“Engineers are becoming sorcerers” | The future of software development with OpenAI’s Sherwin Wu | Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

95% of engineers use Codex.

100% of our PRs are reviewed by Codex.

For engineers, I don't know what job has changed more in the past couple years.

Engineers are becoming tech leads.

They're managing fleets and fleets of agents.

It literally feels like we're wizards casting all these spells.

And these spells are kind of like going out and doing things for you.

What do you think people aren't pricing in yet?

The second or third order effects of the one person billion dollar startup.

To enable a one person billion dollar startup.

There might be a hundred other small startups building bespoke software.

So I think we might actually enter into a golden age of B2B SaaS.

I've been hearing more and more there's this stress people feel when their agents aren't working.

There's a team that's actually doing an experiment right now with an open AI where they are maintaining a 100 codex written code base.

They run into the exact problems that you're describing.

And so usually you're like, all right, I'll roll up my sleeves and figure it out.

This team doesn't have that escape hatch.

You've shared that listening to customers is not always the right strategy in AI.

The field and the models themselves are just changing so, so quickly.

They tend to like disrupt themselves.

The models will eat your scaffolding for breakfast.

What's your advice to folks that are like, okay, I don't want to miss the boat.

Make sure you're building for where the models are going and not where they are today.

There's a quote from Kevin Whale, our VP of science here.

He likes saying this is the worst the models will ever be.

Today, my guest is Sherwin Wu, head of engineering for OpenAI's API and developer platform.

Considering that essentially every AI startup integrates with OpenAI's APIs, Sherwin has an incredibly unique and broad view into what is going on and where things are heading.

Let's get into it after a short word from our wonderful sponsors.

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Sherwin, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

I want to start with what's feeling like a barometer of progress in AI, especially in engineering.

What percentage of your code, if you even write code anymore and your team's code is written by AI at this point?

I do write code occasionally now still.

And I actually see for managers like myself, it's way easier to use these AI tools than to manually code at this point.

And so I know for myself and some of the other EMs engineering managers at OpenAI all of our code is written by Codex at this point.

But more broadly, there's just so much energy.

There's like a tangible energy internally around just how far these tools have gotten, how good Codex as a tool has gotten for us.

And it's a little hard for us to exactly measure how much of the code is written, because the vast majority of it I'd say close to 100 is usually generated by AI.

First,

What we do track though, is at this point.

The vast majority of engineers use Codex on a daily basis.

So 95% of engineers use Codex.

100% of our PRs are reviewed by Codex daily as well.

So basically any code that goes into production that's merged in Codex kind of has its eyes on and suggests improvements, suggests changes in the PRs.

And so that's kind of what we're seeing internally.

But by and large, the most exciting is just the energy that there is.

Another observation that we've had is engineers who tend to use Codex more open way more PRs.

So they're actually opening 70% more PRs than the engineers who aren't using Codex as much.

And the gap is widening.

So I feel like the people who are opening more PRs are starting to learn how to use the tool more and more, get more efficient, and that 70 gap keeps growing over time.

And so it might have actually increased since I last looked at the number.

Okay, so just to make sure we hear what you're saying, you're saying all of the code of these 95 engineers at OpenAI is written by AI.

It's written and then they review it.

Yep, yep.

It's like crazy, that that's almost like not crazy anymore, that we're just like getting used to this.

I think there's still some getting used to, to be clear.

There's also, I think, some you know engineers who I think trust Codex a little bit less, but basically every day I talk to someone who is blown away by something that I can do and kind of like their bar of trust kind of, or like how much they trust the model to do on its own goes up over and over over time.

There's a quote from Kevin Whale, our VP of Science here.

He likes saying, this is the worst the models will ever be.

And so this is the worst that the models ever be for software engineering as well.

And so over time you just see people trusting it more and more, and then we'll see the models get better and better as well.

Yeah, Kevin Weill, former podcast guest, he said exactly that line on this podcast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A few times.

Yeah.

Peter, the Clodbot slash Moldbot slash OpenClaw is what it's called now.

Developer recently shared that he uses Codex for his work and he feels like anytime it does things, he just trusts that it has done the right job.

And he's just like almost certain he could just commit it to master and it'll be great.

Yeah, yeah.

He's a great user of Codex.

I know he's in close touch with the team, gives us great feedback.

I'm not surprised that he uses it.

I mean, sorry, it's called OpenClaw.

OpenClaw, yeah.

OpenClaw is a great product.

And then I saw that this morning.

I mean, this is very recent, but this morning, I think Molt's book kind of like was shared as well.

And seeing all of the AI agents talk to each other is pretty surreal.

It's basically hers happening in real life is what I'm hearing.

Yeah, yeah.

So, just like coming back to this crazy moment we are living through, for engineers in particular, we've gone from you write every line of code to now AI is writing all of your code.

I don't know what job has changed more in the past couple of years.

Like job that we didn't expect to change this much.

We're just like the job of an engineer is so different.

In the entire lifespan of an engineer, like in the past couple of years.

It's now shifted to I don't write any more code.

How do you imagine the role of an engineer and the job of a software engineer looks in the next couple of years?

Just like, what is that job?

Yeah, I mean, it's honestly been really cool to see.

And it's part of where the excitement is, because the job is likely going to change pretty significantly over the next one or two years.

It kind of feels like we're still figuring things out, though.

And so there's this excitement I know, especially from some of the software engineers of we're in this rare moment, maybe over the next 12 to 24 months, where we'll kind of get to figure things out ourselves and set our standards for ourselves.

In terms of where I see this moving.

So I think there's a common thing that everyone's saying, which is you know, people are generally.

IC engineers are becoming tech leads.

They're basically like managers now.

They're managing fleets and fleets of agents.

I know many of the engineers on my team basically have like 10 to 20 threads kind of being pulled on at the same time.

Obviously not active running Codex jobs, but just a lot of parallel threads.

They're checking in on what they're doing.

They're steering the agents in Codex and giving it feedback.

And so their job has kind of really changed from just writing the code itself into being almost like a manager.

In terms of where I think this will go one to two years from now.

So one kind of metaphor that I kind of always come back to here is actually from this programming textbook that I read back in college called SICP.

I don't know if you've heard of it.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

So S-I-C-P.

At MIT.

It was really popular and it was actually used as the introductory.

It was the textbook for the intro programming course for a very long time.

And it kind of has this cult following.

It teaches you programming, it teaches you a dialect of Lisp called Scheme.

And so it like introduces you to like functional programs, like very mind opening that way.

But the thing that was memorable for me about that book so I kind of read it in college the very beginning of it kind of describes programming as a discipline and draws this metaphor to basically like sorcery.

Like it says, like software engineers are like wizards and you're like programming languages are like incantations and you're like you know, you're issuing these spells, and these spells are kind of like going out and doing things for you.

And the challenge is like what incantation do you have to say to make the program do what you want?

And this book was written in 1980.

So this is a while ago.

And I think that metaphor has actually kind of persisted over time.

And I think it's actually playing out as we move into this new era of vibe coding, or just like what software engineering will look like.

Because programming languages were basically these incantations.

They've changed over time.

And the trend has been that it's been easier and easier to kind of get the computer to do what you want via programming.

And I think the current wave of AI is probably the next stage of that evolution.

It is now literally incantations, because you can tell Codex, you can tell Cursor exactly what you want to do, and then it'll all go do it for you.

And I particularly like the wizard and like the sorcery analogy, because I think our current state is starting to move towards kind of like the sorcerer's apprentice.

You know from Fantasia, where Mickey Mouse is like you know, he finds the sorcerer's hat and he tries to do all these things.

And I think it's a really apt analogy because one, it's just it's really powerful now.

These incantations you can do can is extremely high leverage.

But you kind of have to know what you're doing, right?

Like in Sorcerer's Apprentice, the whole plot is like Mickey goes wild, the brooms like go crazy and everything's flooding.

