Lenny Distilled

Kevin Weil

Chief Product Officer, OpenAI

17 quotes across 1 episode

OpenAI's CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more

There's something fundamentally interesting about that makes life fun here. If the model gets it right 60% of the time, you build a very different product than if the model gets it right 95% of the time versus if the model gets it right 99.5% of the time.

Why shouldn't we be vibe coding demos right, left and center? Instead of showing stuff in Figma, we should be showing prototypes that people are vibe coding over the course of 30 minutes.

If you teach your kids to be curious, to be independent, to be self-confident, you teach them how to think, I don't know what the future holds, but I think that those are going to be skills that are going to be important in any configuration of the future.

You can often reason about [how AI products should work] the way you would reason about another human and it works.

Chat is an amazing interface because it's so versatile. It's incredibly universal because it is the way we talk. If I had some more rigid interface that I was allowed to use when we spoke, I would be able to speak to you about far fewer things.

A company is arguably an ensemble of models that have all been fine tuned based on what we studied in college and what we have learned over the course of our careers. We've all been fine tuned to have different sets of skills and you group them together in different configurations.

I think you want to be pretty PM light as an organization just in general. Too many PMs causes problems. We'll fill the world with decks and ideas versus execution.

High agency is something that we really look for, people that are not going to come in and wait for everyone else to allow them to do something, they're just going to see a problem and go do it.

High agency is something that we really look for, people that are not going to come in and wait for everyone else to allow them to do something, they're just going to see a problem and go do it.

Everywhere I've ever worked before this, you kind of know what technology you're building on, but that's not true at all with AI. Every two months, computers can do something they've never been able to do before and you need to completely think differently about what you're doing.

The AI models that you're using today is the worst AI model you will ever use for the rest of your life, and when you actually get that in your head, it's kind of wild.

If you're building and the product that you're building is kind of right on the edge of the capabilities of the models, keep going because you're doing something right. Give it another couple months and the models are going to be great, and suddenly the product that you have that just barely worked is really going to sing.

We have this philosophy, we call iterative deployment, and the idea is we're all learning about these models together. So there's a real sense in which it's way better to ship something even when you don't know the full set of capabilities and iterate together in public.

If you're building and the product that you're building is kind of right on the edge of the capabilities of the models, keep going because you're doing something right. Give it another couple months and the models are going to be great, and suddenly the product that you have that just barely worked is really going to sing.

Everywhere I've ever worked before this, you kind of know what technology you're building on, but that's not true at all with AI. Every two months, computers can do something they've never been able to do before and you need to completely think differently about what you're doing.

Plans are useless. Planning is helpful. It's really valuable to have a moment where you stop and go, 'Okay. What did we do? What worked? What went well? What didn't go well? What did we learn and now what do we think we're going to do next?'

If you teach your kids to be curious, to be independent, to be self-confident, you teach them how to think, I don't know what the future holds, but I think that those are going to be skills that are going to be important in any configuration of the future.