, everyone started using it, seeing it, and then immediately thinking, "How do we make this like commercially viable to be able to scale?"

• 59:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  Hackers that are, that are buying Mac minis and just into something that everyday people can use. And I feel like, in some ways, it's surprising that it, given how good the models are, that it took another six months to actually get to this moment right now where there's more excitement than ever around personal agents. Like, in some ways, like you saw this, the roller coaster, right? You saw this curve of excitement and then, "Hey, this is, maybe isn't ready for like a billion people to use." And then now we're back to the point of like, "Okay."

• 59:42Peter Steinberger?

  Isn't that the classical Gartner hype cycle?

• 59:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:46Peter Steinberger?

  And I honestly, I wish it would have been less hype.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 59:50Peter Steinberger?

  It was, it was, it's kind of like this roller coaster where like, "Yay!" And then like it gets even faster, like, "Holy fuck." You know? So, so I definitely had like a massive hype cycle with like inflated things, what OpenClaw would do for you.

• 1:00:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:08Peter Steinberger?

  Completely beside of what it could actually do.

• 1:00:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:12Peter Steinberger?

  And then you had all these insane stories. And then, of course, people tried it. They're like, "No, it doesn't quite work like this."

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Peter Steinberger?

  Because we, we still, there's still limitations.

• 1:00:23Peter Steinberger?

  Models were not as good. The software was not as good. Of course, everything's still hard. Everything is still hard. And, and people were expecting this perfect magical thing that one guy slopped in the basement.

• 1:00:39John Coogan?

  The ultimate slop grenade.

• 1:00:40Peter Steinberger?

  Um.

• 1:00:41Jordi Hays?

  No, it was really a slop grenade for you threw it over to San Francisco.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Well, you were, yeah, you were the one of the first people to come out and just be like, yeah, it's all it's so vibe coded and you were unabashed about it. And it's like, that comes with a lot of pluses and a lot of minuses, but like, here is the thing. And you know, it's great. Like, you can go and make, you can make your own decisions. You can go rewrite the whole thing yourself, one line at a time, if you want.

• 1:01:02Peter Steinberger?

  And people did many, many, many times.

• 1:01:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh, how do you think the like OpenAI and ChatGPT is an interesting position because you have ChatGPT threads, you have ChatGPT work in the cloud, Codex Cloud, Codex on your desktop. There's like a few different ways to interact with this. And I'm wondering if you have a vision for like what the next year looks like with like how much people are getting into devices, their own hardware versus, uh, versus things like the cloud just eating more and more things. Like, we went through the boom of the open web, then everything went to social networks and, and Instagram profiles. And I'm wondering if you think there's like a pendulum that's swinging, or if you have any sort of mental model for where the early adopter or the early consumer will be in a year?

• 1:01:49Peter Steinberger?

  I mean, the current situation with like chat and work.

• 1:01:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Peter Steinberger?

  Of course, it's a compromise.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Peter Steinberger?

  It is. And I learned this the hard way. It is very hard to like, take people from where they are and introduce them into something new.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:03Peter Steinberger?

  It's not annoying these people.

• 1:02:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Peter Steinberger?

  Or like confusing these people.

• 1:02:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:07Peter Steinberger?

  So, so sometimes you have to make compromises. Is this gonna be the final form? Hell no. Like, there is people working on, on, on something that's way cleaner.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Peter Steinberger?

  Um.

• 1:02:21Peter Steinberger?

  What I don't fully know yet is if we will be in a future that is mostly your agent, or if it's gonna be whole army. I see, I'm seeing both approaches. I'm more in the, in the, in the first team, but I can also totally see like the, the second team. And then how all these are like, how your personal and your team agents interact. There's still a lot of questions that I don't think the industry has fully figured out.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Peter Steinberger?

  And.

• 1:02:45Jordi Hays?

  I, yeah, I always, I always comp it back to like how, how human organizations have worked, right? So like, you have a big company with thousands of people, you might task one person, hey, we have this like general goal, you figure out how to exactly define it and what it should look like. But then hundreds of people might work on it, but then you don't have hundreds of people report back all, all back.

• 1:03:05Peter Steinberger?

  Kind of, kind of replicate those hierarchies. And then maybe your agent, oh, this is something really complicated. Let me spawn an agent that manages this. And then it manages this little sub-agent. Ah, there's so many ideas. There's like, I, I am playing with a lot of them, you know? What, what really excites me these days is how do we build software in the future? And how do we work better with agents? So like, what I just had so much fun with the last few months is moving all of my team to one place. And everybody was freaking out. Oh, what do you mean? You're like, you're like, you were so embarrassed on like how everyone is talking to their agents. Felt so private.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:03:41Peter Steinberger?

  And, and, and like, I got pushback. And then like, I, we did it anyhow. And then everybody felt embarrassed for a day. And now everybody's learning so much. It's like, because we all have a mental model on how we use agents. And it is very different because that was not something we shared. Are you sharing your Codex sessions? I'm sure you have some really interesting questions.

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:03Peter Steinberger?

  And, and.

• 1:04:04John Coogan?

  I've, I've actually, I've actually wanted that, uh, back in the deep research era, I would see Tyler Cowen talk about how he was getting a bunch of value for economic research. And I was like, I would love for him just to be able to click on.

• 1:04:16Peter Steinberger?

  Show me the prompts.

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  Share, share the prompt and the result, because I might never think to ask that question. And we've never really developed a pattern around, oh yeah, it's totally normal to just go on Twitter and share a link to a ChatGPT transcript. Occasionally, you'll see what like the GROK responses.

• 1:04:32Jordi Hays?

  They like to take credit.

• 1:04:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, they like to take credit for it. It's like, it's good content. You did the research, or you did the research, you thought of the question.

• 1:04:39Jordi Hays?

  Where are you, um, going through, you know, the first kind of era with, with Open Claw and, and then now this personal agent boom? Where are you actually, where have you seen a bunch of agent, like personal agent activity? And you're actually like, I don't think that that will be a paradigm. So for example, like shopping is a good example. Like a lot of shopping with, with agents right now is like walking up to the front of a store and asking a person outside of the store like, hey, I think I want to get this thing. And then they, can you give me some information on it? And then, and then maybe they go in and they come back. And it's this sort of like strange dynamic where you maybe at, at some points, it just makes sense to go into the store and see all the information as a, um, and, and so there's like every single one of these, you know,

• 1:05:24Jordi Hays?

  big debate around restaurant reservations in the last, you know, 48 hours as well, right? And so it's like, where are these areas where you're, you've seen some activity and you're like, it doesn't even make sense to like really focus on that from a product standpoint?

• 1:05:36Peter Steinberger?

  There's so many companies that want to own the experience. And I don't want to talk to your agent. I want my agent to be able to use your system in the way it thinks it's best. But then they, they push their own agent and they block my agent and I just go somewhere else.

• 1:05:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Peter Steinberger?

  I, well, ultimately, we don't see how that will play out. But let me, let me use my agent.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59Peter Steinberger?

  I like my agent. Make your service good so my agent can use it. Now we have like the agent wars, I feel.

• 1:06:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Peter Steinberger?

  Like, there's big companies that, that block their website and make it.

• 1:06:10Jordi Hays?

  The agent wars.

• 1:06:11Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah. Fucking agent wars.

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:14Jordi Hays?

  And, and. No, but here's an example. So shopping, going back to shopping, there's all these, let's say like companies that make sneakers, right? That are super desirable and there's more demand than supply. Well, they've had bots trying to block.

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, for a long time.

• 1:06:25Jordi Hays?

  Block other bots forever. And now people are just going and they want a generic pair of sneakers.

• 1:06:29John Coogan?

  It's the same thing.

• 1:06:31Jordi Hays?

  And they're getting blocked, right? Um, and, and even like a, an agent that is sufficiently aligned to the user is going to, you can just set it, hey, when this thing drops, go and make sure that we're the first person to buy it. And yet that's, that's the thing that like the companies have been trying to block for.

• 1:06:47Peter Steinberger?

  Well, if you cling on to your old ways without rethinking how else we could do it, maybe you have to rethink some system. Maybe the who clicks fast enough is no longer the right way. I don't know. I bought, I bought like the Steam machine and there was just like a window of a week where you could register and then date lottery, you know? And it doesn't matter if my agent clicks in 0.1 seconds or I have a human clicking in, in one hour. Everyone gets the same chance. So there's such a lot of ways where we just need to rethink how we did things in the past, because it no longer makes sense.

• 1:07:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:18Peter Steinberger?

  And so you want to block my agent? Oh, then I buy something else.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about agents going outbound, becoming more proactive? Uh, everything from Open Claw to ChatGPT has been very user prompted. I come to ChatGPT, I ask a question. Otherwise, it doesn't do anything. It just sits there.

• 1:07:36Peter Steinberger?

  Really?

• 1:07:37John Coogan?

  But it feels like we're about to enter a more proactive, I'm already seeing in ChatGPT, it'll recommend some prompts. And you can imagine the future where I'm more in the response category.

• 1:07:49Peter Steinberger?

  Oh, I, I want an agent that's always thinking.

• 1:07:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:52Peter Steinberger?

  It should be thinking about this interview right now.

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:54Peter Steinberger?

  And, and then maybe I have like a hidden screen or I can.

• 1:07:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:57Peter Steinberger?

  Maybe a little meat proxy.

• 1:07:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Peter Steinberger?

  It is also really hard to do.

• 1:08:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a design problem, right?

• 1:08:06Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, you know, not just, it's also hardware problem.

