Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedIan Silber: belief
16 Aug 2026 Lenny's Podcast OpenAI’s Head of Design: This is the best time in history to be a designer | Ian Silber
“When we think of the super app, I think eventually we really think of the idea of, especially for our broad consumer base, we do think that there should be this one universal input that you can ask that knows when it needs to answer really quickly or should be chatty or whether it should go and go off and do work for you.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Ian Silber
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 16 Aug 2026
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…In terms of the vision and future of where all this goes, I know this is always evolving, but is there kind of a sense of what the future of ChatGPT Codex is? I know there's this idea of a super app. You talked about voice, this personal assistant idea. What's a way you think about where this goes long-term? I think that it will start to become more and more adaptive to all of the context of your life. I think proactivity is a big untapped part of the experience that we're really excited to think about. We're starting to see this with ChatGPT Work now where it actually has pretty good suggestions based on your calendar or your Slack or these different sort of inputs and external context. I think that's going to become more and more important or shift the way you use it. I think voice, we just had a step change in the model that just feels much more natural. And again, I can only imagine how that's going to feel in two, three years as it just gets better and better. I do love interacting with ChatGPT, especially Voice In. I want to just really quickly say something. And then I think its ability to go not just from asking questions, but actually doing things for you, that's all going to change. And hopefully all of this gets simpler as we do it too. When we think of the super app, I think eventually we really think of the idea of, especially for our broad consumer base, we do think that there should be this one universal input that you can ask that knows when it needs to answer really quickly or should be chatty or whether it should go and go off and do work for you. And so that's a big excitement that we can get to is how can we just continue to simplify the experience such that you shouldn't have to think about how this works. You shouldn't have to think about what model you're on or what sort of speed you're using. That goes back to the balancing the different kind of personas and user needs. Of course we want to expose that for the right people, but then we want to make sure that we can get a default experience that works great for most people. But yeah, I think it's going to be really proactive. I do think that we're going to get much richer input through voice and richer visual outputs that are more interactive. I think that you'll start to build more durable workflows with ChatGPT that you can use over and over. Right now, a lot of times it feels like you're coming and starting from scratch each time. And we want to really make this kind of the tool that you can use to help you with whatever sort of task you have. This all sounds wonderful. I can't wait. Just zooming out a little bit, and then I want to talk a little bit to designers again. But you're in this epic role right now. I imagine there's a lot of surprises as you entered OpenAI and took on this role. What's something you wish you'd known? What's something you wish you could whisper into Ian of day one to give you some advice?…
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