I think he literally sets the brooms off on a task and then goes to sleep.

And so, you know, it's like vibe coding at its greatest.

And then eventually the old sorcerer comes back and like cleans everything up.

And you know, when I see engineers kind of like doing these 20 different codex threads at a time, there is some skill and there's some seniority and a lot of thought that needs to go into this because you want to make sure that the models aren't going off the rails.

You definitely don't want to just completely go away and ignore the thing.

But it's also extremely high leverage.

A very senior engineer who's really proficient with these tools can now just do way more things via what they're doing.

And I think this is also what makes it fun.

It literally feels like we're wizards now.

It feels like we're closer to making it feel like this magical experience where we're casting all these spells and having software do all these things for you.

I was thinking of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, exactly as the metaphor, as you were describing that.

So I'm glad you went there.

A previous podcast guest described it as you have a genie that grants you wishes, and it's a useful frame because you have to be very clear about the wish you want.

Like if you want to be big, like how big exactly?

Yeah.

Or it might be like the monkey's paw type thing where you know it's actually you caught what you want.

But what are the side effects?

Um, yeah, yeah.

I think that, and the analogy is great.

And, um, yeah, the crazy thing for me is just the staying power of that book.

Like it's called the wizard book.

You know, people call it the wizard book because that is the metaphor that they kind of weave throughout the book.

And, um, we're, we've basically reached that point now, which is, which is, which is really cool.

There's two kind of threads I want to follow here.

One is I've been hearing more and more.

There's this like stress that people feel when their agents aren't working.

You fire off all these, you know, codex agents and then you have to keep stand top of them.

Oh, shit.

One's not working.

I'm wasting time.

Do you feel that?

Do you feel that across your team at all?

Yeah, I mean, it happens all the time.

And I actually think this is where the interesting part of all of this lies right now, because these models aren't perfect, these tools aren't perfect and we're still trying to figure out how to best interact with Codex or with these AI agents to get work done.

We see this come up all the time.

There's a particularly interesting team that we have internally.

So there's a team that's actually doing an experiment right now with an open AI where they are basically maintaining a 100 codex-written code base.

So you know like you'll have the AI write code, but you'll obviously end up rewriting a lot of it and you might need to double-check and change things.

But this team is just fully codex-pilled and just leaning in entirely.

And they run into the exact problems that you're describing.

Which is their challenge is I want to get this feature built, but I can't get the agent to do it.

And so usually there's an escape hatch, where then you're like all right, I'll roll up my sleeves and figure it out.

And then instead of using codecs, I might use tab complete and cursor and things like that.

But this team, for the experiment, this team doesn't have that escape hatch.

And so then the challenge is how do I get the agent to do this?

And I actually think we're going to be publishing a blog post from some of our learnings here.

But a lot of fascinating paradigms and best practices are falling out of this.

Um, one interesting thing that we've noticed.

I don't know if this is what you you kind of feel, but we definitely feel it.

Here is a lot of the time uh, when the coding agent is not doing what you want.

It's usually a problem with context and just like information that you've given it.

It's just either under specified or there's just not enough information around how to do something.

Available to the agent.

Available to Codex.

And so when you have to solve it through that, the challenge is then to add documentation and actually work around this limitation and basically encode more tribal knowledge that's in your head somehow into the code base, either via code comments itself or code structure itself, or via text files like md files skills, any type of additional resources within the repository, so that the model can better do its task.

There's a whole bunch of other learnings from this group, which I think is fascinating to explore.

But yeah, removing that escape hatch of no longer using the AI has allowed them to start piecing together a lot of the problems that we'll have to solve if we really want to lean into agents.

Another issue people run into you talked about how people are shipping PRs like crazy a lot more PRs if they're working with AI.

Obviously, code review is becoming a bigger challenge.

Is there anything you've figured out in your team to help speed that up, to make that scale and not just create this terrible job for people where they're just sitting there reviewing PRs all day?

Yeah, I mean, one thing is Codex reviews 100% of all of our PRs at this point.

And so I actually think so.

One really interesting thing that's happened is the things that tend to we tend to hand to the models immediately, tend to be the things that annoy us or like are the most boring parts of software engineering.

It's also why it's more fun now because we get to do more more of the fun things.

For me, speaking more for myself, I really hated code reviews.

It was like one of the worst things for me.

And then I remember in my first job out of college, it was at Quora, I was working on the newsfeed.

And so I owned the code for the News Feed.

And so I was a reviewer for News Feed.

And it was just like the central piece of code that everyone would touch.

And so I would just, every morning I'd log in and be like, like 20 to 30 code reviews.

And she's like, oh my goodness, I gotta like, you know, get through all of these.

I would procrastinate and then it grows to like 50.

And so there's just like a lot of code reviews.

Codex is really good at reviewing code.

So actually, one thing that we've noticed that 52 in particular has gotten extremely, extremely adept at is reviewing code, and especially when you kind of steer it in the right direction.

And so for code reviews, yeah, we create a lot of PRs, but Codex reviews all of them.

And it makes you know code reviews go from a you know, I don't know 10, 15 minute task to sometimes even just like a two to three minute task, because you have a bunch of suggestions already baked in.

A lot of the times people will, especially for small PRs like you.

Actually don't even need people to review.

We kind of trust Codex in this way.

The original author kind of looks at Codex.

It is.

You know, the benefit of code reviews is to have a second pair of eyes to make sure that you're not doing anything dumb.

Codex is a pretty smart second pair of eyes at this point.

And so...

So that's something that we've heavily leaned into.

The general CI process and the post push and deployment process has also been heavily automated via Codex internally.

At this point,

If you talk to a lot of engineers, the thing that annoys them the most is after you've written your beautiful code, how do you get it into production?

You had to run through all these tests.

You had to, like you know, lint errors.

You had all the code review.

There's a lot of automated stuff you can do with Codex.

And so we've actually built some tools internally that help automate that process, automate the lint.

You know, if there's like a lint error, it's a very easy Codex fix.

And then it could just patch it and then kind of restart the CI process.

So all of that is we're trying to collapse as as into as little work for an engineer as possible which, and the byproduct of which is they can.

They can now merge and push out a lot more peers codecs writing the code, codecs reviewing its own code.

I'm curious if you're open to using other models to review your models work is that is that a path?

Or is it just it's good enough, we don't need anything else.

So I will say there's definitely a circular thing here.

And going back to Sorcerer's Apprentice, you want to make sure you're not letting the brooms go crazy here.

And so we're very thoughtful, I'd say, around which PRs are completely just codex reviewed.

Most people still obviously take a look at their PRs.

And so it's not like it's going to zero.

It's more like going from 100% attention to 30% attention, which just helps things push through.

In terms of multiple models, we obviously test a lot of models internally, and so we have a lot of those.

We use external models less.

We think it's important to dogfood our own models and get feedback there.

But there are a lot of internal variants of models that you can use to give you different perspectives here as well, and we found that to work quite well.

Okay, so just to make sure we get a barometer of today's world at OpenAI in terms of AI and code.

Just so I understand.

And then I want to move on to a different topic.

100 of code across OpenAI is written by Codex.

At this point,

Is that the way to frame it?

I wouldn't make the statement that 100% of code running in production today is written by AI.

And it's kind of hard to do attribution there.

But almost every engineer heavily uses Codex in all of their tasks at this point.

And so if I were to guesstimate the vast majority of code at this point, it was probably authored by AI.

Incredible.

Okay, so there's a lot of talk and we've been talking about kind of the IC role, the work of an IC engineer.

Let's talk about the changing role of a manager, especially an engineering manager.

How has your life as a manager changed with the rise of AI?

What do you think of managers?

What's the role of a manager in the future?

It's definitely changed less than an engineer.

There's no codex for managers just yet.

However, I use codex quite a bit for some of the more manager-y tasks that I do.

I'd say a couple things are changing.

There are some trends.

