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The sharpest AI recommendation is a brute-force heuristic
9 hours ago
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3 min read
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95 docs
Aaron Levie’s endorsement of a Jeffrey Huber post offers the sharpest practical test for agent opportunities; adjacent recommendations add humility, design fundamentals, and a governance lens.
The most actionable pick is Aaron Levie’s pointer to Jeffrey Huber’s formulation that AI is “better at brute forcing than you”: Levie treats it as a way to find agent opportunities where tireless, exhaustive work was previously impractical.
The standout: a practical test for agent opportunities
- Title: “AI is better at brute forcing than you” (the opening line of the post; no formal title is supplied).
- Content type: X post.
- Author/creator: Jeffrey Huber.
- URL:Original post.
- Recommended by: Aaron Levie, who calls it a “pretty good way” to think about the value of agents and where the opportunity lies.
- Key takeaway: Agents can tirelessly perform work that was valuable but not remotely practical before—such as simulating every security risk, reading every contract, or combing through a customer base for upsell signals. Levie’s startup heuristic is to target markets where adding compute qualitatively changes what customers can do.
- Why it matters: This is a usable screen for agent ideas: look for domains where exhaustive analysis is valuable, repeatable, and previously too costly or laborious for people to carry out.
Two design-side correctives
Stop the AI Confidence Theater
- Content type: Post.
- Author/creator: Elena Vera.
- URL: Not supplied in the recommendation; context in the Lenny’s Podcast interview.
- Recommended by: The Lenny’s Podcast host, who describes it as a “really great post.”
- Key takeaway: The post is presented as a critique of people broadcasting AI accomplishments as if they have figured everything out, even though few of those examples are actually working well. The surrounding advice is to be humble, keep experimenting, and stay curious as the tools change.
- Why it matters: It is a useful guardrail against mistaking polished AI success stories for a repeatable operating method.
The Design of Everyday Things
- Content type: Book.
- Author/creator: Not named in the interview passage.
- URL: Not supplied in the recommendation; context in the Lenny’s Podcast interview.
- Recommended by: Ian Silber, head of product design at OpenAI.
- Key takeaway: Silber calls it a classic that shapes how he thinks about design and says it is worth reading whether or not someone works in tech.
- Why it matters: Among AI-specific recommendations, this is a reminder to return to durable design principles rather than treating new tools as a substitute for understanding how products should work.
A contextual governance recommendation: The Vision of the Anointed
- Content type: Book.
- Author/creator: Thomas Sowell.
- URL: No direct book link is supplied; recommendation context in David Sacks’s post.
- Recommended by: David Sacks, who invokes the book while arguing about the concentration of authority over frontier AI.
- Key takeaway: Sacks says the book captures the mindset of “elite intellectuals” convinced that only they are enlightened enough to control the outcome, and uses that framing to criticize concentrating power in a small group.
- Why it matters: It offers a political-philosophy lens for the central governance dispute Sacks identifies: whether frontier AI is too powerful to distribute or too powerful to centralize.
The sharpest AI recommendation is a brute-force heuristic
Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin
Jason Lemkin (@jasonlk) recommended a video of Klaviyo CEO Abi Abialecki's SaaStr AI talk on how a 2,300-person, $1.5B ARR public company builds with agents — the one he'd most want a founder with an aging codebase to hear — with a YouTube link. The takeaways he called out:
- Every employee must hit AI skill 'L3' (running a team of agents); everyone from the CEO to summer interns commits code .
- Klaviyo builds agents with agent teams: the 'Dark Factory' prompt acts as PM, decomposes problems into subsystems, and writes contractual API interfaces; Composer hit 95,000+ users in month one after a one-weekend run .
- The base model is a 'very athletic high schooler'; the harness — a proprietary data feed plus a coach agent — scores every campaign before it ships .
- Customer agents ship pre-trained on 5-10 of their own use cases at a 50-70% resolution rate .
- Headless is the default: Twilio was 'left for dead' 18 months ago growing 4%, now almost 20%, because its API works with agents . A follow-up post quoted Abialecki: 100% of Klaviyo PMs are L3s and all commit code .
Lenny's Podcast
Resource recommendations from Lenny's Podcast:
- The host recommended Elena Vera's post "Stop the AI Confidence Theater" as a great post that criticizes people posting AI accomplishments and pretending they have it all figured out, noting few of those things are actually that great and working .
- Ian Silber, head of product design at OpenAI, recommended "The Design of Everyday Things" as one of the books he recommends most to others, calling it a classic of how he thinks about design and saying "You have to read it if you're in tech or not in tech" . He added that it's not a unique recommendation and that few purely design books have stuck with him .
No Priors
DoorDash co-founder @stanleytang endorses a video by @andyfang (Andy Fang) on agent-first commerce: an AI agent watches your pantry shelf and reorders the moment it runs low, with builders now using the DoorDash CLI. He calls it 'insane and cool' to see in real life. The tweet embeds the video (https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2080769801157480448/vid/avc1/2560x1440/Yl3kMpXfCadpwOsN.mp4?tag=29).
David Sacks
David Sacks (Craft Ventures, All-In co-host) recommended Thomas Sowell's book "The Vision of the Anointed," citing it as capturing the mindset of "elite intellectuals convinced that only they are enlightened enough to control the outcome." He invoked the book in his critique of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's AI-regulation arguments, using it to argue that concentrating power in "an enlightened few" has rarely produced the promised results .
Garry Tan
Garry Tan (@garrytan) recommended an Instagram creator's reel, calling him "amazing" and urging followers to follow him, with the reel at https://www.instagram.com/reels/Db9H43evBi4/.
