Kevin Weil: belief

Transcript context

…I'm just going to keep following the thread that you're leading us down, but I'm going to come back because I have more questions around some of these things. So you came to a space that I think a lot of AI founders are thinking about is just, where's OpenAI not going to come squash me in the future? Or one of the other foundational models. So it's unclear to a lot of people just like, "Should I build a startup in this space or not?" Is there any advice you have or any guidance for where you think OpenAI, or just foundational models in general likely won't go and where you have an opportunity to build a company? So this is something that Ev Williams used to say back at Twitter that's always stuck with me, which is, "No matter how big your company gets, no matter how incredible the people are, there are way more smart people outside your walls than there are inside your walls." And that's why we are so focused on building a great API. We have 3 million developers using our API. No matter how ambitious we are, how big we grow, by the way, we don't want to grow super big, there are so many use cases, places in the world where AI can fundamentally make our lives better. We're not going to have the people. We're not going to have the know-how to build most of these things. And I think, like I was saying, the data is industry-specific, use case-specific, behind certain company walls, things like that. And there are immense opportunities in every industry and every vertical in the world to go build AI-based products that improve upon the state of the art. And there's just no way we could ever do that ourselves. We don't want to. We if we did want to, and we're really excited to power that for 3 million-plus developers and way more in the future. Coming back to your earlier point about the tech changing constantly and getting faster, not exactly knowing what you'll have by the time you launch something in terms of the power, the model. I'm curious what allows you to ship quickly and consistently in such great stuff? And it sounds like one answer is bottoms-up empowered teams versus a very top-down roadmap that's planned out for a quarter. What are some of those things that allow you to ship such great stuff so often, so quickly?…

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