Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…And it was just a way that we were going to let people play with and iterate on the models. So we were primarily a research company, a world-class research company, and as ChatGPT has grown and as we've built our B-to-B products and our APIs and other things, now we're more of a product company than we were. I still think we can't... Open AI should never be a pure product company. We need to be both a world-class research company and a world-class product company, and the two need to really work together, and that's the thing that I think we've been getting much better at over the last six months. If you treat those things separately and the researchers go do amazing things and build models and then they get to some state and then the product and engineering teams go take them and do something with them, we're effectively just an API consumer of our own models. The best products though are going to be, it's like I was talking about with deep research, it's a lot of iterative feedback. It's understanding the products you're trying to sell or the problems you're trying to solve, building evals for them, using those evals to go gather data and fine-tune models to get them to be better at these use cases that you're looking to solve. It's a huge amount of back and forth to do it well. And I think the best products are going to be ENG product design and research working together as a single team to build novel things. So that's actually how we're trying to operate with basically anything that we build. It's a new muscle for us because we're kind of new as a product company, but it's one that people are really excited about because we've seen every time we do it, we build something awesome, and so now every product starts like that. How many product managers do you have at Open AI? I don't know if you share that number, but if you do. Not that many, actually. I don't know, 25. Maybe it's a little more than that. My personal belief is that you want to be pretty PM light as an organization just in general. I say this with love because I am a PM, but too many PMs causes problems. We'll fill the world with decks and ideas versus execution. So I think it's a good thing when you have a PM that is working with maybe slightly too many engineers because it means they're not going to get in and micromanage. You're going to leave a lot of influence and responsibility with the engineers to make decisions. It means you want to have really product-focused engineers, which we're fortunate to have. We have an amazingly product focused, high agency engineering team. But when you have something like that, you have a team that feels super empowered, you have a PM that's trying to really understand the problems and gently guide the team a little bit but has too much going on to get too far into the details, and you end up being able to move really fast. So that's kind of the philosophy we take. We want Product ENG leads and product engineers all the way through. We want not too many PMs, but really awesome, high quality ones, and so far that seems to be working pretty well.…

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