Nick Turley: evaluation

Transcript context

…What was it called before? It was going to be Chat with GPT-3.5 because we really didn't think it was going to be successful product. We were trying to actually be as nerdy as we could about it because that's really what it was. It was a research demo, not a product. So, we didn't think that was bad. But I think that in the original release, making it free was a big deal. I don't think we appreciate that because the GPT-3.5 model was in our API for at least six months prior to that. I think anyone could have built something like this. It might not have been quite as good on the modeling side, but I think it would've taken off. So, making it free and putting a nice UI on it, very consequential in the way that you take for granted now. And this is why I think that A, distribution and the interface are continuously important even in 2025. The paid business, which now it's a giant business both in the consumer space and in the enterprise space. The birth of that was just to turn away demand originally. It was not like we brainstormed, "Oh, what is the best monetization model for AI?" It was really what monetization model or what mechanism would allow us to turn away people who are less serious than the people who are really trying to use it? And subscriptions just happened to have that property and it grew into a large business. I think shipping really funky capabilities before they were polished is another thing where that feels like a tactical decision, but it became a playbook because we would learn so much. Remember when we shipped Code Interpreter, we learned so much after we shipped it. Now it's known as I think data analysis in ChatGPT or something like that just because we actually got real world use cases back that we could then optimize. So, I think there's been a lot of decisions over time that proved pretty consequential, but we made them very, very quickly as we have to, so. The $20 a month feels like an important part of this. Feels like everybody's just doing that now and-…

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