OpenAI’s Head of ChatGPT: We’re entering a new era of AI (again) | Tibo Sottiaux

Often when I look at what people are building out there, it's just like, you're not quite getting it. If you were just pushing yourself and just really imagining all of this being roughly 10 times better than it is today, like in a year, you would build in a different way.

What do you think people aren't pricing in in terms of where things are going?

The majority of actions on the internet will be taken by agents. If you want your product to be successful for agents, you have to build for a certain level of scale.

How many agents do you find yourself running in parallel just in your day-to-day work?

As I'm pushing the frontier, I find myself building larger and larger teams. of agents. And then when we have the next breakthrough with models, like suddenly it's just kind of like, oh well, you know, a bigger agent can just do all of it. And so I kind of shrink the team again and then it just kind of goes through this expansion and shrinking expansion.

It kind of makes me think about there's this whole loops thing and then this whole graphs thing.

Having to set up and fiddle with your loops is something that maybe people got excited about, but I don't think this is the way that it's going to work over time. You just want a system that learns. You don't want to necessarily think about, oh, I was just like, I'm going to loop it exactly this way in order to get results.

Do you think there's still more radical change happening to how we work?

going to continue to change quite radically. Even today, it still feels like a bit clunky, and I think it will feel clunky until it isn't.

Thibault, thank you for doing this.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Of course.

Nice room. You launched a ton of stuff today. How's your sleep?

How are you sleeping?

Are you doing all right?

I'm doing great. I'm fortunate to have a very good team. So while I sleep, they were awake most of the night. We have this amazing room at the office called the library, which we completely repurposed as like a mega war room. And the vibes in there are just immaculate. Uh, people were there until like very, very late.

So you've been a longtime engineer. Are you, are you coding at all anymore? Are you shipping PRs? Are you mostly like in docs and meetings now?

What is coding?

Exactly. Yeah. Are you shipping PRs? I don't know.

Is that— Uh, yeah, yeah. Merging some code every once in a while. Technically, like a lot of code is getting written for me to do all sorts of kinds of like analysis, like, you know, understand like trends, understand the business, understand the next feature, you know, how well our previous launches are doing. A lot of code is written by Codex for that. You know, I'm obviously not writing it by hand anymore. Occasionally at, during the weekends, I'll have like a little therapeutic moment where I do a little LeetCode, just by hand. Um, but that's the only actual hand coding that I do.

How many agents do you find yourself running in parallel just, uh, in the, in kind of your day-to-day work?

I used to run a lot more in parallel and then we were, you know, fortunate enough to get, um, a breakthrough with UltraFast. And so now, you know, I feel like, you know, I'm able to be in the flow again. And so just having a faster agent helps me a lot. I'm excited that we're getting, you know, 6.1 SOL UltraFast out there. soon. And then, yeah, I think it sort of varies. As I'm kind of like pushing the frontier, I find myself like, you know, building larger and larger teams of agents. And then when we have the next breakthrough with models, like suddenly it's just kind of like, oh, well, you know, a bigger agent can just do all of it and keep everything in memory and learn. And so I kind of shrink the team again. And then it just kind of goes through this expansion and shrinking expansion.

Can you say more about that? It kind of makes me think about there's this whole loops thing and then this whole graphs thing. This like an evolution of that in some way, or?

I think like having to set up and fiddle with your loops and, you know, figuring that out is something that, you know, maybe people got excited about, but I don't think this is the way that it's going to work. I think the way that it's going to work is how we're positioning and what we're shipping with DOTS, where you have an incredibly smart agent that works 24/7, understands your goals, understands your preferences. Learns from feedback. Um, and, you know, it's like, what we launched is like not perfect. I will learn very much from, you know, making this available to all our pro users. But over time, you just want a system that learns from, you know, what you want to achieve. You don't want to necessarily think about, oh, I was just like, you know, I'm going to loop it exactly this way in order to get results.