Aaron Levie
Aaron Levie (@levie) recommended an X post by @jeffreyhuber as "Pretty good way to think about the value of AI agents and where the opportunity lies" . The post states: "many of the gains of AI boil down to: AI is better at brute forcing than you" . Levie elaborates that AI agents can tirelessly do things previously impractical — e.g., simulating every security risk in a codebase, reading every contract, or combing the customer base for upsell data — and the real opportunity is to "throw intelligence at [problems] that won't give up," targeting markets where more compute qualitatively changes what customers can do . Link: https://x.com/jeffreyhuber/status/2089020697876275202.
OpenAI’s Head of Design: This is the best time in history to be a designer | Ian Silber
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highlights
0:00I've been doing this sentiment survey of the tech workforce. Surprisingly, designers are just the most unhappy on every dimension.
0:08We're unclear right now what is expected of a designer. Someone who might be classically [music] trained in a certain way of working now feeling like, "Oh my gosh, I need to really change everything."
0:17You believe this the best time in history to be a designer.
0:20We're all extremely early in this process. There's just a huge opportunity for designers. Nobody should feel behind right now. I think that if you literally started today, you're going to have a leg up on pretty much most people. There's just so much opportunity [music] to change the way you work to make great things.
0:36If you look at engineering, it's just a completely new job versus a few years ago. I'm curious how that translates to product design.
0:43Engineers have 10 or sometimes like 100x their productivity, but our design team hasn't because the design process still takes time. It's still sometimes you have to try a bunch of things and throw them out. Still [music] very messy and fluid. We had a podcast with head of design cloud code Jenny when she talked about [music] there's been this traditional design process prototype mock test research iterate and now there's just no time for that.
1:05There's certain features for chatbt where we really obsess and we really spend a lot of time we try 100 things we throw out 99 we finally ship one and other things we really embrace building in public we take big swings and then we learn quickly. Do you think AI will ever be an extremely good product designer? I think it already is an incredible product designer.
1:26Today my guest is Ian Silber, head of product design at OpenAI. Ian's been in this role for three years now, which is a lifetime in AI time. Prior to OpenAI, he was at Artifact, the news app from the founders of Instagram that I absolutely loved. Before that, he spent 8 years at Instagram. The role of design is in such an interesting place right now and Ian has such a unique and insightful and fascinating take on the future of product design and what the AI tools that we use everyday will look
1:55like in the future. A huge thank you to Cleo and Joel Loenstein for suggesting topics for this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennisproass.com for a year free of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI products in the world available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Ian Silbert. Ian, thank you so much for being here.
2:20I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
2:22I'm even more excited. Something that I'm very excited to get your take on. I don't know if you've watched me doing this, but I've been doing this uh sentiment survey of the tech workforce over the past couple years. I think it's the biggest survey of its kind where we basically survey people in tech about how they're feeling about their careers, their work, their roles, especially with the rise of AI this last year. And kind of surprisingly, designers and user
2:50researchers are just the most unhappy on every dimension, like every actual dimension. They're the most overwhelmed, the most anxious, the most the least optimistic, the most worried, uh the most tired, also the least likely to recommend their role to people entering the workforce.
3:11I'm curious if you're seeing this yourself in the design community, and if you are, what do you think is going on?
3:18Uh, first of all, it's an incredible survey, and it's such great, I think, information to have as an industry. Um, and I think it's something we need to unpack, you know, and I see I I see a mix uh for sure. I think like I can speak most to design. Um, and I mean I talk to a lot of designers that are very optimistic and very excited. Um, and so I see in my world I see luckily I I'm or
3:46I I I see a lot of that. But I can totally understand why people might be feeling very uncertain, right? Because there's so much discussion about, well, is the role changing? Should my expectations be different? Um, and you know, well, do I need to do I need to do X, Y, and Z? Do I need to be shipping code every day? And you know someone who might be uh sort of classically trained in a certain way of
4:14working now feeling like oh my gosh I need to like really change everything and I think it's to me right now it feels like the the uncertainty of of that I can totally understand right because as an engineer I think people have they've already sort of gone through that shift like we see that engineers are working totally different and we also you know one thing I do hear and I this came up a lot in my own team when when we did we do similar surveys internally One of the big things that came up was
4:42you know we see that uh uh you know engineers have 10 or sometimes like 100x their productivity uh but our design team hasn't right because the design process still takes time. It's still sometimes you have to try a bunch of things and throw them out right versus maybe working with a coding agent you ask it to do something it's pretty binary now at this point it usually sort of gets it pretty well. Um, and but the design process is really
5:10still very messy and fluid and you think you have a great idea and you try it and it sucks and then you try it again and it sucks and then you you give it to you know users or internal you get internal feedback and it's wrong and you still have to go through that arduous and kind of messy but really fun process. Um, and that hasn't really comp that it's compressed in that you can get much more ideas out fast, but you still need that that whole sort of feedback loop.
5:38There's the alignment of getting many people uh, you know, especially in a bigger company like that still has a lot of overhead. So the point is that I think that it's we're unclear right now like what is expected of a designer and that lack of clarity I can see totally lead to you know um some some fears uh or some unease I guess. But on the other hand I've seen that I mean our designers what's been what's great I think about
6:06at OpenAI is like we're such an experimental company. We are driven by you know research and we treat our company as a research lab and we totally embrace that and that's a new thing that I really kind of learned and and have really come to love about OpenAI is that started as a research lab that DNA is like deeply embedded in everything we do and as designers I think that you know you come here we look for people that are not don't have a background in AI
6:36but are like really curious about the tools and how it can And we found that like just by sort of supporting that excitement to explore that people feel less pressure.
6:49Um it's not like you need to change the way you work but it's more about encouraging exploration. Um, and when we've done that, when I go and talk to um, both very senior designers and early career designers at our company, they're so excited because they I I literally was just asking some people before this cuz I wanted to get some different takes and they, [snorts] you know, I think the feeling is that like they have so much more ability to be creative, to express
7:17themselves, to try bad ideas and throw them out. you can just like really move through lots of different ideas and it becomes this incredible way to create and the things that I'm seeing from my team the the bar is raising um the the I think the thinking is getting stronger the more that they're using um these tools. So, I think for the people that that that are starting to embrace this, they're starting to feel really excited and realizing that they have just so much agency as as designers and like um
7:47you know, so much more ability to have like really high impact uh as as a as a designer.