I don't think it's changed that much yet, but I see trends and I think if you play it out you can see where a lot of this is going.

One thing that's becoming increasingly clear is Codex really empowers top performers to be a lot more productive.

I think this may be true for AI more broadly across society, which is the people who really lean in, are the people who have high agency or will really get good at these tools will kind of supercharge themselves.

And so I'm kind of noticing this now as well, which is like the top performers kind of end up being a lot more productive.

And so you see a broader spread in team productivity in this way.

So one thing that I've always done as a management philosophy is to spend actually the majority of my time with top performers.

Just make sure they're unblocked, make sure they're happy, make sure they feel productive and they feel heard.

I think this is even more true in an AI world, where your top performers are going to just really be shooting ahead using these tools.

I think one example is the team that's maintaining a 100% codex-generated codebase.

Just letting them kind of rep and see what's happening there is something that's paid dividends.

So I think that's kind of one trend that I'm seeing, where spending even more time with top performers for managers I think is likely going to continue.

The other thing is.

So this is more an observation, but my sense is, with a lot of these AI tools available to managers, so less like writing code, but just things like chat, GPT with organizational knowledge, like being able to do research and understanding organizational context, a lot better.

Another good example is...

We're doing performance reviews right now, and it's actually really easy to use ChatGPT with internal knowledge, hooked up to GitHub and Micronotion Docs and Google Docs to get a really good sense of what this person has done over the last 12 months and writing a little deep research report for it.

My sense is I think managers will be able to manage much larger teams in this world.

Kind of like how software engineers are managing 20 to 30 codexes.

My sense of these tools will allow people managers to be higher leverage and will allow them to manage teams of way more than the current best practice of I think it's like six to eight for software engineering.

You kind of see this apply to the non-engineering domains, like support or operations, where previously the size of a support team might be limited.

But as you can pass off more things to agents, you can actually do more work and also manage more people this way.

I think the same thing might happen for people management as well, especially in tech companies.

And we're already seeing this.

There are some teams where there are EMs managing quite a few people and they're doing it pretty adeptly because of some of these tools, where they can get higher leverage and understand what their team's doing, understand organizational context a little bit better and operate in that way.

I love this advice that, the way you described it is, you've always leaned into top performers and spent more time with them and blocked them and make sure they're happy.

The way Mark Andreessen he was just on the podcast.

The way he phrased it is AI makes good people happy, better and it makes great people exceptional.

Yeah yeah, and what you're saying here is just just doing this more and more.

It's probably the right move spending more time with the best people on your team to unblock them, make sure they have everything they need.

Yeah, a very good example right now is there are, I would say, like a group of engineers internally who are really codex filled and are thinking through what the best practices are for interacting with this model.

And that is just an extremely high leverage thing for them to do.

And so just like as a manager, I'm just like, yeah, go explore this.

You know, whatever best practices come out of this, you know, we have to share with the org.

Well, we do all these knowledge sharing sessions.

We'll share documents and best practices everywhere.

So things like that just elevate everyone.

And I view that as another example of this trend that we're seeing, where the top farmers really get exceptional.

People just like have a sense.

This is big.

AI is changing so much.

The world is changing.

It's going to be a huge deal.

What do you think people aren't pricing in yet into what will change into where things are heading?

Just like what's an example of something you think are like, okay, we're not realizing this yet.

So one of my favorite phrases or things that have come out of this whole AI wave is the idea of the one-person billion-dollar startup.

I actually think Sam may have been the first one to say it, but it's fascinating to think about, right?

It's like yeah, if people are so high leverage, at some point there will likely be a one-person billion-dollar startup.

And while I think that's really really cool, I think people aren't really pricing the second or third order effects of this.

Because what the one person billion dollar startup implies is that one person can just have so much more agency and so much more leverage using one of these tools.

Um, that it is just super easy for them to get everything done that they need to for for their business to ultimately create something that's a billion dollars.

But I think there are a couple other implications of this.

So one of them is uh uh, if it's easy for a person to create a one person bill, or if it's possible for a person to create a one person billion dollar startup, it also means it's way easier for people to just create startups in general.

Like I actually think this will like.

One second order effect of this is I think there's going to be a huge like startup boom and like small, like SMB style boom um, where anyone can build software for anything, right?

Like uh One.

You're kind of starting to see this play out in the AI startup scene, where software has become a lot more vertical-oriented, where these verticals like creating some AI tool for some vertical tends to work quite well because you really lean into that particular domain.

You really understand the use case for it.

And so if you play out AI, there's no reason why you can't have 100x more of these startups.

And so I think, I think one world that we might end up seeing happen is, in order to enable a one person billion dollar startup, there might be like 100 other small startups building bespoke software that works extremely well to support other types of you know small small, one person, you know billion dollar startups.

And so I think we might actually enter into a golden age of B2B, SaaS and just software and startups in general.

And so I think that's a really interesting trend to kind of see, because as it gets easier and easier to build software, as it's easier and easier to run a company, you might actually just end up seeing way more of these startups.

And so the way I've been thinking about it is like yeah, there might be one person billion dollar startup or there might be like 100 million dollar startups.

There might be tens of thousands of 10 million dollar startups.

And as an individual, it's actually pretty great to have a 10 million dollar business.

That's like enough for yourself for life at that point.

And so We might really see an explosion in that way.

And I feel like people aren't really pressing that in.

There's another third-order effect to this.

And again all of these as you get to the further and further out predictions, I think there's a lot of uncertainty.

I think if we end up moving to this world where you end up with these micro-companies building software that works for one or two people who own the company and and are working there um, i think the startup ecosystem will change.

I think the vc ecosystem will change.

You know it might we might end up in uh, in a world where there's just like a handful of big players that are offering platforms and supporting all of these startups, but you know the types of venture scale return startups that can really hundred or thousand x your.

Your investment might actually end up shrinking if you end up having a bunch of these smaller 10 to 50 million companies which are not great for venture salary returns but are great for the individuals, the high-agency individuals who are now really leaning to AI to build these businesses for themselves.

I love how many order effects we've been through.

I want to hear the fourth order effect now, Sherwin.

I'm just joking.

Fourth order is too gigabrain for me.

I can't think that far ahead.

It's like inception, where just everything gets slower every time you go deeper into something, every layer.

Okay, so the billion dollar startup.

I think about this a lot because I'm not going to be a billion dollar startup, because what I'm doing is not venture scale in any way and not super high leverage, but just could see how many support tickets I get from just like the most ridiculous things.

It's hard for me to imagine one person like I'm bearish on this billion dollar startup.

I just wanna share this thought.

Simply because of the support costs, even if AI is helping you at a billion dollars, just like, unless your ACVs are very high and you have very few customers.

I just dealing with support and people are like you know, like they can solve their own problems, but they're like oh, email support, ask about this thing.

Just dealing with that is hard to scale is in my experience.

So unless you have, in my opinion, unless you have a bunch of contractors, which I don't know, does that count as a single person company?

I feel like it's very difficult to scale a billion dollar startup and not have someone helping you with at least the support work.

And AI, I think will only take you so far.

So I think that's true.

And actually I think my view on it is slightly different, which is I think that Lenny's podcast might end up becoming a billion-dollar startup.

But what I think might happen is, instead of you kind of being the one person who has to dispatch an AI to solve and fix those support tickets, I think what might end up happening is there might be a whole smattering of other startups that are building software and super tailored towards what you might need.

And so there might be like 10 or 20 startups that build support software for podcasts and newsletters.

And that might be a one-person startup.

It doesn't need to be a big one.

And, you know, they might be able to just code up this product very, very easily.

They're able to kind of like build their own thing.

And because it's so tailored and unique and, hopefully you know, useful for you, it might be something that you purchase as the one person billion dollar startup.

I would buy that.

Yeah, there's like a question of like what you in house and what you what you like, kind of outsource.

And what I think might happen is because the cost of writing, software and building products is collapsing so much, you might end up outsourcing a lot of this.