So right now there's Codex, there's ChatGPT Work, there's ChatGPT Consumer, there's DOTS. What I'm hearing is you think we're heading towards DOTS kind of being the primary way you talk to AI. And that kicks off all these other things.

Yeah, I think fundamentally, if you just take a step back and, you know, whether it's DOTS or not, it's all about breaking free from the technology and having this sort of like permanent active intelligence that knows, you know, everything it needs to do and is available through any client, any screen. You can call it, you know, like maybe you walk into a meeting room. It shows up in the meeting, it takes notes, you know, you pick it back up on email. Um, and then, you know, you text it if you need it. It's not that, you know, you need to be glued to a laptop or, you know, you're like always on your phone. It's just like, it's available when you need it. And it's also like gets out of the way when you don't need it. And I can't wait, you know, for that to sort of like come to fruition because I think like just carrying your laptop as like this brick around everywhere is just like, you know, you're kind of like tied to the technology instead of the technology working for you.

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I was going to ask you about this. It feels like so much has changed in how we worked over the past like 2 years. In 2 years, especially engineers, but a lot of roles have just, the role, your day-to-day life has changed significantly. And I'm curious if you think we're kind of settling into what work will look like in the next, I don't know, 5 years, let's say 2 years. That feels way too far to think about. Or do you think there's still more radical change happening to how we work?

Oh, I think it's going to continue to change quite radically. Even today, you know, it does seem like the technology is finally coming together with voice, uh, you know, multimodal inputs, outputs, but it still feels like a bit clunky. And I think it will feel clunky. Until it isn't. And then you're just like, wow, you know, it's like, I can just talk to this thing the same way that we're talking right now. It just remembers things perfectly. If I want to, you know, ideate and brainstorm, it can just like, you know, squiggle a thing. I have this collaborative surface, you know, this is what we launched with ChatGPT Spaces, like, you know, the very start of that. You know, you can imagine we have like a shared whiteboard. We can collaborate between humans, between agents. And I think it's going to sort of like transcend conversations, transcend, you know, like a lot of the clients that you have today.

Yeah.

And like, none of this is just really working today, right? So I think like we're going to go through this big new transformation.

What I'm hearing here is Dots is a big part of that future, this AI assistant that just kind of does everything for you and you don't have to think about Codex versus ChatGPT.

Yes. And for Codex and ChatGPT, we're going to merge, uh, like the, the, we have, we have chat, we have the work toggle. Like, no, we heard the feedback loud and clear. Like, no, people love the capability in work, but then also, you know, you're like, sometimes you want to use chat because it's a little bit faster. And more pleasant to use. And so we're merging that, we're reducing that complexity. Eventually we will ship all of the capabilities of DOTS straight into ChatGPT as well and lift the floor for our 1.2 billion users, which at that time we'll see how many we have. And we want it to be really, really seamless. One thing that I'm very excited with DOTS is they don't have a model picker. There's just no configuration. You just talk to it. The only thing that you have to configure is which channels you want to It feels very much like the Her kind of vision of the world.

I don't know. Do you think about that movie much? Just this idea of this.

I watched it once.

Yeah.

I think it's, it's, it's interesting, you know, to, to, to think about, you know, maybe more what, what I think about more is like, you know, sci-fi from, from, you know, 30, 40 years ago and like how visionary it was.

Is there a specific sci-fi you think about that's most influenced you?

Like, you know, books like Neuromancer and then, you know, the original like Star Trek, um, you know, I think about that a lot and there's something about Star Trek, which I think, you know, was like, it was this technology that was like very, very useful. Obviously, like, you know, you're able to just like talk to a computer and like it does things for you. Like you can talk to your spaceship and it just moves, right? It's like, this is getting real, you know, like we're entering that era.

So we're recording this in front of a live audience. There was this line out the door, just people waiting to see you, to hear from you. How do you just think about this, I don't know, role you're in, this responsibility you have to build what you're building and the impact it has on people's lives? I don't know, just what does that feel like? How do you think about that?