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9:02What I'd love to do in this conversation is help folks that are in that bucket of well this is sucks and things aren't going well because as you said and this is exactly what we found that survey is about half of people are having the best time of their career having the most fun the most optimistic about where things are going and then the half are not having a really hard time. And exactly what you said, the people that are having a great time report like the main the most the strongest correlation is they feel amplified by AI. It's actually
9:32making them better. And that's that the way you described engineers, they're they're seeing that now. They're like, "Holy I can do so much more." And so just to kind of reinforce the point you're making, think attributes of people that are doing well um feel amplified, very curious, have time to explore, feel like they can be more creative. Is there any more thing more along those lines of just like patterns of people that are doing really well and having a great time that might be helpful for people to hear that are not having a good time?
9:59What I see in in the the folks that I think are really embracing this, right, they are using it every step of the process to kind of help them, right? And it and I think it helps, you know, we have we have a community of course of designers that are all trying this together. So if there's any way to kind of uh find that and that that's something that uh we should think about more as a broader community how we kind of help each other but like I think that learning kind of different ways of working right and so it might be okay I have this idea let me just actually
10:28start by trying what if I just threw this right into codeex or cloud or whatever tool you use like throw it into uh into an agent to help you think about it to help you prototype it just try a different way of working um it doesn't necessarily mean that that has to be the exact right way. But um I don't know. I think we found that just people that are are embracing this that are adaptable. I think adaptability is like another term that I think we all hear a lot now, but it's like so true. It's like knowing
10:57that this stuff changes very quickly.
11:00What didn't work yesterday might work today. I mean literally like within you know six months this entire industry has shifted. I remember I was actually out on on paternity leave uh towards the end of last year and I was working on some side projects. I was trying some uh coding agents and it just like it worked but it just kept kind of running into these hiccups and and then like a month later like
11:29codeex drops and I try it again and it's like oh my gosh it just works. Um and that I think changes a lot of the design process because now all of a sudden if you do have an idea you can like plop it in there and just try it. Um, and so anyways, I think it's it's just really about like not being scared. I think another thing to think about is that we're so early. We're like so in early innings of this entire um evolution, right? It feels like things have changed a lot and it feels
11:58like maybe we're pretty far into this shift. But the good news for anybody who is trying to design or get into design whether again like if you're early career or late career or you never even like actually design anything but you've been thinking about it is like we're all figuring this out as we go. Nobody has like some perfect answer um about the how the design process should work. Um and it's whatever you think is working
12:27today will probably change again. And so I think what's encouraging about this is that nobody should feel like behind right now. I think that if you literally started today, you're going to have a leg up on pretty much most people. Um and uh just really thinking about like how you can just make great stuff. Um and uh there's just so much opportunity to change the way you work work or to to just to make great things. and [snorts] what we think is like really cutting
12:56edge today will look so archaic in you know a year let alone a month right and that's something I' I've learned you know I've been at open air for three years and I think about the stuff that they you know we were working on when we when I first joined um I mean I remember getting a demo of of like our our early voice mode that we hadn't shipped or computer use that like you know barely worked worked uh and now it's like
13:25become it's it literally has become part of the process of how we design. We use both of those tools to to build software. And so anyways, the point is it's like changing very quickly. We're all extremely early in this process and nobody really has like the it figured out.
13:41I love that you've also when we were chatting ahead of this year, you you actually told me you believe this is the best time in history to be a designer.
13:48Yeah, I mean I I truly believe this. Um I can't even imagine you know I so when I uh okay history lesson when I was getting into design I mean I was like uh in my teenage years right and I was like uh you know to learn things it was like you know I uh I was kind of like learning design and code and you could like view source on a HTML web page and kind of see how things were built and that was like kind of how you had to
14:18learn and you know um you could I don't know it's like Dreamweaver and you know like there were these really to tools that actually were really cool. Um but to compare those to today if I were just getting into design the fact that you can like learn so quickly you can kind of like have an idea to working version of it in like like a matter of minutes. Um
14:46it's just you can be so expressive and and you can um I think anybody can be a designer right um and I think that as more and more software is made more and more products are made I think that the I do think that the human element of design is going to really be start to become more and more important.
15:13It's that's always been the case that I think that, you know, companies with great design, you know, can uh of course stand out. I think it's going to be more and more important, right? I think that products that um fully understand their users and that make something delightful when anybody can make anything, you know, that's going to become one of the most important kind of uh like sort of dimensions of a product and that's how people are going to evaluate it. And so I think designers uh stand like that is
15:42that is our core job, right? Um you know and and then on top of that I think that designers are just much more empowered. Uh so you know at a um you know I was talking to some friends that are thinking about starting a company and talking about the uh sort of ratio of design to engineer and how like at a startup maybe that's totally different. It might it may have been like you're going to have one designer and uh I don't know 15 engineers or
16:11something like that. You know that maybe a startup I've seen that sort of ratio.
16:15Uh but they were they were talking about well maybe we'll have like two designers and one engineer. One really good engineer who can make sure that like we're really building something that's rock solid like from from an engineering standpoint. But then we want two really creative people that are going to be thinking about how we kind of build this product. And so thinking about that, I think that there's just like a huge opportunity for designers. I think that internally we see that more and more
16:43we're we like designers we are are totally completely empowered to to take an idea to take a early research concept and try to figure out how we can actually like package that up into something that people want to use or that um that solves some sort of uh unmet need for our customers. and um that is a designer's job. And so I think that maybe more and more people start to think of themselves as designers. Um but either way, I think it's like the best I I really do think it's the best time to
17:12be a designer.
