Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:41:39 · Lenny Rachitsky, Ian Silber
[00:41:39] S0: That is such a mind-blowing point you're making about the spectrum of usage of ChatGPT and Codex. I didn't think about it that way. Has there been a product that has such a wide spectrum from just, "What's this rash on my finger," to building a Salesforce? [00:41:57] S1: Yeah. And it makes it really hard too. It's so funny, one of the big challenges we're always thinking about is this blank box problem. And people talk about this all the time. It's like, is chat really the final frontier? It's a glorified terminal. It is some critique that I think these chatbots get. And then it's like, okay, so how do you design something that can kind of shape-shift into anything? It's like maybe someone is coming here for image generation for fun or they're trying to generate a PowerPoint. So having this adaptable interface is a really interesting design challenge. And it's sort of uncharted territory because it can really shape-shift into many different tools. And it's just incredible at so many different things and trying to figure out how to present that. And then thinking about, we think a lot about a novice user, someone who's sort of brand new to this experience, that we want to help them understand how this can add value to their lives or to their professional work or whatever capacity they're using this in. And then we also want to get out of the way of people that use this every single day and they use this as a real workhorse tool. And so designing for that spectrum is something we have to think about a lot. But yeah, it's all a world of spectrums, I guess.
00:43:31 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:43:31] S0: There's a comment that Kevin Weil, your former chief product officer, made on the podcast that has really stuck with me, which is to your point, people always diss this idea of just like, it's just like a chatbot. Why hasn't it ever changed from that? Even though it has, but still it's kind of this chatbot. And he made this really good point that what is an interface that is very good at spanning a wide spectrum of intelligence? It's actually just talking. If you think about humans, we talk to people of low IQ to very high IQ. We can all just talk to each other and it's actually a really good interface for packaging something that is increasingly smarter and smarter and smarter.
00:44:08 · Ian Silber
[00:44:08] S1: Yeah. And I think we're seeing what's been really fun design space for us is there's two things we think about. One is how can we help you express your intent better? We don't want you to have to think about being a perfect prompt engineer, but how do we even, one, teach you that, oh, this is something that the model can help me with. And then how do we make sure that we best understand what you want? And so we recently shipped some features where if you ask sort of an open-ended question, it can follow up with some follow-up questions that you can just tap through and answer versus having to type everything out. Or another good example is, so then once you actually ask it to do something, the chat transcript doesn't need to be purely text. We've seen these now evolve so far from what it was when ChatGPT just launched. It's no longer just a pure chatbot. It actually has many features within that. So a good example is what we call writing blocks. You ask it to write you a letter or an email and it now contains that email in sort of a block that you can directly manipulate and you can type with it and you can brainstorm and you can edit little bits and parts of it. You can copy just that. And that has made that interaction much better. And we're seeing the same thing with image generation and creating special tools for that kind of mode. And I think that's where UI is going to start to really continue to evolve is how do we make... If you come at this and you're a designer, maybe ChatGPT should actually really look different or have different affordances or you're a data scientist or you're using this to run your home, your personal life. Maybe it should really work or look differently. So understanding the context and giving you different affordances based on that is something that we're thinking a lot about.
00:46:08 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:46:08] S0: In terms of the vision and future of where all this goes, I know this is always evolving, but is there kind of a sense of what the future of ChatGPT Codex is? I know there's this idea of a super app. You talked about voice, this personal assistant idea. What's a way you think about where this goes long-term?
00:46:25 · Ian Silber
[00:46:25] S1: I think that it will start to become more and more adaptive to all of the context of your life. I think proactivity is a big untapped part of the experience that we're really excited to think about. We're starting to see this with ChatGPT Work now where it actually has pretty good suggestions based on your calendar or your Slack or these different sort of inputs and external context. I think that's going to become more and more important or shift the way you use it. I think voice, we just had a step change in the model that just feels much more natural. And again, I can only imagine how that's going to feel in two, three years as it just gets better and better. I do love interacting with ChatGPT, especially Voice In. I want to just really quickly say something. And then I think its ability to go not just from asking questions, but actually doing things for you, that's all going to change. And hopefully all of this gets simpler as we do it too. When we think of the super app, I think eventually we really think of the idea of, especially for our broad consumer base, we do think that there should be this one universal input that you can ask that knows when it needs to answer really quickly or should be chatty or whether it should go and go off and do work for you. And so that's a big excitement that we can get to is how can we just continue to simplify the experience such that you shouldn't have to think about how this works. You shouldn't have to think about what model you're on or what sort of speed you're using. That goes back to the balancing the different kind of personas and user needs. Of course we want to expose that for the right people, but then we want to make sure that we can get a default experience that works great for most people. But yeah, I think it's going to be really proactive. I do think that we're going to get much richer input through voice and richer visual outputs that are more interactive. I think that you'll start to build more durable workflows with ChatGPT that you can use over and over. Right now, a lot of times it feels like you're coming and starting from scratch each time. And we want to really make this kind of the tool that you can use to help you with whatever sort of task you have.
00:49:04 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:49:04] S0: This all sounds wonderful. I can't wait. Just zooming out a little bit, and then I want to talk a little bit to designers again. But you're in this epic role right now. I imagine there's a lot of surprises as you entered OpenAI and took on this role. What's something you wish you'd known? What's something you wish you could whisper into Ian of day one to give you some advice?