I think it's very important to be part of a community and to build with people. I was like, in a way we're discovering this technology and like what it can do together. And so every time I, you know, talk to people, I'm like, I'm kind of like reminded of you're doing this thing, which I hadn't even anticipated, you know, it's impacting your life in a certain way and it's impacted like, you know, this other person's life. And then it's just like all together, it's both very humbling, very inspiring, and I think very necessary in order to build something that is truly useful for humans. I don't know how we would do it without the community.

That's something I hear a lot with people building an AI is they don't know what it is until they've launched it and they see how people use it, see what emerges. And it feels like kind of what you're saying is just to build it with people versus like, here's the vision, we've got it figured out.

Even the Twitter community has been very nice in general.

You're very good at Twitter. Kind of antagonistic sometimes, but very good. How do you find time to even tweet? I don't understand how someone in your role has time to sit on Twitter, tweet, reply.

I spend like maybe half an hour per day.

Wow. Okay.

Just scrolling and then doing something when I feel inspired and I have something interesting to say. Often it just comes like in the moment.

Yeah. Perfect Twitter skill.

And I have a, um, we haven't released the dot, uh, the, the, the team dots yet, but You know, today we're releasing the primary dot, which you can configure, you can get used to like what a dot can do, connect it to your apps. Um, but we'll release, uh, the ability to create more than one. And so I have one that's just responsible for Twitter.

Okay.

Say more about that. So right now everyone gets one dot.

Yeah.

Uh, right now they can't add more dots. That's right. They will be able to have many dots. Talk about kind of where that's going.

Yeah. So we wanted to start with one, the primary dot, which is the one that, you know, you'll probably also text. That learns your preferences most deeply as well and kind of see what people do with it, see how we need to tune the system, learn by working with the community. And then very quickly, soon you'll be able to add a second one, a third one, a fourth one, as many as you need to create your virtual team. And then you can give them specific roles, right? It's not, I don't find it absolutely necessary, but sometimes I have a thing that requires quite a bit of work. You know, such as like monitoring like Twitter for me. And then, you know, that's like a thing of just like, okay, this will be like so much work that it's like the work of an entire dot. Um, and then, you know, you can have a couple of those.

So if you think about all the launches that happened today, it feels like dots may be like the sexiest. I'm curious if there's something that you think is not getting the attention it probably deserves that will become really, really important down the road. That's kind of, people are sleeping on, that's like a vision.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think the sleeper hit is, uh, ecosystem. So opening it all up and the commitment, the deep commitment we have towards opening it all up. So we have signed in with ChatGPT, 16 partners, very, very proud of that. Like we started that, like really it was sort of like in the moment last year. I was talking to creators of Pi and OpenCode and it was like, of course, you know, you should just be able to use the Codex sign-on and then, you know, use the usage. And then we kind of like shook hands, you know, like virtually we're like, you know, it's just like use this auth and then, you know, kind of trust you to not do anything shady. That grew, obviously that became quite popular. And then now we made it an actual thing that we support with many, many partners. And I'm excited to grow that very quickly. The other side as well is opening up all of the infrastructure and how we build for ChatGPT with plugin extensions, also plugin discovery, just allowing everyone to ship something to maybe 1.2 billion users, right? And benefiting from that distribution. And we also have shared economics that we didn't actually talk Uh, in the keynote, but, you know, we will pay, you know, uh, our plugins that are, uh, popular and, you know, are seeing a lot of usage. Uh, they're going to get part of like the, the revenue share as well. Uh, and so I think this commitment towards an open ecosystem is going to be very exciting.

That's amazing. Uh, okay. So as an example, so say Notion, somebody is using the Notion plugin or the Figma plugin within, uh, ChatGPT work. Notion, Figma make money from people using it within the app.

Yes. So we have all these subscribers that use ChatGPT. They get a certain amount of usage. And then when they have that, when their users use that usage with the plugin or within the other product, when they use sign in with ChatGPT, we will have some shared economics with them where they will get remunerated.