17:13So along those lines, when Mark Andre was on the podcast, he had this hilarious way of describing the state of the of the product or right now. Uh he's like basically there's this three-way standoff. PMs, engineers, designers, they're all they all think the other roles are going to go away and they're the ones that are going to win in the end. And so there's less like Spider-Man meme where they're all pointing at each other. And I'm curious because I I can see a case for each role becoming the dominant role. And I completely agree
17:41with you that with all of the tools being shipped, like there's like a thousandx explosion and products being shipped, there's just like endless streams of things to pay attention to.
17:51You think design would be such an opportunity to differentiate and stand out. I haven't seen that yet in just like an acceleration of design hires and explosion as you said like two designers to one engineer. Do you think do you think that's coming? Why do you think that hasn't happened yet? Do you think it's as you said just early and people will realize oh wow we need a lot more designers. What do you think is going on?
18:12We might start to see that happen more. Um or if anything we might start to see engineers wanting to become a little bit more design focused. I also think that designers are getting more productive.
18:26Um it's not necessarily the same direct output of like engineers 10xing. Um but we are seeing that that designers um are are able to do a lot more. But no, I mean I think that that that is something we're sort of always thinking about and and evolving. Um the other thing I wanted to talk about too is like the difference between PM and engine and design and are they all blurring together? And my point of view is that they they definitely are and they
18:54there's always been overlap as far as I've seen it, right? I've seen designers that are like kind of really good product, you know, manager type archetype, but can design and I've seen designers that are like really good sort of polish engineer type, you know, like so that I think I've always found that these like single siloed um role definitions don't really make sense.
19:20It's just that at big companies you have to have like a ladder to put people on so you can generally kind of like organize.
19:28But in reality, you know, when you look at a team, you see that there are people that are have various strengths and people that play different roles. And so I've I've always kind of seen that. Um I think there's those lines have always been blurry, but they're becoming blurriier for sure. Um, but the other thing is I do still think that and and maybe this is thinking about it from like a slightly larger company perspective, but I think you do still need people that have certain responsibilities, right? Because if you
19:57have one person that's expected to design, to rally a team around something, you know, to align a whole company, uh to do all the work that like a PM does, for example, and also be designing it and also be engineering it, it's just maybe not you you might it might be hard to find one person that's good at all of those different skills.
20:17And so I still find a lot of value, for example, in having like an excellent PM that can help rally multiple teams together that can help um sharpen kind of the perspective or the problem space that a team is focused on um that can help with like resourcing, all of those things, right? And so I do think there will still be value in these um and people focused on different parts of building a project or a product. Um that doesn't mean that um maybe there's more
20:47fluidity that people can move between them but having somebody who is sort of generally responsible for these different things or an engineer who's like really making sure that the output is totally sound and you know is actually like um lading up to something that is going to work for the broader system.
21:03I completely agree. So just to make sure I understand what you're saying is just there's talk about all the roles blurring. is like maybe we'll all just be builders and we do everything and you're saying is like no that's not going to happen the like the ven di I'm picturing ven diagrams of product design engineering like converging but you're saying they're going to continue to stay their own roles there's going to be a PM design engineer but each can do more of the other roles I think that's right I I do think that like for and again this is not a blanket statement right because I think if
21:32you're at a startup that's like very different I would I would if I were starting a company right now I [snorts] would hire like the best generalist people I could possibly think of, someone who I think could kind of fluidly move between that. But maybe again that's maybe that's always kind of been true. Um, but at at a bigger company, I do think that I've seen like designers um that are, you know, maybe incredible at designing, but could really use a product manager who can
21:58help them kind of with with like hone um both their thinking and how and and then how they work and the operations of it all. So the point is I do just think that there are there are different it's it's almost like in t taking the people out of it I think that there are different sort of hats that you need to wear to build great software and I think that um those are continue to be important functions I think so this begs the question do you think
22:26AI will ever be an extremely good product designer and just to like it's interesting to ask you this question because on the one hand you're like oh yeah open like ChachiP is going to become incredible at everything. On the other hand, it's hard for a head of design to say, "Oh, no, design's going to be done by AI." I'm curious to get your your take and you know, it like sounds crazy, but like engineers never thought it would be able to write code the way it is now. Um, so just yeah, thoughts on just how good AI will get.
22:53Maybe one way to put it is I think it already is an incredible um product designer. [laughter] Um, it it really is actually already great. The cool thing about it though is it's accessible to every single person.
23:06Um, and it's a tool that anybody can use. I do think it's really good. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's like the best visual designer or best at, you know, uh, information hierarchy or or typography or even, you know, user experience and interaction design. It's not necessarily like the best at any of those. It's impossible to predict where things are going. And like I said earlier, like you know, how much has changed in three years? Of course, they're going to continue to get better.
23:35Um, but the way we think about it and and I and I really do believe this is like we're building tools to enable people to be more creative, to be um to to do more, to build more. And so it's it is already a great designer, but you it's at your fingertips to kind of figure out how to use it and how to get the best out of it. Where do you think human brains will continue to be most valuable as AI gets better at product design specifically? What are kind of like the remaining areas for us to be useful?
24:05Truly understanding [snorts] what people need. um you know I mean the human uh feedback loop of watching people use something and and understanding that um the you know inventing something new um I think uh and then of course there's just the pure like
24:33human kind of take right like oh somebody made this somebody had a point of view about this um I just think that I do think that will stand out more and more and I think that that's like an important thing for a designer to like really hone is like what is my point of view? What who am I building this for and why? Um and I don't know I think like as as as AI becomes more and more like better and better for sure there will be an opportunity to always kind of stand out and push how can you push that even further.
25:01Yeah, that touches on uh a conversation I had with um the PM of codeex. I asked him just why is AI not good at design?