And in doing so reducing the size of your company.

And so that's kind of the world that I think might end up happening.

Again, there's like high uncertainty and what might play out here.

But the end result still might be a one like one person driving this like high high, massive leveraged company that might actually reach a billion dollars.

I could see that.

I also think about Peter at Cloudbot slash, Multbot slash OpenClaw, of just like how barraged he is right now by all these asks and emails and pings and DMs and PRs.

Just like, I'm curious to see.

And he's not even making any money off this thing.

Yeah, I can't imagine what it's like to be him right now.

It must be like absolutely insane.

It's probably like, you know, like the months after we launched ChatGPT, the craziness that was.

As one man.

He's coming out on the pod, by the way, in a week.

Oh, that's exciting.

Yeah.

Maybe the fourth order effect is distribution becomes increasingly important because there are so many freaking things trying to get your attention.

So people with an audience and platform, I think, become more and more valuable, which is good.

Good stuff.

Okay.

I wanted to come back actually to your management stuff.

So I really loved your insight about spending more time with our performers has been really successful to you.

Just thinking about you as a manager of a team that is building the platform that powers basically the entire AI economy, like every AI startup is building on your API.

Clearly, you're doing a great job.

What other kind of core management lessons have you learned?

What do you find is really important and key to your success as a manager of engineers and just people?

Yeah, I think a lot of the lessons that I've learned here.

I don't know how specific it is to the opening API or some of our enterprise products in particular.

I think my management philosophy has obviously changed over time, but I think it's probably stayed the same more than it's changed over time.

One of these principles is kind of what I talked to you about before, which is spending a lot of time with top performers.

And, to be very concrete, it's more than 50 of your time with your top performers, with maybe your top 10 performers, and really, really trying your best to empower them.

The way that I think about it is kind of come back to this analogy of software engineer as a surgeon which comes from the mythical Man-Month book.

So it's actually, it's funny.

So I pull it from the book.

But in the book they actually describe this world where I think they were like predicting the future, because I think the book was written like in the 70s or something.

They said that software engineering might end up moving into a world where the software engineers are like surgeons or like in a surgery room there's like one person doing the work.

Um and uh.

You know, there's the one person like cutting or whatever and like doing all the surgery, and everyone else in the room is there to just support them.

Right.

It's like the nurse and like the assistant, the resident and the fellow.

And then the surgeon's like, I need a scalpel and they give them a scalpel.

And then uh uh, they're like I need you know this tool and let's machine, and they'll bring it over.

Everyone's there to just like, you know, support the one, uh, surgeon.

And so the the, the mythical mammoth, actually predicted that that is kind of the direction that's offering is going to go.

I don't think that's exactly played out, where it's much more collaborative and it's not only one person doing the work.

But I've always really liked that analogy.

And that analogy is actually what I strive to emulate in my own management philosophy, which is software engineering isn't really like surgery, where it's not just one person doing work.

But the way in which I like treating the people on my team and the way that I act as a manager is I want to empower them, make them feel like they're a surgeon.

And in so far as like making sure that I'm supporting them and making sure they have everything that they need to do their work,

And it feels like they have an army of people kind of supporting them and looking around corners and giving them everything that they need, when it's really just me as the manager.

And so, like the example that I give is looking around corners and unblocking people, especially from an organizational perspective, is extremely, extremely useful.

And again, going back to the AI conversations, even more important nowadays, right?

Like if people are just like cranking PR after PR, the main thing, bottlenecking progress and shipping.

Something tends to be organizational or like process oriented.

And if you as a manager can kind of look around corners and kind of unblock the team if you can like, if the surgeon needs scalpel, but the manager kind of already has a scalpel ready for them, that's the best case scenario.

That's kind of the way that I approach management and especially engineering management.

And so that's something that's really, really stuck with me over time.

And even though, you know, software engineers aren't exactly surgeons, that metaphor has always kind of stayed in my mind.

As of the rest of my career,

I love that and I feel like I wonder if that's something AI can help with is look around corners and predict here, this engineer is going to be blocked by this decision.

We need to figure this out.

Yeah, that's actually a really good point.

I haven't tried this yet, but I wonder what would happen if I ask chat GPT hooked up to company knowledge.

You know, like what are the active blockers?

Look through all the Notion docs.

What are, maybe Slack messages.

You know, it's probably in Slack somewhere.

What are the active blockers on my team, and is there something I can do to... to help.

Now, that's very interesting.

I have not thought about that, but you're right.

We just had an insight right here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think even more interestingly, what do you anticipate will be a blocker for this engineer or this team in the coming months?

Yeah, you asked the model, you asked the AI to do the second and third order things.

Anticipate that and anticipate what the blockers will be next month, too.

I think we've got a good idea right here.

Yeah, yeah.

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Okay, I'm going to shift to talking about the API and the platform that you all build.

So you work with a lot of companies implementing your API, your platform building on your tools.

You told me that you find that a lot of companies actually have negative ROI on their AI deployments, which I think is what a lot of people read about and feel and think.

And it's interesting actually seeing that.

What's going on there?

What are they doing wrong?

What's happening in the world of AI and deployments and ROI?

Yeah.

Yeah, so to be clear, I don't explicitly see quantitative numbers around this.

It's actually really hard to measure these things.

But especially from observing some companies kind of trying to do AI.

I would not be surprised if a lot of AI deployments are actually negative ROI.

I mean.

Part of this too, is I think there's also general sentiment from folks around the country like, basically outside of tech, that AI is being forced onto them.

And I think part of this is probably a symptom of some negative ROI AI deployments.

A couple of things I've observed around this.

So one thing is and I think I come back to this again and again I think we in Silicon Valley just forget that we live in a bubble.

Twitter is a bubble.

X is a bubble.

Silicon Valley is a bubble.

Software engineering is a bubble.

Most people in the world, most people in the US, are not software engineers, are not very AI-pilled, are not following every single model release.

And so we're just, like, highly out of the loop on how to use this technology.

And so you know, like we always talk about all these like best practices for Codex, all these like Codex-filled people within OpenAI.

I'm sure everyone on X who posts are, like, crazy power users of these AI tools.

You know, they lean into skills, they lean into agents.md.

MCPs.

Yes, yeah, all of that.

And...

When I talk to some of these companies and I talk to the actual employees using these, it's like the most basic thing that they're trying to do.

And they have very little understanding of exactly how this technology works.

And so that's kind of like one big observation for me, which is like they're asking very simple questions of these things.

They're really not pushing it just yet.

And so...

That kind of ties into what I think more companies do, or what should do, or what a more ideal AI deployment setup looks like.

And this is kind of how we've run things within OpenAI too.

The companies where I think it started to work really well have a combination of both top-down buy-in.

So it's like the C-suite, it's like we want to become an AI-first company.

So there's buy-in, they buy the tools, they have exec support.

But it also has bottoms-up adoption and buy-in.

And so what I mean by that is it has like actual employees doing the work who are really excited about the technology and are willing to learn evangelize, build best practices and kind of like knowledge share within the organization.

We've seen this a lot internally.

So like obviously, OpenAI has always wanted to be a very AI-centric company, but when it really started taking off was with the introduction of Codex and these tools where, like people, like actual employees themselves, could start applying it to their work.

And I think you really need this because, at the end of the day, everyone's work is like very different.

It's like very unique.

Software engineering is different than finance, is different than operations, is different than go to market and sales.

And so there's like a lot of these like last mile intricacies of work that needs to really be done in a bottoms up fashion.

And so my sense is a lot of these AI deployments don't have bottoms-up adoption.

It was like an exec mandate and it's extremely top-down and it's very divorced from what the actual work looks like.

And as a result, you end up with a giant workforce that doesn't really understand the technology.

It's like.

I know I'm supposed to use this, and maybe it's on my performance review too, but I'm not sure what to do.

And they look around, no one else is doing it, there's no one else to learn from.