One of the, I don't know, things I think that gets people excited about plugins and ecosystems is distribution platforms, ways to kind of get out there. People discover my app. And blows up. Do you have any advice for people that want their plugins to bubble up, to get discovered?

Build a good plugin. Yeah. The way that it works, and we'll obviously tune the system, but we look at retention numbers. We look at how successful the plugin, the quality, and then that's what we then start to recommend to users in conversations. And so your plugin can just get recommended to a significant slice of users. Obviously, if your plugin is not quite good, it will stop being recommended.

Right. That's amazing that you're looking at retention of people using that plugin. That's right.

Is it, is it actually adding utility? Is it, you know, enabling ChatGPT to do something else?

Got it. So it's, it's not so much an AEO kind of get the right words and get people writing about you. It's people using it consistently, sticking with it.

That's right.

I think. Okay. So you think that's kind of the sleeper hit that's going to become a big deal. And I know this is kind of the second attempt. You guys had an app marketplace that—

This one is the right one.

Okay.

This is— This one's going to work.

Maybe going back to DOTS, because it feels like that's a big part of the vision in the future. When did you guys start working on this? Obviously there's an OpenClaw, big OpenClaw moment. You guys, Peter joined and there's a foundation, uh, and then GroqBot, Muse, and Instinct and all these things. I guess, how long have you guys been working on it? What, why'd it take so long for you guys to get something out?

Do you remember Codex Cloud?

Yeah, the first, uh, yeah.

That was like a year ago, right? And, uh, if you look back at Codex Cloud and you look at the little animation that we used, I think that was the inspiration for GrokBot. Yeah, it's just like very, very similar, eerily similar, I would say. But seriously, like on the research, long persistent, long horizon tasks, this is something that we've worked on for more than 2 years. Memory systems that stay coherent, roughly the same amount of time. We launched a lot of that straight into ChatGPT. I think people just really enjoy that ChatGPT gets to know so much relevant information about you. So many people I talk to have like an anecdote of like, hey, you know, I fell ill and, you know, ChatGPT remembered actually like, you know, I had this barbecue and, you know, I had like lime and I was like making tequila and like, you know, just like probably like this burn that I have on my hand is actually like this lime, you know, it's like a sunburn and you're just like, how did it know that? And it's like, you know, it's just memory works very, very well in ChatGPT. And so we've put a lot of research in that. And, you know, all of this coming together on top of like the Codex harness and also the ability to just like run 24/7 with, you know, good productivity. That's what we launched with DOTS. And so it's the work of like many, many months. And then one of the important things was also getting safety and security right. You know, this is also why we launched with Astra. It's our safest, most aligned model. And like a lot more effort went into like making DOTS like, you know, just really safe and secure.

A question I like to ask people who come on the podcast is, where do you think human brains will continue to be valuable over time? Where do you find yourself being necessary in the work that happens versus where AI is taking on more and more? Where do you think human brains will continue to be useful, most useful over time?

Yes, I think this is very much a function of how we build the technology and the way that we design everything at OpenAI is like to put humans at the center of it and build it as extensions of humans, of your will and your taste. And so just really be like this super empowering thing. I think as long as we continue to do that and it kind of like enables you to just take whatever you wanted to do and, you know, your creativity and your taste and sort of like, you know, expand that, you know, in a way that feels like awesome in the moment. It's just like really this artistic tool, right? And we may, we may not have coders anymore, but we have more builders than ever. And I think there's something that's going to remain like, you know, deeply human about that. Like humans want to learn and see, you know, what other humans are building. And, you know, I'm like much more interested. I'm here. I'm, you know, I'm not talking to Dot, you know, I'm talking to you, right? I think that will remain true for like a very, very long time.

One of the things that's emerged with engineers especially in how their lives have changed is there's a lot more context switching. There's kind of this trend of loneliness that has emerged where they're talking to agents all day instead of other humans. I'm curious how much you think about just like that part of the impact AI has on people's lives and just how you might, is there solutions to that? Is there stuff you think about to make that less annoying?

