OpenAI’s Head of ChatGPT: We’re entering a new era of AI (again) | Tibo Sottiaux
Guests: Tibo Sottiaux
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript · 00:00–24:33
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 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, suddenly, it's just kind of like, "Oh.
Well, a bigger agent can just do all of it."
And so I kind of shrink the team again, and then it just goes through this expansion and shrinking expansion.
It kind of makes me think about there's this whole loops thing, and then this little graphs thing.
Having to set up and fiddle with your loops is something that maybe people get 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 thinking I've got 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?
It's going to continue to change quite radically.
Even today, it still feels a bit clunky, and I think it will feel clunky until it isn't.
Tibo, 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 repurpose as a mega war room, and the vibes in there are just immaculate.
People were there until very, very late.
So you've been a longtime engineer.
Are you coding at all anymore?
Are you shipping PRs, or are you mostly in docs and meetings now?
What is coding?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Are you shipping PRs?
I don't know.
Is that-
Yeah, yeah.
Merging some code every once in a while.
Technically, a lot of code is getting written for me to do all sorts of kinds of analysis, understand trends, understand the business, understand the next feature, how well our previous launches are doing.
A lot of code is written by Codex for that.
I'm obviously not writing it by hand anymore.
Occasionally, during the weekends, I will have a little therapeutic moment where I do a little lead code just by hand, but that's the only actual hand coding that I do.
How many agents do you find yourself running in parallel just in your day-to-day work?
I used to run a lot more in parallel, and then we were fortunate enough to get a breakthrough at Ultrafast.
And so now, I feel like 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 six-months-old Ultrafast out there soon.
Then, yeah, I think it sort of varies.
As I'm pushing the frontier, I find myself building larger and larger teams of agents.
Then, when we have the next breakthrough with models, suddenly, it's just like, "Oh.
Well, 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 goes through this expansion and shrinking expansion.
Can you say more about that?
It kind of makes me think about there's this whole loop thing and then this whole graphs thing.
Is this an evolution of that in some way or ...
I think having to set up and fiddle with your loops and figuring that out is something that 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 that ... 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.
What we launched is not perfect.
I will learn very much from making this available to our pro users.
But over time, you just want the system that learns from what you want to achieve.
You don't want to necessarily think about, "Oh.
I was just thinking I've 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 take a step back, and whether it's dots or not, it's all about breaking free from the technology and having this sort of permanent active intelligence that knows everything it needs to do and is available through any client, any screen.
You can call it.
Maybe you walk into a meeting room.
It shows up in the meeting.
It takes notes.
You pick it back up on email, and then you text it if you need it.
It's not that you need to be glued to a laptop or you're always on your phone.
It's just like it's available when you need it, and it also gets out of the way when you don't need it.
I can't wait for that to come to fruition, because I think just carrying your laptop as this brick around everywhere is just you're 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 two years.
In two years, especially engineers, but a lot of roles have just, the role, your day-to-day life has changed significantly.
I'm curious if you think we're kind of settling into what work will look like in the next, I don't know, five years, let's say two years.
That feels way too far to think about, or do you think there's still more radical change happening to how we work in-
Oh.
I think it's going to continue to change quite radically.
Even today, it does seem like the technology is finally coming together with voice, multimodal inputs, outputs, but it still feels a bit clunky.
I think it will feel clunky until it isn't, and then, you're just like, "Wow.
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 ideate and brainstorm, it can just squiggle a thing, I have this collaborative surface."
This is what we launched with ChatGPT Space.
It's like the very start of that.
You can imagine we have a shared whiteboard.
We can collaborate between humans, between agents, and I think it's going to transcend conversations, transcend a lot of the clients that you have today.
None of this is just really working today.
So I think we're going to go through this big new transformation.
But I'm hearing here is dots is a big part of that future, this AI assistant that just does everything for you.
You don't have to think about Codex versus ChatGPT and ...
Yes, and for Codex and ChatGPT, we're going to merge the ... We have Chat.
We have the Work toggle.
We heard the feedback loud and clear.
People love the capability in Work, but then, also, 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.
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 talk 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 interesting to think about maybe more ... What I think about more is sci-fi from 30, 40 years ago and how visionary it was at the time.
Is there a specific sci-fi you think about that's most influenced you?
Books like Neuromancer and then the original Star Trek.
I think about that a lot, and there's something about Star Trek, which I think it was this technology that was very, very useful.
Obviously, you're able to just talk to a computer, and it does things for you.
You can talk to your spaceship, and it just moves.
Right?
It's like this is getting real.
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 in 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, because in a way, we're discovering this technology and what we can do together.