And so my you know, my recommendation for companies kind of pushing this, is find or maybe even staff a full-time team internally, that is, this kind of tiger team internally that can explore the full extent of the capabilities apply to specific workflows.

Do the knowledge sharing create excitement within folks who might want to use this technology?

Because in the absence of that, it's very difficult to, it's actually very difficult to pick up.

And who would you put on this Tiger team?

Is it like engineer-led, do you find, in your experience?

Is it a cross-functional sort of team?

Yeah, it's interesting.

Also, a lot of companies don't have software engineers.

And so the pattern I've seen is it tends to be these like software engineering adjacent, like basically technical people but are not software engineers.

I think those are the ones who tend to get most excited around this.

It's like you know, maybe the it's like, maybe the, like you know, support team operations lead who doesn't code but loves using these tools and you know, is like an Excel wizard or something.

And so it's like technical adjacent or like coding adjacent and, like you know, pretty technical people.

Those are the kinds of people I've seen in these companies who just really light up and get excited around this.

And you can usually build a team around that.

But yeah, it's oftentimes not software engineers.

Software engineers, I think, will understand this, but not every company has software engineers.

It's actually kind of a rarity.

They're hard to find.

They're expensive.

And so it's these other types of folks.

What I'm hearing is the anti-pattern is top-down.

The CEO found an exec team just like, we are going to go AI first.

We're going to lean into AI.

Everyone's going to be judged on their performance using AI tools.

How much your productivity is increasing thanks to AI?

And with that being just top-down and not creating a team that is bottom-up, spreading the gospel.

You find it doesn't work.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And the advice is find the people that are most excited.

And instead of kind of having them spread out through the organization, what you find works is create a little AI kind of evangelist team that finds ways to use it and kind of spreads it across the work.

Yeah, I mean another.

It's kind of like hearing you play back to me.

Another way to think about it, kind of tying back to my own management philosophy, is find the high performers in AI adoption and empower them.

You know, let them build hackathons, let them, you know, hold seminars.

Do knowledge sharing kind of create the seeds of excitement internally.

Okay, amazing.

There's a couple hot takes.

I want to hear from you something that I've seen you talk about and share.

One is you've shared that talking to customers and listening to customers is not always the right strategy in AI and it might often lead you astray.

I don't know if it's that hot of a take.

I think the main thing here is, so obviously you should talk to your customers.

It's useful to talk to customers.

I just think the AI field especially what I've seen over the last three years working on the API and seeing all that evolve, is the field and the models themselves are just changing, so so quickly.

They tend to like disrupt themselves, especially around the like tooling and the scaffolding space.

So there's this quote that I read, actually earlier this week, from an X article by this guy named Nicholas, who's the founder of a startup called Fintool, where I think he was sharing a lot of the best practices that he has learned through building AI agents for financial services I think at a Sartfin tool.

And he had this phrase that I thought was really good, which is the models will eat your scaffolding for breakfast.

If you rewind back to 2022, right when ChatGPT launched, These models are pretty raw.

And there was, like all this product, scaffolding and things, especially in the developer space, to basically try and steer the model and build a scaffolding around it to get it to do what you want like agent frameworks.

There's like vector stores, I think was like really popular back then.

And just like a whole smattering of tools here.

And, as you've kind of seen the field play out, that the models have just changed so much and gotten so much better that they ended up yeah, literally eating some of the scaffolding.

And I think this is even true today.

So I think the article from Nicholas.

Actually, you know, the current scaffolding which is fashionable is skills files-based context management.

I could see a world where at some point you know that's no longer useful, where the model can actually, you know, manage all that themselves or, like you know, or there might be.

You know it's hard to predict, but like might move on to some new paradigm where you no longer need this file-based, like skills type thing.

You have literally seen this play out, right?

Like the agent framers, I think, are a little less useful now.

There was a period of time, like 2023, where we thought vector stores is going to be the main way for you to bring organizational context into the models.

And you need to vectorize and embed every bit of your corpuses and then you need to do all this work to figure out the vector search, to optimize that, to pull out the right information at the right time.

All of that is scaffolding because the model, you know, was not good enough.

And turns out.

You know, in this case it turns out as the models get better.

A better approach is actually to take out a lot of that logic and trust the model and give it a set of tools for search.

It doesn't need to be a vector store.

You could actually just hook it up to any type of search.

It could literally be files on a file system like skills and agents MD to kind of steer it as well.

Obviously, there's still a place for vector stores.

I know a lot of companies are still using it.

But the entire scaffolding around that and building an entire ecosystem around that and assuming that's the only scaffolding that you need has really changed.

And so tying this back to the like, you know, you don't always have to listen to your customers.

Because the field is changing so much at any point in time.

You know, a lot of people are kind of in this local maximum.

And if you just blindly listen to your customers, they'll be like yeah, I want a better vector store.

I want a better agent framework for this.

And if you had just kind of only chased down that path, it actually would have led you to build something that again is local Maxima.

Whereas as the models get better, we've had to reinvent and kind of rethink the right abstractions and the right tools and frameworks to build around these models.

And the cool slash exciting slash kind of crazy annoying part is it's a moving target.

And so yeah, like the current smattering of tools and frameworks right now will likely need to evolve and change pretty significantly over time as the models get smarter and better.

But that is just the nature of building the space.

I think that's what makes it exciting.

But it also means when you talk to customers, you kind of need to balance the exact feedback that they want uh with uh where you think the models are going and where you think things will uh trend over the next one or two years.

It's interesting how this is um.

The bitter lesson is uh, you know this big lesson that ai and ml folks learned, which is just like uh don't, the less you over complicate, the less logic you add to to machine learning, to ai, the more it'll be able to scale and grow and just like, take it all the way and let it just just compute.

Basically, just give it more power to to get Yeah.

There's literally a version of the bitter lesson applied to like building with AI, where you know we were trying to architect all this stuff around and it turns out the models are just kind of, you know, eat it all away.

And, and and and honestly, like open AI API team has like been guilty of this uh, where we kind of like took some you know left and right turns uh, when we shouldn't have.

Um, but uh yeah, the models still end up, models get better and uh, we're all learning the bitter lesson, day in and day out.

So what would be the key takeaway for folks building on say, the API or just building agents and, you know, having to build a little bit of this around.

For now is it just yeah, what would be the advice?

My general advice and I've been giving this to people for a while and I think it's still true today is make sure you're building for where the models are going and not where they are today.

It's clearly a moving target.

And I think a lot of the companies that I've seen, startups that I've seen really really do well, is they build a product for an ideal type of capability.

That is maybe 80 of the way there today.

And they end up having a product that kind of works, but it's just almost there.

But then as the models get better, suddenly it might click.

And then their product now is incredible because it works maybe with like O3 at some point.

It suddenly works with 51 52, suddenly it unlocks it.

But they're building these products with the model capability improvements in mind.

And with that you end up creating an experience that's way better than if you had assumed that it's static in the first place.

And so that'd be my general advice, which is, you know, build for where the models are going and not where they are today.

You end up building a better product.

You may need to, you know like, wait a little bit but, like you know, the models are getting so much better, so quickly, you often don't need to wait that long.

So to follow that thread, where are, like in the next six to 12 months, where is the API heading?

Where's the platform heading?

Where are the models heading?

As much as you can share.

I know there's a lot of secrets here that maybe you're more excited about, or do you think that people should start to prepare for however much you can share?

I mean, so the obvious one is how long of a task these models can do coherently.

So there's like the meter benchmark that I think tracks software engineering tasks and how long of a task can these models do?

50 of the time, 80 of the time.

I think we're at something like multi-hour tasks being able to be done by software engineering tasks being able to be done by these frontier models 50 of the time.

And then I think 80% is something like just under an hour.

But the sobering thing about that chart is they plot all the previous models on this chart as well.

So you can really see the trend of this.