Yes, all the time. Reducing configuration fatigue is one, reducing The fact that talking to an agent is like sort of like a solo adventure and you just have this conversation just with your one agent and then you have like many and then you're delegating so many things. A lot of things are going to come together to make it much more delightful and something that I spend a lot of time, the team spends a lot of time thinking about. So I think for me, the ideal way to get things done is, would be like to just have it in your physical space. We're just having conversation like we have now. It's able to sort of like observe, like here are the ideas that we have. We can jot something down on a white paper, on a paper, it can maybe take that and start building in the background. And then you're like, actually I have another idea. And it's just like, it starts building another thing. It gets projected on a screen and then you just talk to it and it's just involved in a conversation with other humans. And you don't have this fatigue of having to be on this screen and you're just thinking about prompting. It just becomes supernatural. That's what we're trending towards. I think We didn't fully get there today, but, you know, we'll get there in the future.

One of the other kind of downsides that's emerged along those lines is just this kind of pressure to do more because we can do more. Everyone's just like, come on, run 30 agents at once. Why aren't you shipping more? Everyone's shipping more. Do you think that's solvable? Do you think that's just kind of, I don't know, human nature? We can do more. Let's do more. Something there.

I think we heard Sam as well, you know, about the promise of this as well, which is reduce the noise and allow you to spend attention where you want to spend attention. And having all these things that are maybe important and maybe not important, but vying for your attention, it's just sort of like tone that down a little bit and just get you to focus on the things. I find it remarkable, every time I go on a holiday and I take that one week to just fully disconnect, I start to think in different and more creative ways. And I'm very eager to see, like, you know, can we bring that, you know, can we just make this your day to day? Like, you know, maybe you need fewer meetings, you know, maybe you don't need, you know, to do as much and, you know, you would actually be more productive if you're like, you know, better rested. And so, you know, we will have to, you know, I think as an industry figure that out. Um, but I think that's the promise of AI and it's not, you know, just one more prompt, you know, per second.

There's a bot that I'm building right now that's kind of this energy audit bot that watches my calendar and asks me just like, was this giving you energy, taking away energy? Is this something someone else could have done? I feel like, you know, AI should be like, hey, Lenny, maybe, maybe you can cut out these things so you could be a happier person. Is there anything you've done really interestingly with AI recently that's just like a really cool use case of, wow, that really was amazing. That blew my mind. Or someone you've heard?

Oh, it was like something cool because the live demo just failed, right? You know, in front of everyone. Uh, so it was like, okay, well, that's not cool. But actually, uh, my, my My dot was, you know, it's like realized I was, you know, at Dev Day, like, you know, we have ChatGPT production when done. And so it pinged me 5 minutes before the live demo, which was actually quite stressful because it was like, hey, production is down. And it's like, oh, well, you know, it's like, do you want me to try and fix it? And I'm like, I don't think you're there yet, you know, a little dot, but, you know, thank you for trying. And then, you know, then, you know, I got in touch with like the engineering teams and we started to look. You know, what was going on and, you know, they, it's like fixed by now, but having this thing that just understands like, okay, there's a pretty important thing happening. It's called Dev Day. There's like this production system. There's a live demo. It's probably using this production system. So these 2 things are connected and this is happening in 5 minutes. So I should ping him because like he probably wants to know about it. I think that's quite remarkable.

That is remarkable.

Wow.

So it just knew that this was coming and told you, and I love that it wanted to fix it and you were like, not quite, you're not quite there yet.

I don't think you're just like, you know, please go in Trust me, but that would have been a better story.

How do you feel about just giving access to all these things? I don't know, does it have access to the production codebase?

It has access to some production systems with guardrails. So we built, we talked about specialist dots, but specialist dots just operate with additional guardrails, additional monitoring, and then on their own hardware. So we actually run some on Mac minis. The fundamental difference in the way that we've built DOTS is like the harness does not run on the machine, you know? And then this is like, maybe people have not realized is like it can connect to as many devices as you want. So it has its own computer. You can actually connect it to your own laptop as well. Over time, you might connect it to like 10 different devices and it can control it all a little bit like an octopus.