And so every time I talk to people, I'm reminded of you're doing this thing which I hadn't even anticipated.
It's impacting real life in a certain way, and it's impacted this other person's life.
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.
It feels like what you're saying is just to build it with people versus, "Here's the vision.
We've got it figured out."
Yeah.
Even the Twitter community has been very nice in general.
Yeah.
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 maybe half an hour per day-
Wow. Hey.
... just scrolling and then doing something when I feel inspired and I have something interesting to say.
Often it just comes in the moment.
Yeah.
Perfect Twitter skill.
We haven't released the team dots yet, but today, we're releasing the primary dot, which you can configure.
You can get used to what a dot can do, connect it to your apps, but we'll release the ability to create more than one.
And so I have one that's responsible for Twitter.
Okay.
Say more about that.
So right now, everyone gets one dot.
Yeah.
Right now, they can't add more dots.
That's right.
They will be able to have many dots.
Talk about where that's going.
Yeah.
So we wanted to start with one, the primary dot, which is the one that you'll probably also text, that learns your preferences most deeply, as well, and see what people do with it, see how we need to tune the system, learn by working with the community.
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.
Then, you can give them specific roles.
Right?
I don't find it absolutely necessary, but sometimes, I have a thing that requires quite a bit of work, such as monitoring Twitter for me.
Then, that's a thing.
It's just like, "Okay.
This will be so much work that is the work of an entire dot," and then you can have a couple of those.
So if you think about all the launches that happened today, it feels like dot's maybe 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 people are sleeping on, that's a vision, really important.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think the sleeper hit is a ecosystem, so opening it all up and the commitment, the deep commitment we have towards opening it all up.
So we have, signing with ChatGPT, 16 partners.
Very, very proud of that.
We started that really, it was sort of in the moment last year.
I was talking to creators of Pi and OpenCode, and it was like, "Of course you should just be able to use the Codex sign-on and then use the usage."
Then, just, we shook hands virtually.
We're just like use this auth, and then trust you to not do anything shady.
That grew.
Obviously, that became quite popular.
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 through maybe 1.2 billion users and benefiting from that distribution.
We also have shared economics that we didn't actually talk in the keynote, but we will pay our plugins that are popular and are seeing a lot of usage.
They're going to get part of the revenue share, as well.
And so I think this commitment towards an open ecosystem is going to be very exciting.
That's amazing.
Okay.
So as an example, so say Notion, somebody's using the Notion plugin or the Figma plugin within 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.
Then, when the 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 get out there.
People discover my app.
It 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 over time.
That's right.
Is it actually adding utility?
Is it enabling ChatGPT to do something else?
Got it.
So 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 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.
Peter joined, and there's a foundation, and then Grok Bot, Muse, and Instinct and all these things.
I guess how long have you guys been working on it?
Why did it take so long for you guys to get something out?
Do you remember Codex Cloud?
Yeah.
The first.
Yeah.
That was a year ago.
Right?
If you look back at Codex Cloud, and you look at the little animation that we used, I think that was the inspiration for Grok Bot.
It's just very, very similar, eerily similar, I would say.
But seriously, on the research, long, persistent, long-horizon tasks, this is something that we've worked on for more than two 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 an anecdote of like, "Hey.
I fell ill, and ChatGPT remembered, actually, I had this barbecue.
I had lime, and I was making tequila.
Just, probably, this burn that I have on my hand is actually this lime, it's like, and sunburn."
They're just like, "How did it know that?"
Then it's like, it's just memory works very, very well in ChatGPT, and so we've put a lot of research in that.
All of this coming together on top of the Codex harness and also the ability to just run 24/7 with good productivity, that's what we launched with dots.
And so it's the work of many, many months.
Then, one of the important things was also getting safety and security right.
This is also why we launched with Astra.
It's our safest, most aligned model, and a lot more effort went into making dots 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 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 this super empowering thing.
I think as long as we continue to do that and it enables you to just take whatever you wanted to do, and your creativity, and your taste and expand that in a way that feels awesome.
In the moment, it's just really this artistic tool.
Right?
We may not have coders anymore, but we have more builders than ever.
I think there's something that's going to remain deeply human about that.
Humans want to learn and see what other humans are building, and I'm much more interested.
I'm here.
I'm not talking to dot.
I'm talking to you.
Right?
I think that will remain true for 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 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 a solo adventure, and you just have this conversation just with your one agent, and then you have many and then you're delegating so many things, a lot of things are going to come together to make it much more delightful.
It's something that I spend a lot of time, the team spend a lot of time thinking about.
So I think for me, the ideal way to get things done would be to just have it in your physical space.
We're just having conversation like we have now.
It's able to observe, "Here are the ideas that we have."