• 1:08:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:08Peter Steinberger?

  Like, like, give, give us more chips.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, incredible amount of influence.

• 1:08:13Peter Steinberger?

  You, you want.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  Looking at everything on your calendar and saying, you have an interview. So I went and did a deep research. Here's what John likes to talk about. Here's what Jordy talks about. And they did all this and they put it together, put it in a video and an audio, and they gave it to you in every single way. It's a game and.

• 1:08:25Peter Steinberger?

  I want Astro Six ultra fast thinking about my day.

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Peter Steinberger?

  And not just looping. You know, like if everyone would do that, that would just not work today.

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  This is the country of geniuses in a Roomba. So to decide where to go next is.

• 1:08:38Peter Steinberger?

  Down the stairs.

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  It's, yep, exactly. It's deploying an incredible amount of intel, super intelligence to, to solve the most mundane things. But it does feel like that, that is maybe the natural flow, which is in the shopping analogy, like, like the credit card permeated shopping. And it took a pretty complicated, uh, dance of are you writing a check? Who are you? Write the check, pay with cash, I give you the change, et cetera, to just tap the card. And there's another world where the inventory and sizing is checked behind the scenes all through my agent talking to your agent. And I think any, any worldview that assumes that only one side of the interaction will be agent mediated is mistaken. I think that, uh, if, there might be a world where in the future, our agents have talked to each

• 1:09:24John Coogan?

  other for the equivalent of a million years to prop us. But I don't think there's any world where, where my agent is spamming you with tons and tons of emails and you're, and you're flooded and you don't have anything, and you don't have any defenses.

• 1:09:37Jordi Hays?

  The agent wars.

• 1:09:38Peter Steinberger?

  And I'm fine with AI.

• 1:09:39John Coogan?

  Exactly. The agent war will happen below the, below the fold. And we will both be blissfully ignorant of the, of the trench warfare that's going on.

• 1:09:47Peter Steinberger?

  I mean, if anything, it's, it's keep being interesting.

• 1:09:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:09:51Peter Steinberger?

  Like, nothing slowing down.

• 1:09:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:09:53Peter Steinberger?

  I, I kind of dig that we finally arrived in this world where so many people cannot try agents.

• 1:10:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Peter Steinberger?

  But also. There's too many people that just... We build all these super intelligent things, but we're not really good at explaining people what we can actually do with such things. There's still a lot of work to do.

• 1:10:13John Coogan?

  What are you tinkering with these days? I feel like a lot of people are getting the hardware bug, the robotics bug, the video game bug, 3D rendering. I went back into Blender for the first time in years. Are there any new... Like, I mean, I imagine everything blends together, but are there any areas that have interested you because of the model advances? You're like, "Oh, I want to go check that out, build a robotic arm that paints, or build a video game," or something like that?

• 1:10:45Peter Steinberger?

  Robotics definitely something I bought some stuff and I'll play more. But I'm really still very interested in, as the models get better, how much more can we move up the stack?

• 1:10:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:56Peter Steinberger?

  So you said before about this, like, agents building hierarchies.

• 1:11:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:03Peter Steinberger?

  Like, how can I build this? I want to build an agent that creates those hierarchies almost on demand.

• 1:11:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:11Peter Steinberger?

  Like, if I tell the agent, "Hey, rewrite Postgres in Rust," I don't know. Like, okay, figure out this, like, "Oh, like, is Peter okay?"

• 1:11:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Peter Steinberger?

  And maybe also, "Okay, he's serious?" And like, "How can we plan this? What structure does it need to be created on?"

• 1:11:27John Coogan?

  And also, over what timeline? Because maybe you want Postgres rewritten in Rust, and you want to use it... Maybe you want it now.

• 1:11:34Peter Steinberger?

  Now.

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  But maybe you want... Of course you want it now. But maybe you want it in a couple of months. And so it's like, "Okay, well, you're gonna throw this on the back burner, cook on it for a while." I mean, I've noticed this where there's certain things where I'm like, "Oh, this is actually something I'd like to play with tomorrow. I'll set a goal and run it overnight, and if it's rendering something and it's sitting there, it's fine." And then other times, it's fast mode, "Let's get it done."

• 1:11:55Peter Steinberger?

  Like, I was very apologetic on trusting the models.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00Peter Steinberger?

  And where people to the point where people were mocking me, "Oh, this will never work, it's slop." But look where it got me.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Peter Steinberger?

  And yes, it's slop, but also, yes, we're gonna make it better, and the models will keep improving.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:12Peter Steinberger?

  And then slowly, people are waking up, and we moved from this world where, of course, you look at every little line of code, like, "Yeah, we just crawl through it."

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:21Peter Steinberger?

  So, and it's not stopping. It's not stopping. There's still... And there's so much of how we do all those things around this that need rethinking.

• 1:12:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Peter Steinberger?

  And I just find that super interesting.

• 1:12:32Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about your personal workflows? Sam earlier was saying, historically, you would want to think of 30 ideas and maybe whittle it down to one and just work on that for a few months. It feels like the success of OpenClaw came because you shipped 30 things in 60 days. But are you still trying to do that internally, where you're just building, again, silly little kind of projects just to see what's possible to almost generate more robust ideas that you can then invest more time in?

• 1:13:03Peter Steinberger?

  Well, these days, I kind of get annoyed if I can't change software with a prompt. I get so used to having all the tools myself, that now I'm kind of annoyed at the operating system. You know, because it's still like its last frontier. That's why I started shifting more towards, "Hey, Linux is now actually cool."

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:13:20Peter Steinberger?

  Because, yeah, there's like a lot of problems, but I like problems.

• 1:13:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's all tech-based problems.

• 1:13:26Peter Steinberger?

  And my agent just goes down and reads the kernel and compiles the kernel.

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:29Peter Steinberger?

  And now my webcam works.

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:31Peter Steinberger?

  And then that gets me excited.

• 1:13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:34Peter Steinberger?

  Like, "Oh, wow, I can literally own the stack, and there's nothing we cannot fix anymore." Like, everything's fixable. Nothing... Everything is still hard, but nothing's impossible.

• 1:13:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:44Peter Steinberger?

  Like, yeah, I could run my own OS. But maybe it's still hard, but like, let's see. There's enough tokens and advances that ridiculous thing will not be that ridiculous anymore in the future.

• 1:13:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, it's interesting too, because the agent actually becomes the operating system in many ways. Like, I grew up using Mac computers and never had like a Windows PC at home, ever, in my whole life.

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  Wow, loser.

• 1:14:09Peter Steinberger?

  Jealous.

• 1:14:09Jordi Hays?

  Very blessed.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, very game PC.

• 1:14:12Jordi Hays?

  But I got like a sim racing rig, right? And so I have a PC for the first time, and I'm like, "I don't know how to do anything on this thing." But you just set up Codex with computer use, and you just talk to it, and you tell it what you want to do, and it just doesn't...

• 1:14:25Peter Steinberger?

  I built a little ESP device and it has display issues. So I glued my webcam to the display, and Codex ripped overnight, and it fixed the display driver.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  That's so crazy.

• 1:14:35Peter Steinberger?

  You know, all you need to do is think about ways how your agent can do the best work.

• 1:14:38John Coogan?

  That's so fascinating.

• 1:14:39Peter Steinberger?

  Close the loop.

• 1:14:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:40Peter Steinberger?

  And then the problem was, I also told it to fix audio, and then I was waking up, "Hello ESP!"

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  Oh, and it's testing it.

• 1:14:44Peter Steinberger?

  "Hello ESP!" the whole night! Because it took so long for it to figure out that the volume was down on the other thing. Well, eventually it learned.

• 1:14:51John Coogan?

  That's so funny. That's so funny. Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing.

• 1:14:57John Coogan?

  Are you... You said you put the team together, but that was digitally, correct? You said you put all the... The whole team is now sharing what they're prompting their agents. But physically, what's your day-to-day look like? How much time are you in San Francisco?

• 1:15:14Peter Steinberger?

  Oh, I'm here, I'm here.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  You're here, okay.

• 1:15:16Peter Steinberger?

  And I... Yeah, maybe basically I have two teams. I do a lot of work on the foundation side.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:15:21Peter Steinberger?

  We pushed it forward, and then there's a lot of things inside Open here, where we tried new ideas. There's a lot of, "Hey, we tried this, how can we make this into something that's a one P product?"

• 1:15:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Peter Steinberger?

  And also, there's some cross-pollination, I take some ideas back as well, because I like to play with them. Some of you disagree on ideas, not everything works in that scale to that scale. You know, it's a very different way how you need to build things.

• 1:15:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:50Peter Steinberger?

  But it's kind of cool, so, yeah, I have a lot of jobs.

• 1:15:53John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:15:56Peter Steinberger?

  Thank you.

• 1:15:57Jordi Hays?

  What a year.

• 1:15:57Peter Steinberger?

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:15:58Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:15:59Peter Steinberger?

  See you next year, hopefully.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  Hopefully sooner than that. We'd love to chat to you again. Up next, we have Tebow, the CEO of the Reset Company of California.

• 1:16:08Jordi Hays?

  San Francisco.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  Yes, the master of resets coming on the show. Tebow, here we go, taking a photo. Can we pan over to them?

• 1:16:17Speaker 06

  I don't think so.

• 1:16:18John Coogan?

  Tebow, thank you so much for coming on the show. How you doing?

• 1:16:20Speaker 06

  Man of the hour.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  Man of the hour.

• 1:16:22Speaker 06

  What's happening?