So you're basically talking to your DOTS, it's living in some VM somewhere and it can—

Yeah.

Might be a VM, might not be a VM. It's just like, it's a thing, you know, and it can connect to many devices.

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I know you're hiring a lot. In your interviewing, what have you seen as skills that are kind of trending up in what you look for that is more and more important in people being successful now? And what skills do you find are trending down that are just like, okay, we don't need that as much?

Yeah, I would say like a skill that is trending down is typing fast. That is not that useful anymore. Skills that are trending up is, you know, just great taste, thinking about the user, connecting to the audience that you're building for. A lot of ex-founders are incredibly successful right now, or like, you know, just like repeat founders. We're also finding this like when we're hiring at OpenAI, it's like, you know, we have a lot of founders. I think we have more than 120 XYZ founders currently at OpenAI. So it's like this mega startup. And I think just this, This passion and this envy to build something that matters and then know what good looks like is more important than ever.

I've been arguing for a long time that PMs are kind of going to thrive in this time because that's basically the job of a PM. Uh, you know, they're like, what should we build? Help someone build it. And then is this right? Is this great?

And iterate.

So, uh, I don't know.

I agree with that. Yeah.

All right.

Also, roles are blurring. So, you know, you might, you might have been, you know, only into design or only an engineer and Um, you know, it felt always a little bit uncomfortable, but, you know, now it's just like, it's your time to shine.

Do you miss the engineering part of the job? I was an engineer back in the day. I was an engineer for 10 years. Little did you know. And, you know, there's this flow state. There's this beauty of just building and just seeing it work and not work. And you kind of miss that at all? Or are you just like, okay, this is my old life?

I, um, I missed that for, for a while. And then now with, you know, really fast speeds, I'm finding that back. And so I'm like really excited to democratize that as much as possible. It will take a while for it to be like, no, absolutely ubiquitous, right? And like, you know, available to like more than a billion users. But now, you know, with ultra fast speeds, like we're able to achieve it for a 6-month soul. It's like, you know, it costs roughly the same as Astra. And so the progress there is like quite astonishing, you know, even for us internally, we're like, wow, you know, we can do these things also because we are using Astra and we're finding, you know, like we can push it super far. And when you have those speeds and especially when you can be able to like voice control it, you know, you kind of get back into this like really creative state of mind and like the flow. It is different from the flow of the past, but I don't miss it.

Yeah, it's like your last 2 launch videos, just people kind of standing around talking to their AI and just cooking or sitting on a lounge chair. I asked people while I was kind of walking around the event what to ask you. And one thing that came up a few times is advice for new grads, kind of people junior in their career. I think a lot of people look up to you and they want to be the next Thibault. What advice do you have for folks kind of early in their career in terms of what to work on, what skills to build, what to do?

Yeah, I think the next Thibault is already at OpenAI. His name is Ahmed Ibrahim. I love working with him. He was a new grad when he was hired at OpenAI. He's now responsible for all of OpenAI compute fleet and applied, which is a massive, massive responsibility and built a lot of the Codex harness. And the thing that has made Ahmed really stand out and successful is just his, he's incredibly kind. He's incredibly collaborative and always tries to solve the problem that is really important, but in a way that he's not putting himself first. And he is just a sponge. He's learning so fast and learning about everything and using all of the latest technology to learn at speeds I haven't seen before. And so he just in the span of like, you know, a couple of months and a year, you know, it's like his progress at the company was just absolutely fascinating to see. And he's now someone I trust a ton in doing like, you know, the most gnarly launches at OpenAI. All right.

I got to get him on the podcast.

You should, you should.

So kind of thinking about how things work at OpenAI, what would surprise people about what it's like to work inside OpenAI? From the outside, it feels like it's just like constant Shipping code, things are kind of like chaotic but awesome.

I don't know.

What would surprise people about what it's like inside at OpenAI?