We can jot something down on a white paper on a paper.
I can maybe take that and start building in the background, and then you're like, "Actually, I have another idea."
It's just like it starts building another thing.
You just project it on a screen, and then you just talk to it.
It's just involved in a conversation with other humans.
You don't have this fatigue of having to be on this screen, and you're just thinking about prompting.
It just becomes super natural.
That's what we're trending towards.
I think we didn't fully get there today, but we'll get there in the future.
One of the other 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 see more from there"?
I think we heard Sam, as well, 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, maybe not important, but vying for your attention.
It's just sort of like tone that down a 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, can we bring that?
Can we just make this your day-to-day?
Maybe you need fewer meetings.
Maybe you don't need to do as much, and you would actually be more productive if you're better rested.
And so we'll have to, I think, as an industry, figure that out, but I think that's the promise of AI.
It's not just one more prompt 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 AI should be like, "Hey Lenny, 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 a really cool use case of, "Wow.
That really was amazing.
That blew my mind," or someone you've heard?
Oh.
There was something cool, because the live demo just failed, right, in front of everyone.
So it was like, "Okay.
Well, that's not cool."
But actually, my dot was ...
It's like realized I was at DevDay.
We have ChatGPT production went down, and so it pinged me five minutes before the live demo, which was actually quite stressful.
Because it was like, "Hey.
Production is down."
It's like, "Oh.
Well, do you want me to try and fix it?"
I'm like, "I don't think you're there yet, little dot, but thank you for trying."
Then, I got in touch with the engineering teams, and we started to look at what was going on.
It's fixed by now.
But having this thing that just understands, "Okay.
There's a pretty important thing happening.
It's called DevDay.
There's this production system.
There's a live demo.
It's probably using this production system, so these two things are connected.
This is happening in five minutes.
So I should ping him, because 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.
I love that it wanted to fix it, and you're like, "Not quite.
You're not quite there yet."
I don't think it was like, "Please go impress me," but that would've 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 code base and, you know?
It has access to some production systems with guardrails.
We talked about specialized dots, but specialized dots is 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 the harness does not run on the machine.
Then, this is 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 10 different devices, and it can control it all, a little bit like an octopus.
So you're basically talking to your dot.
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, and it can connect to many devices.
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So you're really hiring a lot.
I know you're hiring a lot.
In your interviewing, what have you seen as skills that are trending up in what you look for that is more and more important in people being successful now?
What skills do you find are trending down that are just like, "Okay.
We don't need that as much"?
Yeah.
I would say skill that is trending down is typing fast.
Oh.
That is not that useful anymore.
Skills that are trending up is 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 just repeat founders.
We're also finding this when we're hiring at OpenAI, is we have a lot of founders.
I think we have more than 120 ex-YC founders currently at OpenAI, so it's like this mega startup.
I think just 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.
They're like, "Where should we build?"
help someone build it, and then, "Is this right?
Is this great?"
and iterate.
So I don't know.
I agree with that.
§02Transcript · 24:34–37:20
Yeah.
All right.
Also, roles are blurring, so you might have been only into design or only an engineer and felt always a little bit uncomfortable.
But 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 there's this flow state.
There's this beauty of just building and just seeing it work and not work.
Do you miss that at all, or are you just like, "Okay.
That is my old life"?
I missed that for a while, and then, now, with really fast speeds, I'm finding that back.
And so I'm really excited to democratize that as much as possible.
It will take a while for it to be absolutely ubiquitous and available to more than a billion users.
But now, with Ultrafast speeds, we're able to achieve it for six months old.
It costs roughly the same as Astra.
And so the progress there is quite astonishing.
Even for us internally, we're like, "Wow.
We can do these things," also.
Because we are using Astra, and we're finding we can push it super far.
When you have those speeds, and especially when you can be able to voice control it, you kind of get back into this really creative state of mind and this flow.
It is different from the flow of the past, but I don't miss it.
Yeah.
It's like your last two launch videos, just people standing around talking to their AI and just cooking or sitting on a lounge chair.
That's right. Yeah.
I asked people while I was walking around the event what to ask you, and one thing that came up a few times is advice for new grads, people junior in their career.
I think a lot of people look up to you, and they want to be the next Tibo.
What advice do you have for folks early in their career in terms of what to work on, what skills to build, what to do?
Yeah.
I think the next Tibo 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 in Applied, which is a massive, massive responsibility, and built a lot of the Codex harness.
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.
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 a couple of months and a year, it's like his progress at the company was just absolutely fascinating to see.
He's now someone I trust a ton in doing the most direly launches at OpenAI.
All right.
I got to get him on the podcast.
You should.
You should.
