Alexander Embiricos: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Just feels like everything else is now more important. Everything that isn't the building piece, which is coming up with an idea, getting to market, profit, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I think we might've been in this weird temporary phase where, for a while, it was so hard to build product that you mostly just had to be really good at building product and it maybe didn't matter if you had an intimate understanding of a specific customer. But now I think we're getting to this point where actually if I could only choose one thing to understand, it would be really meaningful understanding of the problems that a certain customer has. If I could only go in with one core competency. So I think that's ultimately still what's going to matter most. If you're starting a new company today and you have a really good understanding and network of customers that are currently underserved by AI tools, I think you're set. Whereas if you're good at building websites, but you don't have any specific customer to build for, I think you're in for a much harder time. Bullish on vertical AI startups is what I'm hearing. Yeah, I completely agree. There's the general thing that can solve a lot of problems and then there's like, "We're going to solve presentations incredibly well and we're going to understand the presentation problem better than anyone and we're going to plug into your workflows and all these other things that matter for a very specific problem." Okay, incredible. When you think about progress on Codex, I imagine you have a bunch of evals and there's all these public benchmarks. What's something you look at to tell you, "Okay, we're making really good progress," I imagine it's not going to be the one thing, but what do you focus on? What's something you're trying to push? What's a KPI or two?…

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