Nick Turley: evaluation

Transcript context

…You mentioned this idea of first principles. This came up actually when I talk to a lot of people about you, is this something you're really big on. A lot of people talk about first principles, most people are like, " I don't really understand," or they think they're amazing at thinking from first principles. Is there something you can share of just what it actually looks like to think from first principles as maybe an example that comes to mind where you really went to first principles and came up with something unexpected? Yeah, this is not something I'd ever say about myself. It's nice that someone else would say it, but it's a mysterious thing. Yeah, I think you just really got to get to ground truth on what you're really trying to solve. For example, as I mentioned with the recruiting thing, I'm not dogmatic that you have to have a product manager and an engineering manager and a designer or whatever. We're just trying to make an awesome team that can ship. So in that case, first principles means just really understanding what we actually need and what we're missing rather than applying a previously learned process or behavior. So I think that's a good example. Another good example of I think being first principles in this environment is, does this feature need to be polished? We get a lot of crap for the model chooser, and I own it. I've tried to say that to everyone who will listen. For those who don't know model chooser, it's this giant drop down in the product that is literally the anti-pattern of any good product traditionally. But if you are actually recent from scratch, is it better to wait until you got a polished product or to ship out something raw even if it makes less sense and start learning and getting into people's hands? I think a company with a lot of process or a lot of just learned behaviors will make one call, which is, we have a quality bar when we ship, and that's what we do. If your first principle is about it, I think you're like, "You know what? We should ship. It's embarrassing, but that's strictly less bad than not getting the feedback you wanted." So I think just approaching each scenario from scratch is so important in this space because there is no analogy for what we're building. You can't copy an existing thing. There is no, "Are we an Instagram or are we a Google or a productivity tool or something like that?" I don't know. But you can learn from everywhere, but you have to do it from scratch. And I think that's why that trait tends to make someone effective at OpenAI, and it's something we test for in our interviews too. So this theme keeps coming up, and I think it's just important to highlight something that you keep coming back to, which is this trade-off of speed and polish and how in this space, speed is more important, not just to stay ahead, but to learn what the hell people actually want to do with this thing. Is there anything more that you think people just may be missing about why they need to move so fast in the space of AI?…

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