25:09It's actually gotten better since that conversation, which was just like a month or two ago. And and he had a number of reasons for it. One is just like like part of great product design is doing something new. And so if it's trained on all the most interesting websites today, it's just like okay, but that's not what that's not interesting anymore. And the other point he made is like AI researchers aren't innately great at design and so they may not understand exactly what it takes to train a model to be really good at this.
25:35Uh thoughts? What do you think? What do you think it'll take to get AI to be much much better at product design?
25:40I mean, the new thing is interesting, right? Because I think that everything we're doing is trying to design something that hasn't existed before, right? Um, you know, if you look at if you look at great great products that have come out in the last, you know, 10 20 years or whatever, right?
25:59It's like all of a sudden, you know, take the iPhone, we're designing for multi-touch. And that opened up like this whole new interaction paradigm. And there's no training data for that, right? You have to you're kind of really trying to understand this new thing, right? And then you had something like Instagram that was like really embracing um the sort of like the fact that everybody had mobile phones. And then Snapchat, I think, is another good example of great design and that it was kind of a maybe people thought strange
26:27sort of like interaction design, but it completely thought like flipped on its head the way people might want to communicate with each other. And to me that that is like great design. It's like truly understanding like I you know the people that like people have this problem or there's this unmet need and and I'm going to build it with this in this unique way. So yeah, I do think that there's that sort of like fresh new kind of way. And then now with AI, it's like we're designing like how do you
26:56talk to something that uh is how do you talk to AI with your voice, you know, or how do you use an agent to like carry out tasks for you? It's like yeah, there isn't a lot of precedent for this. And so I think that, you know, humans are able to kind of do a really good job kind of evaluating, you know, what good is and um, you know, or at least kind of like trying a bunch of things and and learning along the way with people. And so um I don't know, but again, like all
27:25this stuff changes really quickly. It's hard to say, but uh I think um I think there's a lot of reasons why uh having that human in the loop is going to be so important. And kind of following that thread of the human in the loop when you're hiring designers these days, what's kind of trending up in what you look for, what you think is more and more important in the designers that will be successful today, especially at OpenAI, what's trending down with anything?
27:50This might be a luxury of having a slightly larger team, but if you're, you know, at our scale, um, you know, but even at at a startup or a smaller company, I think this still be true. I really believe in hiring a well-rounded team that has many different strengths.
28:05So, I think it's important to have kind of like your handful of or or the right ratio of sort of generalists that can kind of do everything, but uh you know, we also hire like incredible visual designers or we have like like a really amazing sort of brand team that helps us with kind of like the sort of maybe Yeah. expression of our brand both out and in a in the product um or great
28:33prototypers or um you know um and so I think that rounding that out or or great sort of product thinkers that are a little bit more strategic or people that are like really obsess over like the very cutting edge of where these things are going and I haven't found that one designer necessarily checks every single one of those boxes. I think people just naturally are, you know, drawn to certain things and I think embracing that when you build a team is actually
29:02like um if you if you have the luxury of doing that is like really valuable.
29:06Okay. So that's like my a broad statement. But then as far as what we look for, we do definitely, you know, I always tell candidates, we do not expect you to have a background in AI because again, this is evolving so quickly, but we definitely expect high curiosity about it and and and a high aptitude to jumping in and learning how how you know how you're going to use this in your process, how it works. and not just how you use it in your process, but how
29:35especially for us like how you're going to create tools to enable more people to use it. Um, and so it's more about the curiosity I think um is something that like we really push on uh or look for.
29:50And then um definitely prototyping um prototyping is something I've always valued in my career. Um, but I just think that, you know, it's become more and more accessible and so that's something that, uh, I think really does stand out usually when we talk to to candidates. And then I do think that, yeah, just like having some having a point of view on on where where these things are going or or just like any of the tools that people have worked on and
30:18really thinking that strategic thinking. I guess last last one on this is like systems thinking um is becoming more and more important and um you know especially as you're I like in our world we're it's interesting because we're trying to build you know we're building the super intelligence that has uh that has all these different capabilities and we need to think more about the underlying primitives that we can build that can
30:49kind of build on top of each other, right? Um, you know, this is something that I think like notion did really well early on was like we're going to build these building blocks, right? And then like everything kind of is composable. I think that's becoming really important too as you think about like well we don't want to build all these sort of one-off siloed experiences. We want to be able to build and ship systems that can build on top of each other so that you know when someone goes and uses our product it feels like one cohesive
31:18simple thing and the model can reason about how it can pull all these things together. So that like idea of like really understanding the system and thinking about that is becoming even more important especially because it's kind of complex of all the things that it could possibly do. This is the fifth podcast in a row I've done where systems thinking has come up as a skill that people are more and more looking for and it's it's like so funny. I need a bingo card for systems thinking but it makes so much sense and I think it especially makes sense from the designer
31:47perspective. If we come back to just why my take on why designers are kind of frustrated and and stressed right now is just there's less time to do design the traditional design process. things are just moving like engineers are shipping 5,000 PRs a day and so to your point this idea of building blocks and design system langu and and just a platform for people to build on feels incredibly important.
32:08Totally. It's very hard but I um I I yeah it's like it's funny we've had these conversations where I'm like just do less [laughter] like my encouragement has been do less there like don't design it if you don't have to. Maybe there's already an existing system or component or something that we can build on top of or maybe we don't even need this feature.
32:30We actually just need to kind of uh uh like you know extend an an existing feature. Um I think that's an important thing and and part of that is like thinking outside of the bounds of what you're working on, right? and thinking across everything I think is becoming much more important and the speed for sure I think is is a reason why that's so important right now just to follow that thread because that feels like a pretty big change in the design world there used to be this we
32:58had a podcast with u she was head of design club code Jenny Wen and she talked about this and I think it blew a lot of people's minds just there's been this traditional design process prototype mock test research iterate okay cool ready for engineering build it iterate ship it and now there's just no time for that. And so the role in her eyes has just moved to big picture planning and just like steering people in a good direction. Does that resonate?