That's something that I'm really excited about, which is, you know, I actually think products today really optimized for tasks that the model can do for like minutes at a time, like even codecs, and like the coding tools.

I'd say, like you know, it's in the cli, you're kind of like seeing it be interactive.

It's really, you know, quite optimized well for like maybe at most 10 minute type tasks.

I have seen people push codecs to the limit into like multi-hour long tasks.

But again, I think that's more of the exception.

But if you follow this trend, I think in the next 12 to 18 months we could see models that could do multi-hour long tasks very, very coherently.

At some point it might reach six hours a day long task where you kind of like dispatch it and have it do things on its own for a while.

The types of products you build around that will look very different.

You want to give the model feedback.

You obviously don't want it to completely run wild for a day.

Maybe you do, but you probably don't.

And then the universe of things you can have the model do really expands.

So that's something that I'm really excited about seeing.

Another thing over the next 12 to 18 months where I think it'd be really cool is improvements in the multimodal models.

So...

And actually by multimodality.

I'm mostly thinking about audio here, where the models are pretty good at audio.

I think they're going to get a lot better at audio over the next six to 12 months, especially the native multimodal models, the speech-to-speech ones.

I think there's also interesting work being done around new types of models and architectures on the multimodal audio side as well.

But audio, especially in the enterprise and in a business setting, I think is a hugely underrated domain still.

Everyone talks about coding.

It's all text.

But we're talking in audio.

A lot of the world's business is done via audio.

A lot of services and operations are done via talking in audio.

And so I think that area is going to look very exciting in the next 12 to 18 months, and I think there will be growth, even more unlock for what we can do with audio models there as well.

Amazing.

So, quick summary expect agents and AI tools to run longer to that trajectory, to continue to increase and then audio and speech becoming a bigger deal, more first party and native and better and core to the experience.

Yeah.

Extremely cool.

Okay, I want to go back to one of your hot takes, another hot take that I've seen you discuss.

You're very bullish on business process automation as an opportunity in the world of AI.

Talk about that.

Yeah, this goes back to the thing that I said previously, which is we live in a bubble in Silicon Valley.

And a lot of the work that we do, that we're used to software engineering, product management, building products is very differently shaped than the work that goes on that runs our entire economy.

And I see this in and out when I talk to customers.

If you, if you talk to any, like you know company that's not based in, it's not a tech company.

There's a lot of business processes.

And so what I mean by this is you know, I generally delineate it as you know there's like software engineering is kind of like open-ended knowledge work.

And this is why I think tools like Codex tend to be quite good, because it's exploring and you're giving it these open-ended things.

But software engineering is fundamentally pretty open-ended and it's not very repeatable.

So you build a feature, you're not trying to build the exact same feature over and over again.

And a lot of tech...

Jobs are in this space.

I think like data science is kind of in this space as well.

Even some of the like strategic finance stuff.

But as you move further and further away from software engineering and like what is core and tech, a lot of jobs are just business processes.

They're like repeatable things, repeatable operations that some manager at a company has kind of like iterated on.

There's usually a standard operating procedure that people wanna do.

And you don't want to deviate from it that much.

In software engineering the ingenuity isn't deviating, but a lot of the work being done in the world is actually just running through these procedures and operations.

If I call a support line, they're running through one of these.

If I call my utility company, there's a bunch of processes and things that they can and cannot do for me.

And so I'm just extremely bullish on this general category of like and I think it's underrated because it's so different from what we think about in Silicon Valley.

People tend to not think about it.

But how can we apply AI and some of the tools and frameworks that we have towards this business process automation?

Towards automating and making easier repeatable business processes with high determinism that is fully integrated with business data and business decisions and different systems within an enterprise.

And how can we actually make that process better?

Because I actually think there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of work to be done in that area.

And we just don't talk about it because it's a little bit less in our wheelhouse.

So your take here just to make sure I fully understand it is you think there is a much bigger opportunity, outside of engineering, for AI to impact productivity of companies and also jobs of these folks that are doing these kind of repetitive, easily automated tasks?

Impact jobs and also just impact how work is done.

Like so much of work is done in this way.

Like you think about...

Basically, I talk to customers all the time, big enterprises, like, how will AI transfer my company?

How will it run in a world with AI in 20 years?

And software engineering is part of the story.

But there's so much more on the business process side.

And I actually think it might look even more different on the business process side.

And the work there is pretty substantial.

It's actually interesting.

I don't know, like from an absolute percentage or absolute basis.

I don't know if it's bigger or smaller than software engineering.

Like software is pretty huge and pretty expensive as well.

But it is pretty massive.

And it's definitely bigger than you know.

It's bigger than you would think.

It is based off of how people talk about it or don't talk about it on X or Twitter.

Okay.

Going in a slightly different direction, having built the platform, building the API, people building on the API, the biggest question on people's minds is always just, how do I not have OpenAI squash my idea and build their own thing and then destroy this market I created?

What's the general policy?

What's the general philosophy of how startups should think about where OpenAI is unlikely to go?

My general answer here is the market is so big and so massive.

I actually think startups should just not overly think about where open AI or these labs are going.

I've talked to a lot of startups that have not worked out, startups that are doing really well.

Every startup that I've seen that has kind of fizzled out is not because OpenAI or you know a big lab or Google or something has come to squash them.

It's because they built something and it like really didn't resonate with the customers.

Whereas the ones that take off like, even in very competitive spaces, like coding, like Cursor is huge at this point

And it's because they built something that people really love.

And so my general advice is like, don't, you know, Don't overly stress about this.

Just build something that people like and you will have a space in this.

I can't overstate how big of an opportunity there is right now.

The opportunity space of building with AI is so big.

A good example of this is the space is so big that the Overton window of what is acceptable and not acceptable for VCs to do has completely changed here.

VCs are investing in competitive companies left and right.

The space is so big because the opportunity is unlike anything that we've seen before.

And while that affects how VCs operate, from a startup perspective it's the most empowering thing in the world because, even if you just build something that some people really, really love, you will end up with a massively valuable business.

And so...

That's why I tell people, don't overthink about it.

The other thing I also think is important to remember, at least from an OpenAI perspective, one thing that we've always held very near and dear, which both Sam and Greg helped reinforce from the top as well, is we actually view ourselves fundamentally as a ecosystem platform company.

The API was our first product.

We think it's really important for us to foster this ecosystem and continue to support it and not squash it.

And so if you kind of look at the decisions we make, this is all we've through it.

Every single model we've released in one of our products gets released in the API.

We release these Codex models now that are a little bit more optimized for the Codex harness.

But they always find their way into the API.

And all of our customers end up using those.

We don't hold back on any of that.

We think it's really important to keep our platform neutral.

And so we don't block competitors.

We allow people to have access to our models.

We also want you know, like we've recently been testing more of like the sign in with ChatGPT, you know product as well.

And so we want to foster this ecosystem.

I think it's really important that we do so.

The general like thinking about this is like, you know, a rising tide like lifts all boats.

And, you know, we might be an aircraft carrier.

We're like pretty big at this point.

But we think it's important to raise the tide because everyone kind of benefits and I think will benefit as well.

Like our API itself has grown pretty significantly because we act in this way.

And so I'd really encourage people not to view OpenAI as this kind of like you know thing that'll just shove people out of the way, but instead focus on building something valuable.

And we, you know, remain committed to providing an open ecosystem.

Why is that important to OpenAI?

Just this focus on building a platform creating a way for people to build businesses.

Is that just that's been the vision from the beginning?

We want this to be a platform?

It's been the vision from the beginning.

It goes back to our charter, actually, like our mission.

So the OpenAI's mission has always been to, one, to build AGI.

So, you know, we're obviously doing that.

But then the second thing is to like spread the benefits of it to all of humanity.

And there's kind of like a lot of, you know, the main part there is all of humanity.

Like, and obviously ChatGPT is trying to do this.

You know, we're trying to reach however many, you know, the whole world.

But very early on, and this is why we launched the API, you know, back in I think it was like 2020 or something like really early.