So 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 constant shipping code.
Things are kind of 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 have it shipped as a different shape to the Responses API.
Then, when we do that, it's faster, and it's quite delightful for some cases.
It's just, if you were to feel under the hood, you realize, okay, there's this Slack channel that came together.
Initially, it was four people hacking on it on a weekend, and then it was made accessible as company food.
Then, people got excited, started to build things, and they're like, "Oh.
We can support visual inputs.
This is even better than whatever is out there."
Then, people get more and more excited.
People start pitching in in a way that feels completely unstructured, and then take it all the way and ship something.
Then, we try to hold a high bar for the quality and then stop things before they go out, or maybe they need a little bit more baking.
There's many more things that we were maybe going to ship today at DevDay.
Then, we were like, "Okay.
I think this is a lot already.
Let's hold it back a little bit and space it out."
So we'll have more launches next week and the week after.
But it's just this incredible bottoms-up energy, and then people assuming roles to 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 pressing the reset button whenever you want.
You're just saying things on Twitter.
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 have to just own up to it.
So we just trust people to make great choices, and then, when things go wrong, fix it quickly or learn from the mistake.
So far, so good.
It's just really worked as a very empowering environment.
It is true that I can press the reset button whenever is necessary and whenever it feels right, and that's a privilege.
Also, it allows me to just really be close to the community in ways that I think would not be otherwise possible.
Right?
I don't have to run it through an echelon of approvals.
You said sometimes, people screw up.
Is there something you screwed up in that, I don't know, the amount of autonomy and trust you have, something you messed up?
Yes.
I think at times, I could have made teams more inspired to build things that are less complex and just really continue to strive towards complexity.
I think we, early days in Codex, we had a couple of outages that I caused.
Very, very earliest for me at OpenAI, I took production down day three.
I was just, yeah.
But I was still employed after that, and I learned my lessons.
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.
You break something, you reset.
That's kind of the-
Yeah.
Break some things, 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.
I think those three, I feel like often, when I look at what people are building out there, it's like, no.
It's just like you're not quite getting it.
So you're almost there, but if you were just pushing yourself and just really imagining all of these being roughly 10 times better than it is today in a year, it's like 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 from agents, agents, or probably most traffic's 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, it's like you have to build for a certain level of scale.
We've worked very closely with Notion, for example, and when they build 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 come in, and that puts, obviously, a lot of strain on the system.
You have to figure out the economics of that.
And so there's this tension between if you're building products, it's like, do you build an interface or not?
You can hold that back for a while, but it is inevitable.
Right?
The majority of things are going to be used by agents.
Building towards that future, I think, is very important.
The other thing is on the flip side, building absolutely delightful new experiences for humans that really benefit from older 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 revise my prioriter.
Also, I did not expect to rely so much on voice, and I do so much through dictation or just calling my agent.
I had not anticipated that, how much better that feels.
So I had to change my mind there.
Then, you talked about hiring, and one thing that I hadn't realized is the incredible talent and energy just younger generations have and how they would be the ones embracing all this change first and figure out how to harness all of it.
And so that changed, also, my opinion on hiring and the strategy there.
Just to double down on that, just this idea that 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, and I think just also the ability to just absorb and learn 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, p(doom) and all these things.
You guys have slowed down some training.
Everyone's pacing the frontier.
How do you think about this world of AI and the potential risk to the humans?
How do you think about that?
For me, pacing the frontier is just really investing ahead and also investing way more than we even think we ought to, investing in the alignment and safety of the models, investing in security, investing in the guardrails.
We are spending more and more compute on 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 not interrupting it if anything looks like maybe it's getting prompt injected, and just intervening with that.
The majority of our investment on the API stack is actually going into the safety stack.
And so to me, that is facing ...
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.
And so we feel very comfortable about that, but we're going to continue to invest a ton there.
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.
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, I feel, obviously, a deep responsibility, but also just if you think about the incentives for OpenAI, we build products for 1.2 billion people, we can't screw that up.
Right?
We take it very, very seriously, what we put in the hands of so many people, including people who are not very technical themselves.
You have to get it right, and so we don't gamble there.
Final question, what's something that annoys you about the current state of the app that you're just like, "Goddammit.
We got to fix that."
Current state of the app.
I feel like the models are almost there, but not quite for the app to almost completely disappear.
I can't wait to just really get to this super essence of simplicity.
I myself even get fatigued with the model picker, and the reasoning efforts, and whether to use multi-agent or ultra, or what it even does.
You kind of need a PhD in model pickers.
Right?
I just want to get rid of all of that as quickly as we can.
Amazing.
Tibo, thanks for doing this.
Yeah.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for listening.
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