• 1:16:22John Coogan?

  We're gonna have you throw that headset on. The microphone goes on the left. I think you got it right. There we go.

• 1:16:29Speaker 06

  I wish you brought the button.

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  Oh, he already pushed it today.

• 1:16:32Speaker 06

  I know. It's been used. It was a one-time use.

• 1:16:35Jordi Hays?

  Single use.

• 1:16:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  Yes, but the physical button is a great manifestation of all the hard work. How is Dev Day going? What are your reactions?

• 1:16:44Speaker 06

  The vibes are awesome in person.

• 1:16:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, I feel... Everyone I talked to here seems super excited. Maybe not about the things that I thought they would be most excited about, mostly ecosystem and, you know, us opening up, like, sign in with ChatGPT.

• 1:16:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:58Speaker 06

  But we can talk about... Vibes are good.

• 1:16:59Jordi Hays?

  That was the thing that stood up. I, you know, we had it on a screen, and I stood up and just...

• 1:17:06John Coogan?

  You actually did.

• 1:17:07Jordi Hays?

  Like, you know, I'm watching my team play, you know?

• 1:17:11Jordi Hays?

  But to me, that was a standout thing, because even having Peter on just now, like, Peter didn't have the ability to offer massive amounts of compute to the world. And so he made a bunch of product decisions because of that, right? You know, local approach, things like that. And now, if you're a developer and you have product experiences that you want to deliver to customers, you can do that in a way that will be much, much more cost-efficient.

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, so maybe reset on that experience. Explain what actually was announced today, and then we'll go into the discussion.

• 1:17:42Speaker 06

  Sure. But just briefly on that Peter part, I think the great thing is you can now focus on like building great product.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Speaker 06

  You know, instead of like focusing on, "How do I make the token economics make sense?"

• 1:17:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, a lot of things were announced, like, maybe even like too many things.

• 1:17:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Jordi Hays?

  No, that was my... I mean, I always default when I'm talking to, you know, 70-some, you know, portfolio companies. When they're like, "We're gonna launch this fundraiser and this thing all on the same day." I'm like, "Just break it up, launch it, you know, spread it out over two weeks." But in some ways, seeing this live, I was like, "Okay, it actually makes sense." It's fun to have this moment where all these things, and it creates this like pressure around the team to deliver.

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:23Speaker 06

  So the thing I'm most excited about, because it has changed the way I work so much, and I can't wait to see what people do with it, is like, obviously, Dots.

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Speaker 06

  Where I think this is just a new way of packaging a lot of the things that we were seeing working before, like, very long-running agent tasks. The configuration that we have, like, the agent never stops. Occasionally, it sleeps.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:47Speaker 06

  But it's always online, always doing proactive research, thinking about your goals, thinking about your preferences. And then you just steer it live, just, you know, you would give feedback to anyone else. You just give your dot a little bit of feedback, it learns. And so the more you interact with it, and the more you teach it about your preferences, the better a job it does. And at some point, you know, a couple of days in, you're like, "Wow, you know, just like, can't really quite imagine doing work without this thing."

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:12Speaker 06

  So it becomes like super delightful, but it's something that you need to invest a little bit of time in.

• 1:19:15John Coogan?

  Do you think developers are already... Do you think developers are more in a mindset to adopt Dots? Or more excited about sort of diffusing AI throughout their organizations to parts of the organization that may have not be... Like, not... They haven't on-boarded workflows onto Codex necessarily, because it's been like intimidating. Is that part of the next leg up here?

• 1:19:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think democratizing and they're figuring out like what is the natural way to interact with these things? You know, if you're like, oh yeah, you know, like fire up Codex in the terminal. It's like, you know, it's capable of editing documents and it's capable of creating slides and you're like, really?

• 1:19:57John Coogan?

  There were some incredible marketers and finance people that were doing that, but there is value to wrapping things up nicely, right?

• 1:20:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, and then also making sure that it's it's safe and it's secure like right out of out of the box.

• 1:20:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:09Speaker 06

  Um, that, you know, configuration is like really minimal.

• 1:20:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:12Speaker 06

  It does something useful, you know, within the first five minutes.

• 1:20:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:15Speaker 06

  And you don't have to be super technical, but you just kind of still feel like the power of it, right? You know, it's like, and that's, that's, that's what we're doing with Dots. Um, and then in the future, you know, we'll, we'll ship a lot of this, the same technology and the capabilities like, you know, right in ChatGPT as well.

• 1:20:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:30Speaker 06

  For, you know, our 1.2 billion users, but really it's about like getting to the essence of like, you know, how, how much can you simplify really?

• 1:20:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, talk about the current state of the difference between the model and the harness. It feels like this year we went through the whole narrative like the harness really matters. And I'm interested in, uh, the lessons from both the harness matters and specifically Codex as a harness in Dots. How much translated, how much similar lineage is there? Or is it possible we're even in a different regime and I'm using the wrong metaphor?

• 1:21:05Speaker 06

  The, it's, it's like this interesting tension between the model and the harness. And, you know, you always build the harness a little bit ahead of the capabilities of, of the model in order to like kind of make up for it. And, and then the next generation of models kind of catch us up to that. And then you have to delete part of your harness.

• 1:21:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:21:23Speaker 06

  Because it's actually holding it back.

• 1:21:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:26Speaker 06

  Um, and so this like, it's, it's very playful and dynamic.

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  It's a dance.

• 1:21:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a dance, right? It's this beautiful dance of the model, the harness. The, the Codex harness is used to power Dots. Um, so like the same open source harness that we have, and then we also use it to power the agents API. We have, which is like, you know, managed agents. Um, and a lot of effort is going into this harness to just make it very efficient, safe, secure. And so I would say like, right now, that's most of the benefits that you get from this harness. Like it's really a hardened thing.

• 1:21:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Speaker 06

  And then on the complexity of the tools, it's like, you know, we're like, just really, just really minimizing that. Because the current generation of models is just like so, so good.

• 1:22:08John Coogan?

  And is that how I should think about the specialist dots as, as sort of fine tuned harnesses for certain workflows? Uh, what, what is the mental model to sort of deploy those specialist dots across an organization?

• 1:22:22Speaker 06

  We have a lot of specialist dots at OpenAI. And the difference is that you use the existing systems within your company in order to provision.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:22:30Speaker 06

  The identity and then the access.

• 1:22:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:32Speaker 06

  And the machine.

• 1:22:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:33Speaker 06

  So we have them running on Mac minis.

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:35Speaker 06

  Um, so we provision them like exactly like employees, like we melt, we meant like a new little identity. And then, you know, it's like, it's got this IM and the roles. And so we, we have like, you know, very good security story there. And then we give them like a very premium machine as well, because the model is incredibly capable under the hood. Like, you know, Dots are like beyond PhD level, right? Um, and you know, if you look at Astra, it's just like incredibly capable at like computer use.

• 1:23:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:01Speaker 06

  So your dot can just like use a computer, just like you would. And so by giving them like premium hardware as well as like, you know, it just even increases their capabilities further. And so we have these set up and inside of OpenAI to do all sorts of things, including procurement, for example.

• 1:23:15John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah. On computer use, can you help me understand the levers that are being pulled to speed up computer use? I noticed a jump between, uh, 5.5 and Astra. Um, but I wasn't exactly sure whether the speed up was coming from like fast mode or, or the actual model or the harness. Like what are the levers, like what scaling law are we following to when I, I mean, I was demoing it with a video game like Slade Aspire. Just because it's visual and I can watch it work and I know how fast I can click. Uh, and I'm interested to know like when actually we keep joking about it like playing Call of Duty. And we're like, well, it's clearly not there yet, but are we, is it, is it a 10x speed increase every year?

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  Like, how do you even, like, what are the levers that go into it?

• 1:24:01Speaker 06

  Accidentally create an aimbot for every single video game ever created.

• 1:24:05John Coogan?

  Maybe, but, but how much of that is happening in the harness and the model both? Like, how do you even, how do you even think about understanding the progress in computer use speed?

• 1:24:15Speaker 06

  I, I do think we have seen a 10x.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:17Speaker 06

  Every one year.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:18Speaker 06

  Speed up. And it's not that we made the model sample faster.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:23Speaker 06

  Like, obviously fast and ultra fast plays a role if you want to go even faster. But that is not what we improved, uh, in terms of computer use. It's both the harness and the model. So when you think about the model, it's like, how much does it need to think?

• 1:24:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:36Speaker 06

  Before it can take the next action reliably?

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:38Speaker 06

  That's one element that we really improved. The other one is that we take safety super seriously. So we don't just click around and let the primary agent do things. Like we have a second agent, which we call auto review or internally we call it guardian, which watches over this primary agent is like actually, oh, wait a second. You're entering, you know, this, uh, sensitive information on this website. Like this domain is not quite right, you know, you should stop that action. And so it intervenes there. So we also made this auto review model faster.

• 1:25:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:07Speaker 06

  And then the harness, because we had Astra, uh, Tejal talked about this, like we were able to kind of use Astra at scale in order to improve the performance of the harness.

• 1:25:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:25:16Speaker 06

  Do more things in parallel, um, you know, remove little stalls and then just really innovate there as well. And it's like, it's all open source. So, you know, you can go and dig and figure out, you know, exactly which techniques we used. And then combined all of this together, you know, then we got this 10x speed up.

• 1:25:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, next year is the 10 year anniversary of the first OpenAI Dota competition. I think it was one on one and then they did the Dota five a couple of years later. And I, and my, my big question and prediction is like, will a stock OpenAI model with computer use be able to beat that original model?