We don't think we as a company will be able to reach all of humanity, right?

Like there's, I don't know, every corner of the world is like pretty deep.

And so we actually feel like, in order for us to fulfill our mission, we need to have some platform style thing here where we can empower other people to build, you know, the customer support bot for podcasters and newsletter hosts, because we're not going to be able to do it ourselves.

And so we've largely seen this play out with the API.

This is why we talk to so many of our customers and really love seeing the diversity of things built on.

But yeah, it's been there since day one because we view it as an expression of our mission.

And you haven't even mentioned the app store that you guys are launching, the ChatGPT app store.

Yeah.

Is that under your umbrella, by the way, or is that a different Oregon team?

It's a different team.

So it's under ChatGPT.

We obviously collaborate very closely with them.

And they built an apps SDK, which is a built-in close collaboration with our team.

But that is more within the ChatGPT umbrella.

But that is also another... That's another example of this, right?

It's like...

Chachi BT is like we kind of have these 800 million weekly active users who are just coming over and over again.

It's a great asset to have as a business but man, would it be better if we could somehow allow other companies to come in and take advantage of this as well and build for this audience as well?

And then ultimately, we think it'll help us expand that group as well, right?

And so it all kind of comes back to the mission.

And we find that being a platform, being open tends to help here.

Just that number, 800 million, I think it's MAUs.

No, no, no, it's weekly.

Weekly.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Billion people using weekly.

It's absurd how many, how these numbers we're just used to now.

But that's insane, unprecedented numbers.

Yeah, it's mind-boggling for me to think about from a scale perspective, honestly.

And the way I think about it is like 10 of the world and growing by the way, like it's just, it's shooting up.

Come to chat GPT and use it every day or sorry, every week.

And this point, I just want to double down on this point you're making.

OpenAI's mission was to make AI available to all of humanity.

And I think some people diss that.

They're like, oh, you know, it costs money.

And it's like the fact that there's a free version of ChatGPT that anybody can use.

That is not so different from the most powerful AI model that exists in the world for free.

That's not gated that anyone can use.

Like if you're a billionaire, there's only so much more you can get out of AI than what someone in a village in Africa can get.

And I know that's always been really important to open AI.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, look, that's why I think we've leaned into the health work.

We've leaned into like education is going to be very interesting here.

The other insane kind of trend here is the free model has gotten so smart over time.

Like the free model back in 2022 was, You know like well, it's good at the time, but it's like nothing compared to what you get today, because you get to be five today.

And so the like you know, raising the floor across the world is kind of, you know, something that we're really trying to do.

And we view it as part of our mission.

The other flip side of this, by the way is, like you know, kind of talking about like the billionaires or whatever.

I know people are saying like you're using the same iPhone that, like you know Steve or sorry, like Mark Zuckerberg's probably using, or like the billionaires are using.

For like $20 a month, you're basically using the same AI that the billionaires are using.

For like $200 a month, you get the same pro model that all the billionaires are using.

But they're probably not using pro for everything.

They're probably just using the plus tier ones for their day in and day out.

And so yeah, this kind of democratization and just spreading of this benefit across all of the world is something that's really meaningful to us and something that drives a lot of what we do.

One last question just for folks that are thinking about building on the API or just like, oh wait, I could do cool stuff with OpenAI's models and APIs.

What does your API and platform allow people to do?

I know you can build agents on top of the platform.

Just talk about what you allow.

So fundamentally, the API offers a bunch of developer endpoints.

And these developer endpoints basically let you sample from our models.

The most popular one that we have right now is one called Responses API.

And so this is an endpoint, and it's optimized for building long running agents, so agents that'll work for a while.

So at a very low level, you're basically just giving the model text.

The model will work for a while.

You can kind of pull it to see what it'll do.

And then you'll get the model response back at some point.

That's like the lowest level primitive that we have for people.

And that's actually what a lot of people use.

That's the most popular way of building on top of API.

With that, it is like super unopinionated and you can do basically whatever you want.

It's like the lowest level thing.

We've also started building more and more layers of abstraction on top to help people build uh, some of these uh, and so next layer up, we have this thing called the agents sdk, which has also gotten extremely, extremely popular.

Um, this allows you to use, you know, the responses, api or some other api endpoints that we have to build uh, what you might more traditionally think of as an agent like uh, you know, an ai, kind of working in an infinite loop.

It might have sub agents that it delegates to, it starts building all this framework, all the scaffolding.

Actually, you know, we'll see where this all goes um, but it makes it a lot easier for you to build these, these kind of agents, giving it guardrails, allowing it to like, farm out subtasks to other agents and kind of like orchestrate a swarm of agents.

The agents SDK kind of allows you to do that.

And then above that we've now started building tools to help also with kind of like the meta level of deploying an agent.

So we have this product called Agent Kit and widgets, which are basically a bunch of UI components that you can use to very easily build a very beautiful UI on top of either our API or agents SDK, because a lot of times these agents kind of look very similar from a UI perspective.

And so there's agent kit.

We also have a smattering of evals products evals API where, if you want to test and see if your agent or your workflow is working, you can test it in a very quantitative way using our evals product.

And so yeah, I view it as like these various layers, they're all kind of helping you build what you want with our AI, with our models and with increasing levels of abstraction, and you know how opinionated it is.

And so you can use the whole stack and it very quickly allows you to build an agent, or you can go down the stack as low as you want to basically response as API and build whatever you want because of how low level it is.

Erwin, is there anything else that you want to share?

Anything else you want to leave listeners with?

Anything we haven't touched on that you think might be helpful before we get to our very exciting lightning round.

The only thing I'd leave folks with is, yeah, I think...

I think the next two to three years are going to be some of the most fun in tech and in the startup world that we'll have in a very long time.

I would just encourage people to not take it for granted.

I entered the workforce in 2014.

It was great for a couple of years.

I felt like there was a period of five to six years where it wasn't very exciting in tech.

And then in the last three years it's just been the most insanely exciting, energizing period of my career.

And I think the next two to three years is going to be a continuation of that.

And so I wouldn't encourage people to not take it for granted.

I'm trying to not take it for granted.

At some point, this wave is going to play out and it's going to be a lot more incremental.

But in the meantime we're going to get to explore a lot of really cool things, invent a lot of new things and change the world and change how we work.

And so that's the main thing I'd leave folks with.

I love this message.

I want to spend a little more time on it.

When you say don't miss it, what do you recommend people do?

Is it just build, lean in, learn, join a company, building really interesting things?

What's your advice to folks that are like, okay, I don't want to miss the boat?

I would just say engage with it.

It's basically like what you said.

Lean in.

Building tools on top of this is part of the story.

Just using the tools.

You don't need to be a software engineer to lean into this.

I think a lot of jobs are going to change here.

Just using the tools, understanding the limitations of what it can and cannot do, so that you can watch the trend of what it can start to do as the models improve.

And yeah.

And so it's basically like getting used and getting used to the technology and getting familiar with it, instead of kind of like laying back and letting it, letting it pass you.

On the flip side of that, there's a lot of stress and just anxiety around, like there's so much happening.

How do I keep up?

I got to learn a lot about this week.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

What is there something you learned about it?

Just not like you're at the center of this.

How do you not get overly stressed and worried about missing things that are going on and just stay on top of news?

What are some things you've done and learned?

Yeah, so I think I'm personally a bad example of this because I'm basically chronically online on X and our company, Slack.

So I actually try and absorb.

I end up absorbing a lot of it.

What I will say though, is just from observing other folks who are less addicted to this stuff, like I am.

Yeah, a lot of it is noise.

Like you don't need to, you don't need to have like 110 of this kind of pass your mind like, go into your mind.

Honestly, just leaning into like one or two different tools, starting small is already, like you know, more than you need here.

I think just the combination of, like the frenetic pace of the industry X as a product just creates like this insane kind of like yeah, this insane like pace of news which is honestly very overwhelming.