I don't know if that's surprising, but it is, as I said, a lot of ex-founders doing a lot of bottoms-up, very exciting ideas. For example, Decisions API came together very quickly. We realized we have a really good model with Luna. We can just do some constraint sampling and then You know, have it, you know, shipped as like a different shape to the responses API. And then, you know, when we do that, it, you know, it's like, it's faster and it's quite delightful for some cases. And it's just, if you were to like peel under the hood, you realize like, okay, there's this Slack channel that came together. You know, initially it was like 4 people kind of hacking on it on a weekend and then it was made accessible as like, you know, company food. And then people got excited, started to build things and they're like, oh, this is, you know, we can support visual inputs. Like this is, you know, even better than whatever is out there. And then, you know, people get more and more excited. People start pitching in, in a way that is like, you know, feels completely unstructured. And then, um, you know, take it all the way and like, you know, ship something. And then, uh, we try to hold like a high bar for, you know, the quality and then, you know, stop things, you know, before they go out or like, you know, maybe they need a little bit more baking. There's many more things that, you know, we were maybe going to ship today at Dev Day. And then we were like, okay, like, I was like, I think this is a lot already. Let's kind of hold it back a little bit and, you know, space it out. So we'll have more launches next week and the week after. But it's just this incredible, like, bottoms-up energy. And then, you know, people kind of assuming roles to kind of channel that in productive ways.

Something that's very clear and unique about OpenAI is it feels like you have a lot of autonomy. You're just like pressing the reset button whenever you want. You're just saying things on Twitter. Uh, it feels like a really unique culture where you have a lot of autonomy and I imagine that comes with a lot of trust. Maybe speak to just how that, because it feels like that's an advantage at OpenAI that allows you to move faster, just That cultural philosophy?

You get a lot of autonomy and then, you know, you have to just own up to it. So, you know, we just kind of trust people to make great choices. And then, you know, when things go wrong, you know, fix it quickly or, you know, learn from the mistake. So far so good. You know, it's just really worked as a very empowering environment. It is true that I can press the reset button whenever, you know, is necessary and whenever it feels right. And, you know, that's like, that's a privilege. And also it allows me to, you know, just really be close to the community in ways that I think, you know, would not be otherwise possible, right? I don't have to run it, you know, through an echelon of approvals.

You said sometimes people screw up. Is there something you screwed up in that? In that, I don't know, the amount of autonomy and trust you have is something you messed up?

Yes, I think at times I could have, you know, made teams like, you know, more inspired to build like things that are less complex and just really continue to strive towards complexity. I think we, you know, we early days in Codex, like, you know, we had, you know, a couple of like outages that I caused very, very early days for me at OpenAI. I took production down like day 3, you know, I was just saying, I was still employed after that. And I learned my lesson.

One of the other questions people wanted me to ask you is how many resets should they expect in the next, I don't know, month or week?

Depends how many times we break things.

Okay. So that's the philosophy. Break something, you reset. That's kind of the—

Yeah. Break something, celebrate things.

So maybe zooming out a little bit, what do you think people aren't pricing in in terms of where things are going and what will change that they're not just seeing as clearly as they should?

I think there's so many things that I feel are not yet priced in. I think the majority of actions on the internet will be taken by agents. Models are going to become more cheaper and faster at rates that are quite incredible. We will finally be able to integrate all modalities together in a way that is very seamless. And I think, you know, those 3, I feel like, you know, often when I look at what people are building out there, it's just like, not, you know, it's just like, you're not quite getting it. It's like, you know, you're almost there, but like, you know, if you were just like pushing yourself and just really imagining like all of these being roughly 10 times better than it is today, you know, like in a year, it's like, you know, you would build in a different way.

Do you see any kind of second order effects that come from that, from this world where most actions are being, uh, from agents, agents are probably most traffic is going to come from agents. I don't know. That's right. You think about some second-order effect that emerges out of that?