• 1:25:52Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  And, and it's going to be, it's going to be close because it's got to be actions per minute. It's not just the reasoning. I think, I think if you were able to pause the game and cook on a, you know, a really, a really advanced model, you'd be able to get there. But the computer use is like the final thing and I think that's going to be pretty magical.

• 1:26:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, if you, if you look at, um, ultra fast day on Astra, it's 300 tokens per second.

• 1:26:15John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 1:26:16Speaker 06

  Um, and.

• 1:26:17John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe I gotta go demo it today.

• 1:26:18Speaker 06

  It's not quite that, you know, one token is one action.

• 1:26:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:22Speaker 06

  Right? It's more going to be like, you need 20 tokens to make one action, right? So, um, you know, you're going to have, you know, 30, uh, actions per second, which is a decent amount. And then it's all like, how smart is the model? Like, you know, can it actually reason about long-term?

• 1:26:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:26:37Speaker 06

  Strategy and movement and think about all the past actions. And what we're seeing is that, um, currently we, we, we announced as well decisions API.

• 1:26:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:46Speaker 06

  We further tuned the constraints so that, uh, you can make decisions extremely fast. So you can make one decision roughly every 200 milliseconds.

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:54Speaker 06

  Um, so speed is just like, we're just progressing way faster than even I had anticipated six, six months ago.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:01Speaker 06

  And I think we'll see like, you know, definitely like real time, um, real time actions, uh, within next year and like beating that original model.

• 1:27:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so, so, uh, yeah, I mean, I, I, I love those announcements. They're always really interesting. Uh, so many different models and, and speeds and cost trade-offs and Pareto charts and all sorts of stuff. At the same time, uh, how much do you want users to actually understand that? Internalize that, become experts there versus just wait a little bit and it'll be entirely delegated to the harness or to the company even or the product? Uh, I'm just wondering how long we stay in this regime of understanding the model picker. Uh, because there's some real value that comes from being able to, you know, think, okay, we need this, we need this chart, but we need it right now.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  So I'm going to, you know, but that could just be in the prompt. Like go to your dot and say, hey, I need, I need a best estimate of revenue for my business right now. Or, hey, look, we, I need you to go reconcile the books, so get it to me by Monday.

• 1:28:07Speaker 06

  Yes, the way that you think about it feels exactly right.

• 1:28:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:10Speaker 06

  Humans don't have a knob, right? So you just, you just tell it in natural language.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:15Speaker 06

  You're like, I need this right now or I need this tomorrow. Or you have a hundred dollars in order to achieve this.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:28:20Speaker 06

  I'm throwing a big party. I want to spend a few bucks. It's like, good luck.

• 1:28:26Speaker 06

  But the model should just adapt and like the system should adapt and, you know, configure exactly like how many resources it should, it should use in order to achieve your goal. And that's what we're working towards. With Dots, in a way, we already simplify things massively. There's no model picker. Like your dot is just there. It's available 24/7. You can text it. It model relates its effort depending on the ask. And it might not be perfect. It's also why we're announcing it at Dev Day. We want to build it with the community and like we're learning with the pro users. Um, but eventually it will be so good that you will kind of be shocked that we had a model picker.

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:00Speaker 06

  Ever.

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:01Jordi Hays?

  Yep. How are you spending, uh, how are you allocating your time? Cause I imagine you're sleeping like four hours a night, but the other 20 hours.

• 1:29:08Speaker 06

  You're sleeping a month.

• 1:29:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other, uh, yeah, whatever the other 20 hours a day. How much time are you spending on like recruiting and like, who are you actually looking for there? You, you, the team is firing on all cylinders. You want to make sure when you're adding people, they're, they're, they're, you know, speeding up the team versus slowing you down. But recruiting versus everything else on your plate?

• 1:29:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, I spent a decent amount of recruiting, but I tried to do more than one thing at once. So for example, I might talk to an exciting candidate and have a really fun conversation about an idea that I think either the team is already pursuing or something new and speculative that we're thinking about. It's like I'm trying to see what this other person is also, how they would kind of handle it if they were on the team. And so it's not that I'm actually kind of wasting my time in an interview and doing anything boring there. I'm actively thinking about the work and already simulating them being part of the team, which then also is interesting to myself, as it evolves my thinking, sometimes in quite novel ways.

• 1:30:11Speaker 06

  So I would say interacting with other people and I'm always looking for great new candidates to join the team. I would say it's like 20% of my time.

• 1:30:19John Coogan?

  How do you think about the longer term ramifications of memory and going deeper with a particular agent and system? Because there's this interesting thing where right now OpenAI has business relationships and there are some companies that have gone all in. And at the same time, there are individuals who have gone all in on Codex and have complex workflows and there's more memory there. But there is a world that I could imagine where if somebody shows up on my team and they're doing their work and I notice that they're searching the internet using Bing, I'm probably not going to say, hey, look, this is a Google organization.

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  But I would say, okay, we use Gmail, not Outlook. You're on this particular email system. And there's some sort of interaction there that feels like, are we going to be more in the regime of you have your agent, you're tooling, and I'm hiring you to work with me and you bring all of whatever tools you use? Or is there going to be a regime where, hey, you're joining a particular shop, like a rail shop? You're writing rails, you're writing Ruby, or this is a Python shop, so I need to get up to speed on that? Have you thought about where this goes in the longer term?

• 1:31:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, it also, again, it feels like the way that you're thinking about it feels very natural. So just like humans, you don't want to just re-explain the same thing over and over again. And if you're a rail shop, you hire the person and you're like, hey, you understand, we're a rail shop. Here's the documentation.

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:53Speaker 06

  Learn how we do things over here and then try your best to do it. If you don't get it quite right, I'll provide you feedback.

• 1:31:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:59Speaker 06

  And so this is very much the same that we're thinking about it for Dots and agents in general. Space is like a shared memory system that you maintain across the organization. You have your own notes, but you also have like collective notes. And so for example, you could just write in there like, hey, we're a rail shop. Here are the things that you need to know about. And then the first thing that it does is just goes and reads about it. And then memory system is something that we have quite perfected and are continuing to innovate on. Like with the ability to have coherent memory over very, very long periods of time. So you don't want to give feedback today and then learn that two weeks later it's just like, you know, kind of completely forgotten about it.

• 1:32:42Speaker 06

  It's just like, you know, painting the house blue again, like I really don't like that color.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a fascinating interaction of all these things. But thank you so much for coming and breaking it down.

• 1:32:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wish we had more time. I think that the intensity around your X account is something that like, I think very, very, very few people at companies at any point in modern history have had to deal with. Like I actually, but as we've gone through this year, just like seeing how much, just how much attention is focused on the next thing that you post and then what you have to go through to actually balance all of that feedback in real time and understand where am I right, where were we off, and then adapt. It's been incredible to watch. So good luck out there.

• 1:33:29Speaker 06

  Congratulations.

• 1:33:30Jordi Hays?

  Fortunately, I have a dot now to help.

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 1:33:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll see. Maybe the dot's been running the account.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the big reveal. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Up next, we have Kath Korevec coming on to the show. Kath, welcome to TBPN. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:33:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:33:48John Coogan?

  It's a little windy.

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  A little windy.

• 1:33:49John Coogan?

  Do whatever you need to get adjusted, take a seat.

• 1:33:53Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 1:33:53John Coogan?

  Great to have you.

• 1:33:54Speaker 07

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  Big day.

• 1:33:56Speaker 07

  I didn't expect a hug from the man.

• 1:33:59John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:33:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:34:02John Coogan?

  For those who don't know you, please introduce yourself. Tell us a little about your role at OpenAI.

• 1:34:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm Kath. I'm a product manager. I work on GPT sites, ChatGPT sites.

• 1:34:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:34:12John Coogan?

  What has the traction been with sites?

• 1:34:15Speaker 07

  Oh, it's been huge.

• 1:34:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:16Speaker 07

  So let's see. I don't know what I'm approved to say, but I think I can say.

• 1:34:20John Coogan?

  I think I have a doc here. You want the number?

• 1:34:22Jordi Hays?

  Whatever went up.

• 1:34:23John Coogan?

  10 million sites, created in under three months since launch.

• 1:34:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we launched three months ago.

• 1:34:28John Coogan?

  I'm responsible for like 45 of those. I make them for everything. I love them.

• 1:34:31Speaker 07

  Oh, amazing.

• 1:34:32John Coogan?

  My favorite product. I love sites.

• 1:34:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the wildest use case is like looking at, John was like, looking at a bunch of different products online and just instantly building this. You know, this was like a couple of months ago.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it was specifically, I was looking for a house. I would take a Zillow listing, send the link to Codex and say, go and download all the photos, restyle them with images, and then put it together in a site where you can swipe left to right to see if this house went through a remodel, would it look better?

• 1:35:06Jordi Hays?

  And then styling it in a way that, based on your preference.

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  So we would know, okay, this house is, this tile of architecture from this year, this would be a faithful evolution of this. It wouldn't just change the architectural style. And then I'd made so many sites that I told it to make a meta site to like put all them together. I've made like an atlas of all these.

• 1:35:28Speaker 07

  I've got a prompt to do this.

• 1:35:30John Coogan?

  Okay, tell me.

• 1:35:30Speaker 07

  And I mean, I have a couple, but I'll send it to you.

• 1:35:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:34Speaker 07

  And like how to organize it all and everything.

• 1:35:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it's amazing.