The main thing is, you don't need to know all of that to really engage with what's happening right now.

And even something as simple as just install the Codex CLI and play around with it.

Install ChatGPT and connect it to a couple of your internal data sources Notion Slack GitHub and see what it can and cannot do.

All of that, I think, is a part of it.

Amazing.

Sherwin, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.

I've got five questions for you.

Are you ready?

Yeah, absolutely.

First question what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

I'll talk about one nonfiction, one-on-one fiction book.

The fiction book was, I just finished reading it.

I really recommend it.

There is no anti-mimetics division by QNTM.

I think he's like an online author, but I saw it being shared on X.

It's like a science fiction-y kind of book.

And I basically devoured it in like two days.

It's super, super well-written, super fascinating.

It's about a government agency that's fighting things that make you forget it.

And so it's just a very smart, creative book and fresh honestly, in terms of source material that I really like.

So I'd recommend that one.

The book is also unintentionally hilarious.

It's meant to be this sci-fi, almost horror-style book, but it made me laugh a couple times.

So that's the fiction book.

Non-fiction, so I'm going to cheat and I'm going to recommend two of them.

So in the last year, I've been reading a lot more about China and the U.S.-China relations.

And I think there are two books that came out in the last year that have been, you know really, really eye-opening for me in that regard.

First one is the Dan Wang book, Breakneck.

That one was really, really good.

I really liked his analogy of like the lawyerly, US is the lawyerly society.

China is the engineering society and their pros and cons to each.

I read it and I was like, hmm, yeah, it does seem like we're run by lawyers in the US.

So then that's one.

And the other one is the Patrick McGee book on Apple and China.

It was super, super interesting.

I'm a huge Apple fanboy.

If you could see my desk right now, it's all Apple stuff.

But one, it was just super fascinating learning about Apple's relationship to China.

And then two it just had a lot of inside information about Apple as a company that I found fascinating.

So it was also quite a page turner and also, you know, very, very timely, a timely book as well.

The anti-mimetics book sounds amazing.

I'm buying it right now as you're talking.

Yeah.

It's like, I think it's only like a couple hundred pages.

I literally finished it in two days.

It was just like, so, so good.

Okay.

Great tip.

Okay.

Favorite recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed.

Yeah, that one's tough because I have two kids and a busy job.

And so I really haven't had much time to watch TV shows.

I will say in the last couple of weeks, I watched a couple episodes.

I'm actually a big anime guy.

And so I watched a couple episodes.

There's a new season of this anime called Jujutsu Kaisen.

That's out.

So season three of JJK was really good.

In general, I'm a huge fan of Japanese anime.

I think they create the most novel and unique plots and universes that Western media has shied away from.

And so generally a big fan of that.

But yeah, I haven't really watched much, but saw a couple episodes of JJK recently.

Extremely understandable in your role.

Yeah.

Favorite product you recently discovered that you really love.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, so I recently had to set up a wifi and like home networking.

And I went all in on Ubiquiti routers and security cameras.

I'd never heard of it before I had to do this.

I always just had a very simple setup.

And it's just such a well-built product.

I don't know if you've used it before, but it's basically like the Apple of home networking.

So beautiful products.

But the thing that actually makes it extremely good is its software is good.

And so they have a really great mobile app to help manage all of the home networking And so basically Ubiquiti, you can use it to buy wireless routers.

You need Ethernet wiring throughout your house to use it.

But I actually think what makes it really good are its security cameras.

So if you have security cameras that are plugged into the Ubiquiti ecosystem, they have an incredible mobile app and Apple TV app and iPad app to kind of see the live feed of your cameras.

And so they're a little pricey, but not that pricey, but it's been just an incredible product experience.

All right, I went ERO, so I made a mistake.

EROs are pretty good too, but I fully converted to ubiquity at this point.

Okay, good tip.

Okay, two more questions.

Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to in work or in life?

Yeah, the one that I always repeat to myself is never feel sorry for yourself.

Yeah.

There's a lot of things that are going to happen, you know, at work, in life, and reminding yourself to never feel sorry and that you always have a sense of agency, to kind of pull yourself up, is something that I've had to tell myself a lot, and also something that I repeat to a lot of other folks as well.

Last question.

So in your previous life you worked at Opendoor where you led work on basically figuring out how much to pay for houses.

You basically built the model that told the company, here's how much we'll pay for this house.

What's like a variable in the price of a house that you didn't expect is really important and impacts the price of a house.

There's a bunch that were surprising.

I'll maybe list the couple of most interesting ones.

Um, power lines and like uh, high voltage power lines like are super super, uh actually impact your price quite a lot.

I didn't really fully internalize this until i went to like dallas and observed, like when your house sits next to one of these giant like you know voltage lines, it's like buzzing and most people have families.

You don't want your kids kind of near there uh, so i think that was one that really really uh, kind of surprised me.

That makes sense, Yeah.

And then the other one, which was something that was always something really difficult for us to quantify, was floor plans.

And so it is very important.

Like, yes, of course, it's really important.

But just like quantifying what a good floor plan is like and what a really bad floor plan is like.

Like we were doing all these things with like how wide is the kitchen?

And like is it a?

What style of kitchen is it?

And then like, where's the master bedroom?

And so it was just really, really hard to quantify.

But I remember floor plan was a big one because like we'd have a home that like wouldn't sell.

And then our ops team would go in and be like, yeah, that's the floor plan issue.

So like, how do you, how could you tell?

It's like you go inside, you just feel it.

It feels, you know, the floor plan feels off.

So yeah, those are ones that were surprising.

And then the last one that was more impactful than I thought is general curb appeal and even the front door.

And so I actually think there's a Zillow book on this where the front door replacement tends to be the highest ROI for homes.

But just the feel of, as you walk up to the home as a buyer, what you're interacting with and the first moments of the house.

I think I'd underrated its importance.

That is extremely interesting.

And I love that you had to figure how to do all this in code and not walk around and look at these houses.

Yeah, and then floor plans.

I have a bunch of stories around like for floor plans.

There's like it's not digitized, so there's like a handful of people who have like paper floor plans of like all these homes in like Phoenix and Dallas.

Yeah, a lot of fun stories from the Open Door days.

Okay, Sherwin, thank you so much for doing this.

This was incredible.

Where can folks find you online and how can listeners be useful to you?

Yeah, so I'm online on Twitter on X. I'm just at Sherwin Wu.

And yeah, I mostly just tweet about OpenAI and the API and some of the products that we're launching.

And then how folks can be useful to me.

I love hearing about things that people are building.

And so if you're working on a startup, if you're hacking on an idea, you know would love to just reach out to me on X.

I would love to hear about what you're building and learn about how OpenAI can help support you.

Amazing.

Sherwin, thank you so much for being here.

Yeah, thank you, Lenny.

Bye, everyone.

Thank you so much for listening.

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See you in the next episode.

[The Dawn of the AI-Native Engineer: Insights from OpenAI's Sherwin Wu]-[“Engineers are becoming sorcerers” | The future of software development with OpenAI’s Sherwin Wu]

📋 Summary

The Evolution of Software Engineering in the Age of AI

The New Reality: 95% Adoption and the "Wizard" Paradigm

Solving the "Escape Hatch" Problem

Management in an AI-First World

The Golden Age of B2B SaaS

Advice for Builders: Build for the Future

Conclusion: A Call to Engage

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Dawn of the AI-Native Engineer: Insights from OpenAI's Sherwin Wu]-[“Engineers are becoming sorcerers” | The future of software development with OpenAI’s Sherwin Wu]

📋 Summary

The Evolution of Software Engineering in the Age of AI

The New Reality: 95% Adoption and the "Wizard" Paradigm

Solving the "Escape Hatch" Problem

Management in an AI-First World

The Golden Age of B2B SaaS

Advice for Builders: Build for the Future

Conclusion: A Call to Engage

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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