33:25How much is that has changed in in the world of a designer?
33:28I think that 100% we we do work that way. It it's it depends. I think for us it depends on like what sort of what stage you're at in the in the uh sort of process or um you know uh how uh maybe how far along the product is. There are certain features for chatbt where we really obsess and we really spend a lot of time. We try a million things and we throw out you know uh we try 100 things
33:55we throw out 99. We finally ship one. um you know uh the like uh the or like the composer is like changing every single day and we try many things we throw them out but or like and you could take that for many different things within chbt um and then there are other things like codecs where um you know I don't know I mean the super app is a good example where we definitely are just like trying stuff really quick I think that we
34:23really embrace building in public [laughter] which is a different way of working. But I think that like when you get comfortable with it is actually really gratifying or satisfying because you can try stuff and get instant feedback both internally and externally.
34:39Um but yeah, I mean it is uh moving really fast and I think it just depends right like some like like I said certain things we really sweat the details and we try um you know and and we do test we AB test we'll do user research um and we kind of iterate and evolve a lot and then other things we uh we take big swings and then we learn quickly um but yeah I don't know I think you have to like I think the biggest thing is like
35:08embracing that the technology might change in like a a month or you know and maybe a certain interaction or or setting or or whatever that you needed doesn't need to exist or now a new one does need to exist or a new capability is there or the latency profile has changed such that you can like rethink this or whatever all these capabilities are changing or the the intelligence has
35:35changed or and so you have to be just really quick on your feet and and maybe not be so precious about it until it's at the point where okay this is kind of hardened like we don't think that this is necessarily going to change tomorrow because of the technology so let's make this the best it can possibly be you know like we're we're thinking a lot about how we should evolve sort of really think about chatbt becoming like deeply embedded in a per like your
36:02personal life and how how should the how should the app feel that's something that we're not going necessarily design and ship overnight and just like put it out there. We're spending we're really thinking about that and we're trying a bunch of different ideas and we're putting it up on you know uh you know a whiteboard or you know we're doing some design in Figma. We're prototyping it.
36:24We're probably going to dog food a bunch of different ideas long before we ever ship something. Um that but that's a bigger project, right?
36:32And then there's other things where we're like idea to ship in like, you know, 4 hours.
36:38This all makes sense. Essentially, what I'm hearing is you pick your battles and you focus the design effort on the things that will be durable and not change.
36:47Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And it's hard to know what that is. [laughter] Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Mercury. Radically different banking loved by over 300,000 entrepreneurs. And now with command. I've been a customer of Mercury's for over six years. I have never once thought about leaving.
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37:35Command to transfer money around, to figure out what categories I've been spending the most money in, analyze my cash flows, [music] and just today, I used it to find out how much I've made from a specific sponsor over the past year. I just [music] asked, "How much have I made from X over the past year?"
37:5010 seconds later, I have an answer. It is so freaking cool. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA members FDIC. So, I asked uh a bunch of people that know you well what to talk to you about. And uh Joel uh Loenstein, who happens to be the head of design at Anthropic, is a good friend of yours, which I love. and he said what he
38:18imagines the hardest part of your job is is balancing the needs of the existing billion monthly active users of chat GPT with the need to innovate and push and iterate and invent. And so I'm just curious how you just think about that, how you find that balance knowing you have to cater to both sides.
38:37That's a great question and it's a really fun part of the way we work. Um, I think that we have we have vastly different audiences, like really really different. I've never worked in this kind of quite quite a spread. Um, you know, like at Instagram, uh, I I I spent eight years working at Instagram, we had a billion user or billions of users, maybe. I don't actually know what they're at now, but it was a lot of people. Um, but the product was pretty
39:07simple and it was sort of, you know, a couple ways you could use it. We did think about like creators and, you know, larger accounts that had special needs, but this is like vastly different where you have someone who's, you know, using this to help them come up with the recipe to eat tonight. Um, or, you know, brainstorm their next haircut or something like that. And then there's uh somebody who's like transforming the way they're doing farming for their you know
39:35um their like you know helping to automate their farm in Japan or something right and uh it's just like the broadest spectrum ever. Um generally what we've seen is that um we we believe in this idea of this sort of capability overhang where the the product um you know like vast majority of the people are getting a sliver of the the true value that they could out
40:03of the bottle. Um that's not necessarily a bad thing. Many you know they're still getting tons of value. Um but we found that like we you know make sure to focus on creating a extremely simple, streamlined experience for for many many people. Um, and then we put like uh all of the, you know, cutting edge stuff. We also make make sure to give that and and make sure that's like really accessible for the people that care. The challenge
40:31of course is like not necessarily overindexing and and sort of like putting that putting uh something that um people might not understand in front of a billion users. So, but generally what we've seen is we can experiment early with the the people that really care and that's where we have like our desktop app and we have codecs and now chat work is kind of stepping into a much broader audience which we're really excited about and eventually what we want what we what we know and we think about this a lot in design is like it
41:00will tr like things will truly become like for billions of users when they don't have to like think about a switch or a mode or anything like that. And so we know that like eventually it has to kind of get distilled into that main experience. Um but it is like a really fun thing to balance and um we have to think about like people that are using this for free every day to people that are paying us hundreds of dollars and lots of different needs. It's just a matter of sort of balancing and as a designer it does add a lot of complexity
41:30for sure to think to you really have to have empathy for every sort of different type of user. Um, but this it it makes it fun for sure.
41:39That is such a mind-blowing point you're making about the spectrum of usage of chat GBT and CEX. I I didn't think about it that way. Like is there has there been a product that has such a wide spectrum from just like what's this rash on my finger to building Salesforce, you know?