• 1:35:37Speaker 07

  Because that's like, that's when you know you've like hit the limit.

• 1:35:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:40Speaker 07

  That's when you actually have to organize this. So did you tell it what your preferences were? Or did you give it?

• 1:35:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:46Jordi Hays?

  Specifically, John has like very specific tastes. So if he was going to go through a remodel, wants it to look a specific ways.

• 1:35:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:54Jordi Hays?

  The image model takes that into account and nails it within the context of that space.

• 1:35:59John Coogan?

  But it was so helpful because a lot of times you'll see a house that went through a remodel and it prices higher, and then a house that's pre-remodel, it's lower price. And you're like, okay, well, if you equalize these, and Zillow has a feature for this that lets you sort of like redecorate a little bit on some houses that list, but not all of them. And so this was a nice way to just style. And then I could just pass it around to like family members and show them it was a great experience.

• 1:36:21Speaker 07

  So did it show you, this is more a real estate question than it is.

• 1:36:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, please. Okay, let's go real estate. We got a whole mansion section. We can talk cars if you want. We can do whatever you want. This is the show. We don't only talk about AI.

• 1:36:31Speaker 07

  But I'm curious if it could do something, and maybe you weren't like asking it to do this.

• 1:36:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:37Speaker 07

  But you know, like when you go through a remodel, your home value either like goes up or goes down based on what you're doing. So if you're like, I'm going to add a white kitchen or something. Or if you add a pool, your home value goes down when you think like, oh, pool is like fancy.

• 1:36:49John Coogan?

  So it did all of that.

• 1:36:50Speaker 07

  It did it. Okay, cool.

• 1:36:51John Coogan?

  It looked at price per square footage for remodel homes in the particular neighborhood, block by block, finding comps, building all the comp sheets, and then figuring out, okay, what is the realistic building cost for specific things? Creating itemized list of how much you'd spend on architect versus raw materials. And then would you have the correct gap to support that based on like a 10-year holding period, basically? So it did all of that.

• 1:37:14Jordi Hays?

  Truly, truly personal super intelligence. Because five years ago, the amount of experts and like, okay, I don't have time to build the website, so I need someone else to like build this thing. And I need to be able to like compare, contrast. Yeah, it would be.

• 1:37:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. And my end conclusion was just like, it's just going to speed up the economy because more people will be doing like the remodels, more people will be buying stuff because they'll have more confidence in these things. It was, yeah, it was a delightful experience.

• 1:37:38Speaker 07

  This is why we built sites.

• 1:37:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:37:40Speaker 07

  Okay, so we built it for work-related stuff, for sure. But also people use it for personal use cases. I do. I just built a site. I don't want to have to go, I like tinkering with hardware.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:53Speaker 07

  I want to have like, do you guys know the Skylight? It's like a family.

• 1:37:58Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:58John Coogan?

  Oh, organizer. Yeah, calendar. Yeah.

• 1:38:00Speaker 07

  I don't want to go and buy it. I'm sure it's like a fantastic product.

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:38:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:04Speaker 07

  But I don't want to buy it. I want to build it myself.

• 1:38:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:38:06Jordi Hays?

  You mean the picture frames that cycle through images?

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  It's specifically linked to calendar.

• 1:38:10Speaker 07

  No, a calendar, yeah. But they have their own software and everything that's like specific for families.

• 1:38:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:14Speaker 07

  So I don't want to do that. So I'm building one with ChatGPT Sites.

• 1:38:17John Coogan?

  Oh, and then Sites is the backend, basically.

• 1:38:19Speaker 07

  And we just launched plugins in Sites today, and so I can like hook it up to my calendar.

• 1:38:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then with a prompt, you can iterate on it and say, okay, I want to change this. Change the color. We're going with this theme. It's Christmas. Make it a Christmas theme.

• 1:38:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. And I can like hook it up to my kid's calendar, school, do all that stuff.

• 1:38:34John Coogan?

  I think it's really good for, yeah, on the fly UI. Like I was discussing potential guests for throughout the rest of the year. Had basically deep research, polled a bunch of potential people that are one step away from guests we've had on the show. But instead of just giving me a big, long list, I was like, just build me a website where I can thumbs up, thumbs down, share with the team. Very easy. How does that interface with Space? How do you see these products linked? Is there going to be another merge? Everything's merging all the time?

• 1:39:01Speaker 07

  Oh, there's always a merge.

• 1:39:01John Coogan?

  There's always a merge.

• 1:39:02Speaker 07

  And then unmerge, and then toggles everywhere.

• 1:39:04John Coogan?

  Yep, this is the life.

• 1:39:05Speaker 07

  So Sites are in Space.

• 1:39:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:39:07Speaker 07

  And that's very intentional. Sites are a very collaborative place. And you can add editors to your site. You can add co-editors, co-authors, et cetera. And it's a very rich environment to work in. You can like build a site. You can share it with somebody else. We have a lot of people at OpenAI who are doing like, we have, our IT team is using this to manage like where everybody is in the world.

• 1:39:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:29Speaker 07

  And they're sharing those sites with other people like around the world who are like boots on the ground managing security. And so they want to see, like, they want to see like, okay, who's flying in today? Is there an event happening? Is there, like, how was the weather? Is there a weather event happening? Like all of that stuff.

• 1:39:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:43Speaker 07

  And so they'll add co-editors, co-authors, everything to their site to manage it. Inside Space is what's cool is that you can, you have all of your artifacts right there, available for everybody. So you'll see us kind of like cross-referencing stuff, making stuff inside Space more and more interchangeable. And so you'll be able to like inside pages, be able to reference Sites and vice versa. And Slides are launching soon. A lot of people are making Slides with Sites. You'll be able to put those into Spaces really easily. So it's.

• 1:40:19Jordi Hays?

  What's the timeline? For this to be available to anyone, like is there, if you go far enough in the future, can somebody on a free ChatGPT plan create a website?

• 1:40:30Speaker 07

  Oh, yes. Yeah. So we are very, very interested in making it available to everybody. We have to figure out like infrastructure, how to, how to price it appropriately, etc. Like, we just launched three months ago, so we're still kind of learning, but we are also working with the consumer.

• 1:40:46John Coogan?

  Ad-supported.

• 1:40:47Jordi Hays?

  Ad-supported.

• 1:40:48Speaker 07

  Oh, there you go.

• 1:40:49John Coogan?

  Your site will have ads all over it, banner ads for everything you do. That's still free.

• 1:40:53Speaker 07

  You know, I'm big.

• 1:40:54John Coogan?

  I want that.

• 1:40:55Speaker 07

  Use case is e-comm.

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:40:57Speaker 07

  So we could do, you know.

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:40:59Speaker 07

  There's a lot here that we could, we could.

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  I want to go back to the Angel Fire world. I don't know if you remember that, but like, it was free web hosting and you'd have these, uh, these banner ads.

• 1:41:09Jordi Hays?

  Crazy display ads.

• 1:41:10John Coogan?

  Crazy display ads all over that you couldn't remove.

• 1:41:12Speaker 07

  I'm hoping we can get away from the ad.

• 1:41:15John Coogan?

  Well, we'll have to disagree on that because we are huge fans of advertising and so.

• 1:41:20Speaker 07

  Or advertising it in like a unique way.

• 1:41:23Jordi Hays?

  People are like, oh, this, this meeting could have been an email. And I'm going to be like, well, your text to me, John, could have been a website.

• 1:41:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:30Jordi Hays?

  Basically there. We're basically there.

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:41:33John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the launch and the progress. Ten million, ten million.

• 1:41:39Jordi Hays?

  Ten billion soon.

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  Ten billion.

• 1:41:40Jordi Hays?

  There's gonna be more websites.

• 1:41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:42Jordi Hays?

  Per person.

• 1:41:43John Coogan?

  So we'll take that headset off. We'll hand it to our next guest. Ben, thank you so much for hopping on. And I believe we're ready for our next guest. We have none other than Casey Neistat. Um, Casey, welcome to the show. Good to see you. How you doing?

• 1:41:59Casey Neistat?

  Has that been on the table?

• 1:42:00John Coogan?

  This has been on the table the whole time.

• 1:42:01Jordi Hays?

  Been trying to take it out, but it survives.

• 1:42:04John Coogan?

  Why don't you introduce this? What is this thing? Oh, you have one. Okay.

• 1:42:08Casey Neistat?

  Funny you should have asked.

• 1:42:08John Coogan?

  Funny you should ask.

• 1:42:10Casey Neistat?

  No, so this is the, this is the first chromatic, transparent, custom chromatic that we made at

• 1:42:15John Coogan?

  I love the styling, yeah.

• 1:42:16Casey Neistat?

  For this event today.

• 1:42:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:19Casey Neistat?

  We made, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say the number, we made eight thousand of them.

• 1:42:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:42:23Casey Neistat?

  To make sure every attendee could leave with them.

• 1:42:25John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:42:26Casey Neistat?

  Leave with one.

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:28Casey Neistat?

  I will say that, breaking news.

• 1:42:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:42:31Casey Neistat?

  This was announced on stage by Sam like an hour and a half ago. There's one currently on eBay for four thousand.

• 1:42:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask you. They got a trade in the, in the, in the aftermarket.

• 1:42:42Casey Neistat?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:42John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:42:42Jordi Hays?

  Arbitrage. A lot of people are like, I'm gonna wait to get home to, to flip this, but.

• 1:42:47Casey Neistat?

  Not, no, not some enterprising attendee today.

• 1:42:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:50Casey Neistat?

