Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:11:26 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:11:26] S1: Something that someone needs to figure out with the Tesla self-driving is often, you're at a stop and you make eye contact and then, "Go ahead. Go ahead," or someone's about to cross and you're like, "Okay, go ahead." But the Tesla just does its own thing, and so it makes you look like an asshole a bunch of times like, "Oh, I'm not driving this and in control." [01:11:45] S0: Yeah. I had that happen once. You almost want a little two arms in the front to be gesturing or you go or something. It's amazing how much we actually rely on this human connection to decide even who's going to go in an intersection. [01:11:59] S1: Yeah. Okay. So zooming out a little bit, just what's cool about people like you is you're thinking and building things that will exist in the future. You're kind of living in the future and designing it, and you are one of the few people who has a glimpse into where things are going. So I'm curious just to ask, say in five years, what is the vision you have of what is different about our day-to-day robots, devices? Just what does it look like just roughly?
01:12:27 · Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:12:27] S0: So in this job, we have this wild thing where we have to try to live in the future, and we have to try to live in the future far enough away that we can design something not only for two years from now or three years from now, but also something that will ladder up to what we want six years from now because in my field, it's a lot easier to make something and iterate on it and iterate towards a final goal than to do a one-shot thing perfectly. So not only do you have to have a sense of what the first thing needs to be like and look like, you have to have a sense of what the third thing ideally or the platonic ideal of the thing will eventually look like. So you do have to think about the future and live in the future. I have this weird thing where I love to think about the future, but I'm also a skeptic, and you really want me to be a skeptic because if I think everything's going to be fine, the hardware's not going to work. You really want me to be like, "This isn't going to work and this isn't going to work and this isn't going to work," and just be worried about all these things going wrong. So this is kind of an interesting disagreement inside of me of what I want the future to look like and what I think it's going to look like and what it's actually going to look like. I'm trying to guess. And so, it seems pretty clear to me that AI is going to have a foundational change in how we work and what we do over the next couple of years, especially. You're already seeing it. Obviously, anybody who codes is not coding by hand very much anymore. Any knowledge work, this is going to hit next, I think, and progressively affect our economy and our work, but it seems like the physical world is less likely to change as quickly outside of drones, self-driving cars. You're going to see more and more robots, but I'm not somebody who thinks that in five years, you're going to have 20 million robots. I don't think that it's going to be that fast. I think we have a lot of really deep work on supply chain when you do supply chain reliability, raw material access, and then we need to figure out how to make factories again in this country for high tech. So that's a lot of work, but in the interim, you're going to start seeing a lot of weird things on the street. You might see robots on the street. Have you seen any delivery robots in your world, Lenny, before?
01:14:44 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:14:44] S1: Like the little car things, not like anything humanoidy. Yeah. [01:14:48] S0: Yeah, yeah. So this is just going to continue happening, and I think we're just going to continue to feel like we live in the future, but safety is going to be a big key for robotics, I think. I think there's probably more change in war- I think there's probably more change in war than there is in consumer electronics in the next two years, for example. [01:15:07] S1: Wow. What a statement. [01:15:09] S0: Yeah. [01:15:10] S1: And I totally agree. There's nothing like war to incentivize innovation and just endless improvement and trying to get ahead of the other side. [01:15:20] S0: Especially when democracy is at stake. I mean, I think that we are, and I don't want to be on a high horse or something, but I do think that we're in a place where we need to think about things in the future in these terms and defend these things with our capabilities while also hoping that we never have to have hot conflict anywhere. [01:15:39] S1: Along those lines, I have to ask you, recently you became famous, on Twitter at least, for quitting OpenAI. You tweeted that you're leaving with your brief explanation and got seven million views, 50, I don't know, 8,000 likes. What happened? Why'd you leave OpenAI? What happened?
01:15:39 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:15:39] S1: Along those lines, I have to ask you, recently you became famous, on Twitter at least, for quitting OpenAI. You tweeted that you're leaving with your brief explanation and got seven million views, 50, I don't know, 8,000 likes. What happened? Why'd you leave OpenAI? What happened? [01:16:01] S0: Yeah. So what I said in my tweet was that I have a lot of friends in the executive side of OpenAI that I care a lot about, I think are really good people. And I feel that what happened with the decision making, the speed of the decision making, the governance, and the lack of defined guardrails around the announcement of the Department of War deal is not how I thought it should have been done. And both of those things can be true. And so my hope, Lenny, was that there's a third path. You see a lot of people just going along with what their company's doing and then you see some people that are kind of scorched earth about it. In this case, that didn't make sense for me. I didn't feel that way about the company. OpenAI is an amazing company and I was able to help build a robotics program there and attract some of that top talent in robotics, I think in the world. And so I have a lot of, I don't know, this is a group of people I care a lot about. And you can also disagree with friends and feel like what they did isn't good and isn't right. And that's where I ended up and that's what I tweeted about. It was going to get reported on, so I tweeted before that happened.
01:16:01 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:16:01] S0: Yeah. So what I said in my tweet was that I have a lot of friends in the executive side of OpenAI that I care a lot about, I think are really good people. And I feel that what happened with the decision making, the speed of the decision making, the governance, and the lack of defined guardrails around the announcement of the Department of War deal is not how I thought it should have been done. And both of those things can be true. And so my hope, Lenny, was that there's a third path. You see a lot of people just going along with what their company's doing and then you see some people that are kind of scorched earth about it. In this case, that didn't make sense for me. I didn't feel that way about the company. OpenAI is an amazing company and I was able to help build a robotics program there and attract some of that top talent in robotics, I think in the world. And so I have a lot of, I don't know, this is a group of people I care a lot about. And you can also disagree with friends and feel like what they did isn't good and isn't right. And that's where I ended up and that's what I tweeted about. It was going to get reported on, so I tweeted before that happened. [01:17:24] S1: This is a great opportunity to just whisper to me, what OpenAI is working on? What is this robotics device [inaudible 01:17:30], just like just between you and me?
01:17:24 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[01:17:24] S1: This is a great opportunity to just whisper to me, what OpenAI is working on? What is this robotics device [inaudible 01:17:30], just like just between you and me? [01:17:32] S0: I wish I could say. You know, Lenny, part of the fun of our job is we get to see things before everybody else does, but part of the flip side of that is we can't talk about anything internal or any IP. What I can say is the team's really strong and I was really, really grateful for the opportunity to help. But I also thought that after what happened happened, it was time for me to ... I couldn't continue to work there because you don't know what's going to happen next time. And my hope was that my decision made it easier for other folks to talk about what their boundaries were and hold them and we'll see what happens there. [01:18:09] S1: So speaking of team building, this is something I definitely wanted to ask you about. So as I said, I asked a bunch of people what to talk to you about and someone that, I think it was maybe a colleague, former colleague, Marianna [inaudible 01:18:20]. Did you work with her? [01:18:09] S0: Yeah. [01:18:21] S1: Okay. [01:18:21] S0: She's a friend. Yeah. [01:18:22] S1: Okay. She's a friend. So she told me that, here's what she said about you, that, "Your brilliance as a leader lies in hiring exceptional teams. I'd be curious about the kinds of people that she finds indispensable in an era where everyone is concerned about their jobs." So talk about what you've learned about just what you look for when you're hiring folks for your team.