41:56Yeah. And it and it makes it really hard to you know because I a lot of uh it's so funny like one of the big challenges we're always thinking about is this like blank box problem, right? And people talk about this all the time. It's like is chat really the final frontier? It's a terminal bas it's you know glorified terminal is like some critique that that I think these chatbots get. And then it's like okay so how do you design something that can kind of shapeshift
42:24into anything? um you know it's like maybe someone is coming here for image generation for fun or you know they're trying to generate a PowerPoint or you know so having this adaptable interface is like a really interesting uh design challenge and um it's like sort of uncharted territory because it can really like shape shift into many different tools um and it's this like um incredible at so many different things
42:53and trying to figure out how to present that. And then thinking about, you know, we think a lot about like a novice user, someone who's sort of brand new to this experience that we want to help them understand how this can add value uh to their lives or to their sort of professional uh work or what whatever whatever capacity they're using this in.
43:15And then we also want to like get out of the way of people that, you know, use this every single day and they use this as like a real workhorse tool. And so designing for that spectrum is something we have to think about a lot. Um but yeah, it's all a world of spectrums I guess.
43:31There's a comment that Kevin Wheel, your former chief product officer, made on the podcast that has really stuck with me, which is uh to your point, people always diss this idea of just like it's just like a chat box. Why hasn't it ever changed from that? Even though it has, but still it's kind of this chat chatbot. and he made this really good point that what is an interface that is very good at uh spanning a wide spectrum of intelligence.
43:53Uh it's actually just talking. If you think about humans, we talk to people of low IQ to very high IQ. We can all just talk to each other and it's actually a really good interface for uh packaging something that is increasingly smarter and smarter and smarter.
44:08Yeah. And and I think we're seeing what's what's been really fun design space for us is you know there's two things we think about. One is like how do we how can we help you express your intent better, right? Like uh we don't want you have to think about being a perfect prompt engineer, but like how do we even one teach you that oh this is something that the model can help me with and then how do we make sure that we get we we sort of best understand what you want. And so like, you know, we recently shipped some features where if
44:38you ask sort of an open-ended question, it can follow up with, you know, some follow-up questions that you can like just tap through um an answer versus having to type everything out, right? Um or another good example is, you know, so then then once you actually ask it to do something, there's the chat transcript doesn't need to be purely text, right?
44:57We've seen these now evolve so far from what it was with when chat just launched. you know, it's no longer just a pure chatbot. It actually has many features within that, right? So, a good example is what we call writing blocks.
45:09You ask it to um you know, write you a letter or an email uh and it now contains that um that email in sort of a block that you can directly manipulate and you can type with it and you can brainstorm and you can edit little bits and parts of it. You can copy just that and that has made that interaction much better. And we're seeing the same thing with like image generation and creating special tools for that kind of mode. And I think that's where the UI is going to start to really continue to evolve is
45:39how do we make if you're if you come at this and you're a designer, maybe chatbt should actually really look differently uh look different or have different affordances.
45:49um or you're you know a a data scientist or you know you're using this for to run your home you know like your your personal life maybe it should really kind of work or look differently so like understanding the context and giving you different affordances based on that is something that you know we're thinking a lot about 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 chat gpt codeex is I know there's this idea of a
46:18super app. You talked about voice, this personal assistant idea. What's like a way you think about where this goes long term?
46:25I think that it will start to become more and more adaptive to, you know, all of the context of your life. Um, I think proactivity is a big untapped kind of part of the experience that we're really excited to think about. Um, you know, we're starting to see this with chatd work now where it actually has pretty good suggestions based on, you know, your calendar or
46:55your slack or these different sort of inputs and um external kind of context.
47:02I think that's going to become more and more important um or kind of shift the way you know you use it. I think voice as you know we we we just had a step change in the model that just feels much more natural and again like you know I can only imagine how that's going to feel in 2 3 years as it just gets better and better. I think people I I do love interacting with chatbt especially voice in like just I want to just kind of like really quickly say something and and
47:31then I think like its ability to kind of go sort of like not just from asking questions but actually doing things for you. Um that's all going to change and hopefully all of this gets simpler as we do it too right you know 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 sort of this one universal input that you can ask that knows when it needs to answer like
47:59really quickly or it should be chatty or whether it should go and like go off and do work for you. And so that's a big like excitement that we can get to is how can we 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. You know that like that's like goes back to the balancing the different kind of you know personas and user needs like right of course we want to expose that for the right people but then we
48:29want to make sure that we can get a default experience that works great for for most people. Um, but yeah, I think it's going to be really proactive. I do think that we're going to like get much uh richer sort of input through voice and like richer visual outputs that are more interactive. I think that you'll start to build more durable kind of workflows with attribut that you can kind of use over and over. Right now, you know, it a lot of times it feels like you're coming and starting from scratch each time. and we want to really
48:59make this kind of the tool that you can use to to help you uh with whatever sort of task you have.
49:04This all sounds wonderful. I can't wait.
49:06[laughter] Uh just kind of zooming out a little bit and then I want to talk a little bit to designers again, but you're in this uh 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 of day one and to give you some advice?
49:26I mean so many things.
49:29I think you know the first one is like recognizing that we're really early and instead like I actually was pretty intimidated coming to OpenAI if I'm being honest. Um, you know, uh, I remember like, okay, interviewing. Oh, no, I got to like, you know, G GPT4 had kind of recently come out and what GPT, like I, you know, I was like, what is all this stuff? Like, I I was using it and I was using the the stuff, but I I didn't feel like I had a true
49:57understanding of of it. And to be honest, I, you know, there's I still have so much to learn. So that idea of like you are early, we're we're figuring this out like that I think I would I would want to hear. And the other thing like that I found uh you know and for me this is more of like a personal thing.