  Who saw an opportunity and just got in there and sniffed it.

• 1:42:53Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 1:42:53John Coogan?

  But the specific integration, of course, Codex, vibe coding, the idea that you can, uh, create a custom game that runs on here, is that the idea?

• 1:43:03Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, you know, like, what we do at Mod Retro, the reason why we're like focused on retro gaming is, is about like the love and the fun of the, the game we're playing.

• 1:43:11John Coogan?

  Mine came with Tetris. It was fantastic. Right?

• 1:43:14Casey Neistat?

  I rarely take Tetris out of mine.

• 1:43:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:43:16Casey Neistat?

  It's my, it's my anti.

• 1:43:18Jordi Hays?

  Tetris cartridge stays in.

• 1:43:19Casey Neistat?

  It is catharsis for.

• 1:43:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. I did buy a crazy cartridge that had like some modern technology, had like four hundred games on there. And that was really cool, but, you know.

• 1:43:28Casey Neistat?

  That sounds super unofficial.

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:32Casey Neistat?

  But.

• 1:43:33Jordi Hays?

  Naughty.

• 1:43:34Casey Neistat?

  But what this, what this is and what it is today is.

• 1:43:36Jordi Hays?

  Naughty, naughty.

• 1:43:38John Coogan?

  I don't know if I get in trouble for buying it. I think the person should have sold it, maybe.

• 1:43:42Casey Neistat?

  We built a custom plugin.

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:44Casey Neistat?

  Um, for Codex.

• 1:43:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:45Casey Neistat?

  And it enables you to sort of vibe code games.

• 1:43:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:43:48Casey Neistat?

  What's special about it is that you're not, you're not constricted to playing that in an emulator on your laptop. You can like, you can flash it to this cartridge immediately.

• 1:43:56John Coogan?

  Yep. It's amazing.

• 1:43:58Casey Neistat?

  And I think like the best way of framing it is like Torin, our CEO.

• 1:44:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:01Casey Neistat?

  And his five-year-old.

• 1:44:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:03Casey Neistat?

  Vibe coded a game and then he was able to flash it and hand the chromatic to your kiddo and have him playing it right away.

• 1:44:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's something that like leans into the constraints. Like you, I've seen a bunch of demos that are like, oh, this new model's so powerful. I just gave it one prompt and it made a triple A, Call of Duty, GTA six video game. And I'm like, okay, let's, uh, let's calm down. You made a thirty-second video of something that actually looks kind of janky and probably doesn't have anywhere near the breadth of GTA six just yet. We'll get there, but for now, this is the sweet spot. Like, I know that you can actually deliver something that's fun and entertaining and full-featured and not buggy when you're constrained to this screen and just these buttons and you're not trying to.

• 1:44:45Jordi Hays?

  Also, also the exciting thing is having, having a TAM of one, right? Like, there's so many, there's so many great ideas. And when I say that, I'm not saying the product, but I'm saying like, there are great games where for a five-year-old.

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:57Jordi Hays?

  Like, he, they will be the only person that, that appreciates this game.

• 1:45:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:45:01Jordi Hays?

  And it's combining different parts of, of their interests into something that would never have commercial appeal, could never get shipped or made.

• 1:45:08John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:45:08Jordi Hays?

  And now it can. And I think that's, that's been sort of the story of every single category of AI use case where you can now make things that, like, again, the example you were giving ten minutes ago.

• 1:45:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:18Jordi Hays?

  It's like you would never spend the money or the time to make this comparison website only for yourself on the fly.

• 1:45:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:45:25Jordi Hays?

  And now you can.

• 1:45:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:45:26Casey Neistat?

  Yeah. And I think it, constraints is a great characterization because I think it, it dovetails with like what our mission is at Mod Retro, which is like embracing those constraints, which, which amplifies like the why part. You know, like we launched the M64, which was our Nintendo 64 console. We released that a month and a half ago and doing incredibly well. But so much of the feedback we see is from like old people like me.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:51Casey Neistat?

  Forty-five, I was fifteen when Nintendo 64 came out, introducing it to their kids.

• 1:45:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:45:56Casey Neistat?

  So you get a dad or you get a mom with their little ones. And it forces you, because of those constraints, like physically sit with my kids.

• 1:46:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:03Casey Neistat?

  And play Mario Kart.

• 1:46:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:04Casey Neistat?

  And when I think of that versus like when we catch our daughter, she's not allowed to play Roblox, but when we catch her in her bedroom, like hiding in the closet by herself with her iPad six inches from her place, playing Roblox.

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:16Casey Neistat?

  This just feels so antithetical to that because it is about like the social aspect. It's about the camaraderie. It's about the fun.

• 1:46:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:22Casey Neistat?

  And I think like that's, that's what today in this partnership was emblematic of. It's like you can create something that's fun. They say, check this out.

• 1:46:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's so funny that, like, I, I think a lot of, we're all parents here and I think all, a lot of parents are going through this, like, I just want the same experience that I had for my kids. And then there's literally a company that's like, yeah, you can do that. It's such a simple value.

• 1:46:45Casey Neistat?

  It's, it's, it's a funny, it's a funny, like philosophical exploration because there's a part of it which is like, is it just our old man nostalgia?

• 1:46:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:55Casey Neistat?

  And, you know, Palmer, our founder, has like a really curt response to that, which is no.

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:00Casey Neistat?

  It was just better.

• 1:47:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:02Casey Neistat?

  It was better than, and I think about that because like, you know, we bought our daughter this summer a point-and-shoot camera.

• 1:47:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:08Casey Neistat?

  And it was like the biggest fucking deal for her.

• 1:47:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:10Casey Neistat?

  And like she has a camera on her iPad, but having a point-and-shoot camera, this single-purpose device, it meant so much to her.

• 1:47:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:17Casey Neistat?

  And I think that we're starting to see like technology start to go for full circle.

• 1:47:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:21Casey Neistat?

  Like we have these stupid little black rectangles of doom that live in our pockets that you can do everything on.

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:27Casey Neistat?

  But there's something about, whether it's like a wired headphone, point-and-shoot camera, a device that you have to physically put a cartridge in to play a singular game. Yeah, I think it's about the relationship between the, the person and the technology. And I feel like we've gotten so far away from that with, with the, the rate of innovation getting away from us.

• 1:47:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Um.

• 1:47:46Casey Neistat?

  I didn't mean to go so deep.

• 1:47:47John Coogan?

  No, no, no, I completely agree with that.

• 1:47:49Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, I've, I've spent, I mean, I, every, I'll text John like twice a month, maybe every week, where I'm like, everything that's good hasn't changed in sixty years. Right? Um, and, and, and in many ways, like having like machine intelligence is the only thing really that, that I feel like has been super meaningful that's, that's changed in that period. But when it comes to stuff specifically in the physical world, everything that's good has existed for.

• 1:48:18John Coogan?

  Like old restaurants, old hotels.

• 1:48:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, cars, cars got worse, you know?

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:23Jordi Hays?

  Um, a, a bunch of things, you know, homes got worse, all, all these different things.

• 1:48:28John Coogan?

  Toilet paper rolls or, or paper towel holders. Is that your always example?

• 1:48:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, that's probably.

• 1:48:32John Coogan?

  He wants a paper towel holder invented in the nineteen sixties.

• 1:48:35Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, I've got one that has a Wi-Fi connection.

• 1:48:37John Coogan?

  Okay, you're on the opposite end of the spectrum.

• 1:48:39Casey Neistat?

  It sends me alerts when I get low on toilet.

• 1:48:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:41Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but the, the cool thing is it feels like, I really do think that, um, that all, I do think all the hardware that we use is gonna like change dramatically in, in a way over the next ten years that it didn't in the last, uh, in the, in the last ten years. And part of why I think that is is because you have thousands of super smart people working on these new paradigms and form factors, but then you also have the software changing. And the first time we had Peter from Open Claw on, and he was just saying like, he's now getting frustrated with the OS. It's not just the things that are happening as part of the, are on top of the operating system. He's like, he wants to go all the way because there's things that can just make more sense when you can generate an operating system almost on the fly.

• 1:49:24Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, I, I think it's holistic. I think there's room for everything, but I, I think what's been caught up in this like tidal wave of innovation that I felt has, has sort of hit like a, a, a really aggressive inflection point in the last ten to fifteen years is that it's sort of consumed everything. And I feel like we've kind of reached this plateau where we're able to pause and identify little areas where like, no, no, no, that doesn't need that kind of innovation. I think back to like, if I'm, if I'm, feel, allow me to be romantic about it.

• 1:49:54John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:49:54Casey Neistat?

  Like, I got, I think for my tenth birthday, I got one of those yellow Sony Walkmans. And I fucking treasured this thing. It meant the world to me. It was my most prized possession. I, I took showers as a kid, but I would take a bath just so I could listen to music.

• 1:50:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:10Casey Neistat?

  In the bathtub because I had a Walkman that could get wet. And I think about that now and it's like, technically Spotify is better.

• 1:50:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:17Casey Neistat?

  Than having Led Zeppelin cassette in my yellow. It's better in every way technically. But it, like Spotify will never mean to me.

• 1:50:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:25Casey Neistat?

  What that device meant to me.

• 1:50:26John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:50:27Casey Neistat?

  And I think this romanticization of, of technology is something we've, we've drifted away from.

• 1:50:32John Coogan?

  And the change in medium changed, changed the message. You used to, you used to listen to a whole album and now.

• 1:50:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for, for me, it was, for me, it was iPod Shuffle.

• 1:50:39John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:50:40Jordi Hays?