Yeah, there are many. First of all, if you want your product to be successful for agents, you have to build for a certain level of scale. We've worked very closely with Notion, for example, and when they built their MCP, suddenly it's like, oh, well, it's available to all these agents that can actually do the work and use that MCP. And so they saw a ton of traffic kind of come in. And that puts obviously a lot of strain on the system and you have to figure out the economics of that. And so there's like this tension, you know, between like, you know, if you're building products, it's like, you know, do you build an interface or not? And, you know, you can kind of hold that back for a while, but it is inevitable, right? It's like, you know, you're, the majority of things are going to be used by agents. Building towards that future, I think, is very important. The other thing is, you know, on the flip side, you know, building like, you know, absolutely delightful new experiences for humans that, you know, really benefit from all the modalities. is something that I feel like is underinvested in.

Is there something you've changed your mind about in the past, let's say year, just something that you used to believe that you see differently?

I was expecting us to reach the level of capabilities of the models that we have today, say like Astra, maybe in a year or two. And so I had to sort of revise my prioriter. Also, I did not expect to rely so much on voice. And, you know, I do so much through dictation or just calling my agent. And I had not anticipated that, you know, how much better that feels. So like I had to change my mind there. And then, you know, you talked about hiring and, you know, one thing that I hadn't realized is like the incredible talent and energy and, you know, the just younger generations have, um, and how they would be the ones embracing like all this change first and like figure out how to harness, you know, all of it. And so, you know, that changed also my opinion on hiring and the strategy there.

The, just to double down on that, just this idea that new people, new in the workforce actually have an advantage because they haven't worked in a certain way and they could just go all in on AI.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think like just also the ability to just absorb and learn like super fast.

So you talked about models getting really smart fast. Obviously there's a lot of discussion these days about what AI can do in the future, the dangers AI poses to humans, PDoM and all these things. You guys have slowed down some training. You guys, everyone's pacing the frontier. How do you think about this world of AI and the potential risk to humans? How do you think about that?

For me, pacing the frontier is just really investing ahead, right? And also investing way more than we even think we ought Investing in the alignment and safety of the models, investing in security, investing in the guardrails. We are spending more and more compute on sort of like secondary monitoring. So you have all of the compute that is going into the primary system, the agent that is doing work, and then you have all of the compute that is going into monitoring the primary agent to make sure that it's not taking too high risk of actions or interrupting it if anything looks like maybe it's getting prompt injected and just intervening with that. And the majority of our investment on the API stack is actually going into the safety stack. And so to me, that is pacing. It's like, you want to make sure that you're extremely hardened. That's what we're doing. We haven't yet released the next step up in capability beyond Astra. We have released a level that is similar, near Astra intelligence, but much more efficient. So we feel very comfortable about that, but we're going to continue to invest a ton there. And I feel I feel very good about our approach so far. I think it was also in the news that we had 6.1 Astra and then we didn't release it. And that is something I'm very proud of.

So what I'm hearing is you're optimistic we will solve these problems of alignment and AI doing really bad things. AI has been doing a lot of really, really not good things lately with Hugging Face and all that stuff. But what I'm hearing is optimistic we'll solve it. It'll be all right.

Yes. And it's also, it's, it's, I feel, you know, obviously a deep responsibility, but also just, you know, if you think about the incentives for OpenAI, right? It's like, you know, we build products for 1.2 billion people. We can't screw that up, right? You know, we take it very, very seriously. What we put in the hands of so many people, you know, including people who are not very technical themselves, you know, you have to get it right. And so, you know, we don't gamble there.

Final question. Uh, what's something that annoys you about the current state of the app that you're just like, goddammit, we gotta fix that? Uh, current state of the app.

Um, I feel like the, the, the models are almost there, but not quite for the app to almost completely disappear. And, you know, I can't wait for, you know, to just really get to this like super essence of, uh, simplicity. I myself even get fatigued with the model picker and the reasoning efforts and, you know, whether to use multi-agent or Ultra or, you know, what it even does. And you kind of need a PhD in model pickers, right? Um, and I just want to get rid of all of that, um, as quickly as we can.

Amazing. Thibault, thanks for doing this.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

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