Lenny Rachitsky: observation

Transcript context

…Yeah. Okay, to use this analogy a little bit, I feel like there is an aim component, but the aim component is much fuzzier. It's kind of like, roughly what do we think can happen? Someone I've learned a ton from working here is a research lead, and he likes to say that at OpenAI, we can have really good conversations about something that's a year plus from now, and there's a lot of ambiguity in what will happen, but that's a right sort of timeline. And then we can have really good conversations about what's happening in low months or weeks. But there's this awkward middle ground, which was as you start approaching a year, but you're not at a year where it's very difficult to reason about, right? And so as far as aiming, I think we want to know, "Okay, what are some of the futures that we're trying to build towards?" And a lot of the problems we're dealing with in AI, such as alignment are problems you need to be thinking out really far out into the future. So we're kind of aiming fuzzily there, but when it comes down to the more tactically like, "Oh yeah, what product will we build and therefore how will people use that product?" That's the place where we're much more like, "Let's find out empirically." That's a good way of putting it. Something else that when people hear this, people sometimes hear companies like yours saying, "Okay, we're going to be bottoms up. We're going to try a bunch of stuff. We're not going to have exactly a plan of where it's going in the next few months." The key is you all hire the best people in the world. And so that feels like a really key ingredient in order to be this successful at bottoms up work. It just super resonates with me. I was just, again, surprised or even shocked when I arrived at the level of individual drive and autonomy that everyone here has. So I think the way that OpenAI runs, you can't read this or listen to a podcast and be like, "I'm just going to deploy this to my company." Maybe this is a harsh thing to say, but I think very few companies have the talent caliber to be able to do that. So it might need to be adjusted if you were going to implement this.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.