  Like having, having.

• 1:50:41Casey Neistat?

  Which one? The little white one? The clip one?

• 1:50:43Jordi Hays?

  The clip one. Like, to me, to me, that was, that was the pinnacle of technology as a kid because I had, I had this thing that was like a quarter. You could like throw it up and down. And yet it was so powerful because music is so emotional and like it felt like it could take you on a whole journey, be as entertaining as watching a movie, just playing songs.

• 1:51:02Casey Neistat?

  And you never knew what song was coming next.

• 1:51:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:51:04Casey Neistat?

  Part of the romance. Part of the romance.

• 1:51:06Jordi Hays?

  It was like gambling, gambling with audio. Like, you know, slot, slot machine every time you press skip.

• 1:51:12Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, and I think we're gonna see, I feel it now, but this is my world that I live in. I think we're gonna see this sort of looking back, like I, I, I run across the Brooklyn Bridge seven days a week, unless I wake up in San Francisco.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:51:26Casey Neistat?

  And what's interesting that I've noticed in the last five years is it used to always be people's iPhones, and now the amount of people I see with these antiquated ten-year-old point-and-shoot cameras.

• 1:51:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:36Casey Neistat?

  And they do, and it's sort of a flex.

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:51:38Casey Neistat?

  They're using this camera that is objectively a lower-quality camera that's what's on their phone.

• 1:51:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:43Casey Neistat?

  Yet it says something about them.

• 1:51:44John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:51:44Jordi Hays?

  In some ways, New York City is probably getting captured on film more now.

• 1:51:49Casey Neistat?

  Sure.

• 1:51:50Jordi Hays?

  Than when film cameras were like the only way to, to actually take a photo.

• 1:51:55Casey Neistat?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:55Jordi Hays?

  Because the diffusion, like historically, it probably wasn't like, you know, thousands of people spread across the city at all times getting every single angle, and yet now that actually is what's happening.

• 1:52:05Casey Neistat?

  Just constant. Yeah, my favorite thirty-five-millimeter point-and-shoot is this Olympus.

• 1:52:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:52:10Casey Neistat?

  Okay, it was a hundred and fifty bucks when it came out in the, in the aughts.

• 1:52:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:14Casey Neistat?

  And they stopped making it whatever fifteen years ago. Every time I'd break one, I'd just buy it off eBay for fifty bucks.

• 1:52:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:52:19Casey Neistat?

  I noticed a couple of years ago that they weren't fifty anymore, they're like a hundred.

• 1:52:22John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:52:23Casey Neistat?

  Okay, then it was like two hundred. My wife asked me for one for her birthday, and I went to buy it, it was four hundred dollars.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Got a corner of the market.

• 1:52:29Casey Neistat?

  And now they're...

• 1:52:33Casey Neistat?

  And now they're almost unavailable.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:35Casey Neistat?

  And I think it's, it's akin to like what we see with classic cars, like people appreciate what these things were.

• 1:52:41John Coogan?

  I mean, that's what makes me so excited about Mod Retro is...

• 1:52:43Jordi Hays?

  So you guys will make a point-and-shoot.

• 1:52:44John Coogan?

  Palmer's, yeah, Palmer's tease, he can't say anything, but Palmer's tease like, "I don't like connected TVs, I don't like music, and I don't like cameras," and I'm like, "Yes, like the connected TVs gotta go."

• 1:52:55Jordi Hays?

  I have a thing of like, every, the frustration that I have with, um, hopefully this isn't just like my issue and I'm like not updating the software or something.

• 1:53:04Casey Neistat?

  Let us hear, let us hear.

• 1:53:05Jordi Hays?

  But, but the, the level to which, uh, like modern TVs, the software degrades to the point where you're like, "Okay, like I'm gonna click, I'm gonna click," and I clicked too many times, and now I gotta, you know, like...

• 1:53:17Casey Neistat?

  Have you followed along with this LG controversy?

• 1:53:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:20Casey Neistat?

  Okay.

• 1:53:21John Coogan?

  Break it down for those who haven't.

• 1:53:22Casey Neistat?

  Okay, the TLDR is that the most modern LG TV, they have the best panels.

• 1:53:27John Coogan?

  The best panels, yeah, OLED, it's amazing.

• 1:53:29Casey Neistat?

  The most expensive.

• 1:53:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:31Casey Neistat?

  A couple of hackers, a couple, they have a YouTube channel, I apologize, I don't remember the name, they deserve a plug.

• 1:53:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:36Casey Neistat?

  But they broke down all of the software, and they, they determined that the microphone that was intended for like, change it to HBO, is actually listening all the time.

• 1:53:45John Coogan?

  All the time.

• 1:53:45Casey Neistat?

  So much so, then when it wasn't networked, when it wasn't connected to the network, it would store the audio files locally, and then when it reconnected, it would upload it.

• 1:53:54Jordi Hays?

  Good.

• 1:53:54Casey Neistat?

  I watched that, and I was like, "Fuck, this is what Palmer's going on about, with the desire to make a dumb TV."

• 1:53:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:00Casey Neistat?

  And then I realized, in my bedroom, where I sleep with my wife most nights, some nights when the, you know, marriage, we have that fucking LG TV.

• 1:54:09John Coogan?

  I know, I have one too.

• 1:54:11Casey Neistat?

  So I unplug it from the wall now when I walk into the bedroom.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:15Casey Neistat?

  And it's just like...

• 1:54:15Jordi Hays?

  No, but you remember how fast, how snappy old TVs were, where it's like you press a button, it was just instant?

• 1:54:21Casey Neistat?

  How snappy? I'm forty-five, for me, it was one, it was a physical dial with a long wire that, immediate.

• 1:54:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, immediate, immediate.

• 1:54:28Jordi Hays?

  Now, we gotta go back to wired remotes.

• 1:54:30Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, I'll be the first one to buy that.

• 1:54:33John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, I, I remember, uh, uh, sort of some of my frustrations with the, one of the, one of the metaquests was that I found out that I had seven passwords, because I had a keypad, a code, a meta password, Instagram, Facebook password, and Oculus VR password. And, and I, and I showed this whole process of like what it takes to just take it and then play a game, and it was like fifteen minutes, and then, and then I played, and then I just found a video of somebody turning on an N64, and you just, bing, bing, and you're on.

• 1:55:06Casey Neistat?

  Just turn it on.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  And it's the same thing.

• 1:55:07Casey Neistat?

  And you're playing the game.

• 1:55:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're playing the game. It's ridiculous.

• 1:55:10Casey Neistat?

  Our Samsung TV in the other, in the guest room.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:55:14Casey Neistat?

  In the doghouse.

• 1:55:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, in the doghouse.

• 1:55:15Casey Neistat?

  In order for me to download Netflix, I have to sign into Samsung. I don't have a Samsung password.

• 1:55:20John Coogan?

  Why would I?

• 1:55:21Casey Neistat?

  And I don't want one. I just don't watch fuck Netflix on this thing.

• 1:55:24John Coogan?

  Samsung.

• 1:55:25Casey Neistat?

  It is just so much. They ask so much of us.

• 1:55:28John Coogan?

  I know.

• 1:55:28Casey Neistat?

  And it's, it's not better for the customer.

• 1:55:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it's terrible.

• 1:55:31Casey Neistat?

  I just wanna suck that data from you to sell you more ads.

• 1:55:34John Coogan?

  It's terrible, it's terrible. Um, flipping over to the, the creator economy, the creator side of things, I, I have this idea that with, with the, the advances in vibe coding, there is an opportunity basically for someone to make a game every single day for Mod Retro or, or any platform, web games, and that muscle of doing something small every day would compound, I don't know that they would become the next GTA VI, but they would become something. And I'm wondering how you think about creativity and daily rituals, new platforms in a time of rapidly decreasing cost to create whatever it is.

• 1:56:16Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, I have a super cynical perspective on it and a wildly optimistic.

• 1:56:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:21Casey Neistat?

  So the optimistic one is like, what is it, a million monkeys at a million typewriters, and they'll eventually type out all of Shakespeare?

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  Shakespeare, yeah.

• 1:56:28Casey Neistat?

  I think that's, there's a, there's a, math says that's going to happen, whether it's vibe coding games or...

• 1:56:34John Coogan?

  So you were the monkey on YouTube that typed Shakespeare?

• 1:56:36Casey Neistat?

  Correct.

• 1:56:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:38Casey Neistat?

  But I didn't have vibe coding.

• 1:56:39John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:56:40Casey Neistat?

  And I didn't have AI video.

• 1:56:41John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:56:41Casey Neistat?

  And when...

• 1:56:42John Coogan?

  But you did have GoPros and Canon 5Ds and iMovie.

• 1:56:46Casey Neistat?

  And YouTube.

• 1:56:46John Coogan?

  You didn't need to shoot on film with an RE.

• 1:56:49Casey Neistat?

  It didn't matter. I just kept uploading.

• 1:56:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:50Casey Neistat?

  And then, like, the line that, that I share that often shocks people is I was, I think, very successful on YouTube, very successful, and after seven...

• 1:57:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm hearing about this for the first time.

• 1:57:03Casey Neistat?

  After, after, after seven years of a very successful presence on YouTube, I had two hundred and eighty thousand subscribers.

• 1:57:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:10Casey Neistat?

  And then I started the daily vlog.

• 1:57:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:12Casey Neistat?

  I started, I was the monkey that never left the...

• 1:57:16John Coogan?

  The final monkey.

• 1:57:16Casey Neistat?

  Eighteen months later, I had ten million.

