Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, new modalities. I think ChatGPT continuing to push all of the different experiences that are going to be possible. Today, ChatGPT is really just text in, text out or, I guess three months ago, it was just text in, text out. We started to change that with now you can do the voice mode and now you can generate images and now you can take pictures. So I think continuing to expand the way in which you interface with AI through ChatGPT is coming. I think GPTs is our first step towards the agent future. Again, today when you use A GPT, it's really you send a message, you get an answer back almost right away, and that's kind of the end of your interaction. I think as GPTs continue to get more robust, you'll actually be able to say, "Hey, go and do this thing and just let me know when you're done. I don't need the answer right now. I want you to really spend time and be thoughtful about this." And again, if you think back to all these human analogies, that's what we do as humans. I don't expect somebody, when I ask them to do something meaningful for me, to do it right away and give me the answer back right away. So I think pushing more towards those experiences is what is going to unlock so much more value for people. And I think the last thing is GPTs as this mechanism to get the next few hundred million people into ChatGPT and into AI. So I think if you've had conversations with people who aren't close to the AI space, oftentimes you talk about, even if they've heard of ChatGPT... A lot of people haven't heard of ChatGPT, but if they have, they show up in ChatGPT and they're like, "I don't really know what I'm supposed to do with this blank slate. I can kind of do anything. It's not super clear how this solves my specific problem." But I think the cool thing about GPTs is you can package down like, "Here's this one very specific problem that AI can solve for you and do it really well," and I can share that experience with you and now you can go and try that GPT, have it actually solve the problem and be like, "Wow, it did this thing for me. I should probably spend the time to investigate these five other problems that I have to see if AI can also be a solution to those." So I think so many more people are going to come online and start using these tools because very narrow vertical tools are what's going to be a huge unlock for them. So in that last case, a classic horizontal product problem where it does so many things and people don't know what exactly it should do for them. So that makes a ton of sense. Just being a lot more template oriented, use case specific, helping people onboard makes tons of sense. A common problem for so many SaaS products out there. The other ones you mentioned, which was really interesting, basically more interfaces to more easily interact with OpenAI voice. You mentioned audio and things like that. That makes tons of sense. And then this agents piece where the idea is, instead of just it's a chat, it's like, "Hey, go do this thing for me." Kind of along those lines, GPT-5, we touched on this a bit. There's a lot of speculation about the much better version. People just have these wild expectations, I think, for where GPT is going. GPT-5 is going to solve all the world's problems. I know you're not going to tell me when it's launching and what it's going to do, but I heard from a friend that there's kind of this tip that when you're building products today, you should build towards a GPT-5 future, not based on limitations of GPT-4 today. So to help people do that, what should people think about that might be better in a world of GPT-5? Is it just faster? It's just smarter? Is there anything else that might be like, "Oh wow, I should really rethink how I'm approaching my product?" If folks have looked through the GPT-4 technical report that we released back in March when GPT-4 came out, GPT-4 was the first model that we trained where we could reliably predict the capabilities of that model beforehand based on the amount of computes that we were going to put into it. We did a scientific study to show like, "Hey, this is what we predicted and here is what the actual outcome was." So it'll be, one I think, just as somebody who's interested in technology, but interesting to see does that continue to hold for GPT-5, and hopefully we'll some of that information whenever that model comes out. I also think you can probably draw a few observations. One of them, which is GPT-4 came out. The consensus from the world is, "Everything is different. All of a sudden everything is different. This changes the world. This changes everything." And then slowly but surely, we come back to reality of like, "This is a really effective tool and it's going to help solve my problems more effectively." And I think that is the, undoubtedly, the lens in which people should look at all of these model advancements, like GPT-5 is surely going to be extremely useful and solve some whole new echelon of problems. Hopefully it'll be faster. Hopefully It'll be better in all these ways, but fundamentally, the same problems that exists in the world are still going to be the same problems. You now just have a better tool to solve those problems. And I think going back to vertical use cases, I think people who are solving very specific use cases are just now going to be able to do that much more effectively. I don't think that's going to... People have these unrealistic expectations that GPT-5 is going to be doing back flips in the background in my bedroom while it also writes all my code for me and talks on the phone with my mom or something like that. I'm like, "That's not the case." It's just going to be this very effective tool, very similar to GPT-4, and it's also going to be become very normal very quickly. And I think that is actually a really interesting piece. If you can plan for the world where people become very used to these tools very quickly, I actually think that's an edge, and assuming that this thing is going to absolutely change everything, and in many ways I think it's actually a downside, is the wrong mental framing to have of these tools as they come out.…

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