• 1:57:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 1:57:19Casey Neistat?

  And I think if I had maintained that cadence, if the top of the funnel hadn't become more accessible, if the cameras hadn't gotten cheaper, if I hadn't gotten faster at editing because the technology enabled, that, that inflection point would not have happened.

• 1:57:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:57:31Casey Neistat?

  So I'm, yes, I am like the, I am the original monkey at the typewriter. But I think now, especially with AI is doing it, something that is much more complete. And when people shit on AI video, and when I say people, I mean me.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:45Casey Neistat?

  I think it's gonna get to a point where there's gonna be something that's made on AI that's one hundred percent AI, that's undeniably good. And it's just gonna sort of force people to be like, "Oh, I hated it because it was made with AI, but it was a really good fucking movie."

• 1:57:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:58Casey Neistat?

  And eventually, that negativity is gonna start to wane, it will be sort of undeniable.

• 1:58:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:58:04Casey Neistat?

  There's some cynicism in there. I also think that that will enable, especially when it comes to things like gaming.

• 1:58:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:10Casey Neistat?

  Creating software.

• 1:58:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:12Casey Neistat?

  It's just when you open the top of the funnel that wide, the amount of shit being made increases.

• 1:58:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:17Casey Neistat?

  But so does the amount of, of quality stuff being made.

• 1:58:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:20Casey Neistat?

  So I am highly optimistic that there are gonna be these diamonds among a sea of coal, lumps of coal.

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:25Casey Neistat?

  That, that will have real impact and be meaningful.

• 1:58:28John Coogan?

  I would also...

• 1:58:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when I, when I think back, like, I used to work on little like iPhone games. And I remember when I was like trying to just make Pong, right? It was like, I was just trying to make the most simple possible game. The amount of like frustration where you go from like, you know, it's exhilarating because you, you're, you're making progress, and then you, you get like stuck on something, and I was probably like eleven or something at the time. Then you get stuck on something for like two hours, and it's like pure pain, and you're like, "How do I figure out how to get through?" And then you get through. And part of that is like very, part of that is like extremely positive and like worthwhile lessons around like hitting blockers and pushing through. But the amazing thing with AI is like just being able to bust through those like much faster and then compound,

• 1:59:13Jordi Hays?

  compound those learnings and, and do, an, an individual person doing ten times as much in the same period of time, and it's hard not to be excited about it.

• 1:59:22John Coogan?

  It's like a monkey with ten hands. That's the best analogy for AI.

• 1:59:25Casey Neistat?

  We have to keep this monkey analogy.

• 1:59:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:59:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, on, on the video side, the thing that I've been, I think naturally, everyone went from like, "Oh, okay, I'm reading way more AI-generated texts," and, and that was over basically the last two years, and now it's getting harder and harder to tell, and I, we even know people that produce a lot of AI written content, but they've figured out ways to make it not, you know, pangrammable, um, at least, uh, obviously.

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  Until you break your silence, whistle blow.

• 1:59:55Jordi Hays?

  And now I've just noticed like way more, way more like AI video, which, which is like working for me on some niche, like where I'm like trying to learn specifically about a topic.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 2:00:05Jordi Hays?

  But then, but I keep getting hung up on this idea of like, did the person that published, that has, owns the account, did they actually review this video? Because I think that that's where the... Like I'm looking, yeah, yeah. Is there actual curation? Is there someone saying, because specifically I'm thinking of, um, there's, there's an account on Instagram that does like sim, sim racing, like tutorials, lessons or whatever. And so they're putting out like probably 20 videos a day on different topics. And a lot of it is feels like generally right, but, but the, the, where, where it will break down is like, if, if you just, if, if the AI is effectively like reading an online forum and then just piping it into

• 2:00:48Jordi Hays?

  video, and then that advice is like expired almost.

• 2:00:51Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, you're, you're describing the modern news cycle.

• 2:00:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:55Casey Neistat?

  Like that is what, you know, Instagram, Tik Tok and, you know, X news is. It's, it's a, it's a variant of what you're describing.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  Firehose.

• 2:01:03Casey Neistat?

  That's why there's so much, the, the noise to signal ratio has just gotten so convoluted and difficult to navigate. I don't know, maybe like a more acute example of something like that is like, my favorite genre on YouTube is short, esoteric, World War II documentaries.

• 2:01:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:01:19Casey Neistat?

  There's a guy, he's my favorite YouTube around the planet, isn't Mark Felton.

• 2:01:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:22Jordi Hays?

  I love that guy.

• 2:01:23Casey Neistat?

  You know this guy.

• 2:01:25Jordi Hays?

  That's why I fall, I fall asleep to that kind of.

• 2:01:26Casey Neistat?

  Me too. Every day, when I get my sandwich at lunch, I sit in my office by myself, I watch one of his, like a 50 year old British historian. He is an objectively terrible filmmaker.

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:37Casey Neistat?

  Who makes these single best videos. It's just him narrating it over whatever images he could find. I watched that and then I also watched these 100% AI generated, that clearly have a human editorial oversight because they're, they're factually correct. Very well done. And they have all of the YouTube AI notifications all over them. And it, it doesn't bother me.

• 2:01:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:58Casey Neistat?

  It doesn't bother me because it feels like I'm, I'm reading something with visuals that are simply there to support it. It's, I'm very conscious that these are artificially generated images. They're just meant to sort of visualize what something looked like that wasn't actually captured. And for me, like, those are the fissures.

• 2:02:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:15Casey Neistat?

  I'm seeing as someone who's like an anti, who's a purist when it comes to filmmaking.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:02:19Casey Neistat?

  Yet I'm willing to tolerate that. And I think that delta is going to.

• 2:02:22Jordi Hays?

  That's why I don't, I, I never, like, AI content is already here, it's happening. There's going to be 10,000 times more of it in probably two years. But I haven't been, but I haven't been afraid because when I, when I think about my favorite creators and where I'm actually spending attention today, it's like, it's, it's like the guy that you're just talking about, Mark Felton. There's another guy named H.I. Sutton, who's just obsessed with like naval warfare.

• 2:02:48Casey Neistat?

  Yes.

• 2:02:48Jordi Hays?

  And just nerds out about it.

• 2:02:50Casey Neistat?

  I'm a subscriber.

• 2:02:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I figured. But like, he'll just basically press record and he has a presentation, like slides he's going through.

• 2:02:58Casey Neistat?

  And he's narrating it.

• 2:02:58Jordi Hays?

  Some video. He's like, I don't use AI, just sort of sit here and talk. And it's like incredibly captivating and interesting because you're listening to somebody like the world expert on the topic, who maybe uses AI to learn about some stuff now, like off, off air, but then he's just narrating it as a human. And there's just, I'm always going to have time in my day for the H.I. Suttons of the world.

• 2:03:20Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, look, it's a, it's a proliferation of, of podcasts on YouTube.

• 2:03:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:25Casey Neistat?

  Like if I'm watching something, when I edit my own videos, like I will debate a single frame, a 24th of a second, does this fuck up my timing?

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:03:33Casey Neistat?

  Yet then I'll click play and watch a three hour podcast where it's just some dude talking for three hours. Cause I care about the subject matter. And I think this is like the, the extraordinary range in people's appetite for what they're willing to give their attention to. And the idea that there isn't room in there for AI content, I think is, um, is misguided at best.

• 2:03:54John Coogan?

  Last question. What shirt are you wearing under that jacket?

• 2:03:59Casey Neistat?

  Well, I would like to, I do have a plug today. This isn't to sell anything because these aren't for sale, but.

• 2:04:04Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:04:04John Coogan?

  Um, our former intern. Yeah.

• 2:04:07Casey Neistat?

  At Mod Retro, Jeremy.

• 2:04:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:09Casey Neistat?

  Who's now, his title on his business card is Special Operations.

• 2:04:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:04:13Casey Neistat?

  I'm not sure we knew what else to give him as a title when we put him on payroll. He designed this latest Mod Retro merch.

• 2:04:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. So everyone watching can screenshot it. And as a fun game, try and identify each of these letters because they each come from a different piece of a game.

• 2:04:30Casey Neistat?

  Which one got us hung up this morning?

• 2:04:32John Coogan?

  Uh, I think the T we were going.

• 2:04:35Casey Neistat?

  I, I knew the T.

• 2:04:36John Coogan?

  Uh, I identified the M, the O, the D. I think I might've missed the E, the R. You knew the O and I, I, I was off on the 64, but I was directionally correct.

• 2:04:49Casey Neistat?

  Directionally correct.

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  Uh, no spoilers, but plenty of teasers. Go figure it out.

• 2:04:53Casey Neistat?

  Compliments to Jeremy.

• 2:04:54John Coogan?

  Head over to Mod Retro, get yourself a chromatic and start.

• 2:04:57Jordi Hays?

  Turn the T-shirt into a playable game.

• 2:05:00John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:05:02Casey Neistat?

  I'd download it. I'd flash it onto my, my card.

• 2:05:05John Coogan?

  Well, that's our show, folks. Thank you for tuning into TBPN. We will see you tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific sharp back in the TVP Ultra Dome in Hollywood and.

• 2:05:17Jordi Hays?

  I see a wild, I see a wild Theo over here.

• 2:05:19John Coogan?

  Oh, we gotta go see him. You know, uh, there's.

• 2:05:22Jordi Hays?

  He and Elon and Dario and Sam agree on a lot of stuff.

• 2:05:26John Coogan?

  They do, they do. Well, we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

• 2:05:28Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, folks.