50:17It's less about AI or anything but I stepped into a really different role. um you know most of my career I I've managed uh I definitely managed before but never like at a scale that's growing so fast and and then at a company that is like so different you know that it the role was just every day was something new uh and for a long time I felt like I'm kind of like bad at this or you know I don't know what I'm doing
50:46um and then I went and like talked to friends that had led like really large design teams dreams or um or or were in a similar transition as me and they all felt exactly the same or the problems that I had were not unique. Um and so you know this is I guess yeah more personal advice that it's like I think at any stage of your career there's that feeling of like imposttor syndrome and like what am I doing? I don't I don't know how to do this. Finding people you can talk to that are going through the
51:15similar things. you'll find that there's usually a lot of shared kind of uh challenges and struggles and having that like sort of whether it's a mentor or just like a a buddy that is like impartial and out of it has was really helpful to me. Um and you know finding that community I think has been has been helpful. Um so yeah so like that and then understanding that this is all so new and evolving really quickly.
51:37That is extremely helpful to hear. Elena Vera had this really great post. I don't know if you know her. She's how to grow to lovable right now. uh she had this great post called stop the AI confidence theater where she just kind of like all these people just keep posting all these things they've done with AI and all the ways it's changes their life and it's just they're killing it figured all out and really it's like very few people like very few of these things are actually that great and working and and it's just like stop stop pretending like this is actually you figured it all out.
52:05I think it's much better to be humble about it and be like wow yeah I don't know this is like changing quickly and like I'm just going to embrace it and see where it goes. Yeah, and that connects to what you said was a core component of people that are doing well right now, people that are curious and just kind of poking around and trying to trying these things and try them again because maybe it didn't work now. It didn't work before, now it works now.
52:25100%. Yeah. It's like being kind of like Yeah. Every every model, every new every new feature, it's like the people that are poking around at those edges, I I found are just having such a blast doing it, you know. And this connects to something else Kevin Wheel, former CPO at OpenAI, said on the podcast, which has always stuck with me, which is the model we have today is the worst the model will ever be.
52:48Exactly. I mean, that that goes back to like when, you know, we we Yeah. I mean, a new model comes out what, every week? I don't know, every day. Like, uh, if you count all the labs and and everything, it's like it's changing so quickly and and everyone gets better. Um and I don't know it's like yeah I I always try to remind myself it's like you know you you know it must be like
53:17what like I don't know building or designing and like early days of computers when like componentry was like really evolving really quickly and there were these drastic step changes and um you know like you would hit these limitations and all of a sudden those limitations were gone. You know, I think it's the same, right? It's like these things just change and they're what was totally broken yesterday now actually just kind of works.
53:41So maybe to start to close out the conversation, say a designer is listening to this and they're in that bucket of overwhelmed, anxious, struggling, stressed, uh feeling uncertain about their future. What's one suggestion you have for them to help them move out of that state and into a better place? just recognizing that it's it's a it's a totally rational feeling and it's a great time to just try to
54:09explore and see what if I tried working what if I tried you know think rethinking about the the tooling or what if I just embraced like oh maybe I should prototype more let me try you know um try using these tools but again like recognizing that I maybe it helps to hear that I think that we're all still so early and it's and it's still changing and and just kind of embracing that like just have fun with it and and see where it goes. And and I think maybe
54:38another thing I would say is really try to focus on the output the outcome, right? At the end of the day, we're not here to build tools like processes. We're not here to like build uh or token max or something like that. we're here to make great software that people love or great products or whatever it is you do. Um, but that's the thing that really matters and if you focus on that, you know, I
55:07think that you'll hopefully find that, you know, these tools can help you do that, but you still have a huge role in that as as the person that's kind of steering and directing it.
55:17So, along those lines, I'm going to take us to a couple recurring corners of the podcast. The first corner is AI corner.
55:23The question is just what's one way that you have found AI to be really useful in your job that maybe might inspire someone to use say uh JGBT or Codex as like a designer designer. I mean nowadays I spend less time in the pixels. Um but I really do use it to kind of help me think through broader ideas. Um or may like, you know, I'll have an idea at night or something and then I'll just like quickly, you know, type it in and
55:53have it like prototype something and it'll give me like an idea that I can go and talk to the team about and it help visualize something. And so there that's like a part of the design process. It's like early ideas or we're riffing through something and and I can I found that chatbt whether it's CHP work or Codex can like really kind of help me visualize that. That's been something that's been really fun. And then like there's there's more of the operation side, you know, it's like I have it now like checking and making sure that like
56:22important Slack uh messages that I need to follow up with are summarized and giving me context before um sort of like uh you know important meetings or for recruiting or for all like every pro every part of my process I I I use this to kind of augment u uh the work that I do.
56:40It makes sense. on the prototyping piece, just to give someone a tip on how to do this. Are you opening up on your phone and firing off just like a codeex thread? What's like the mechanic of doing this? At CHP work has been incredible because um it now runs fully in the cloud, right?
56:54And so the idea is you can kind of just be anywhere and sort of like talk to chat and have it like really spend the time and and come back with like a really great artifact. So, I found that it's been really fun to just be like, "Hey, you know, we're working on I don't know whatever um this thing is like whether it's helped me think through it or um you know, yeah, sometimes I will just have like some ideas that I would
57:22love to see like quickly visualize before I even like take it further and it will just like kind of help me like play with it and try it and stuff." And so that's been really fun. The fact that it's so accessible, right? um like I might not even be near a computer or I can you know um I don't know just kind of like have that that flexibility I think is really fun.
57:43Awesome. Okay, I'm going to take us to another corner uh fail corner.
57:47Yeah.
57:48So the reason I do this a lot of people awesome awesome people like yourself come on the podcast and all people hear is all the amazing things they've done all the ways they've been really successful and they don't hear all the times things didn't work out. And I feel like that's very important for people to hear. It's not always up until the right and success. What's a story of a time you failed in your career and and what did you learn from that?
58:12I mean there are so many times um I think that I mean even at OpenAI it's like I I think that I found that I've had to learn every step of the way, right? Um, you know, when I first uh joined, I remember, you know, not really even like fully understanding like how I wanted to build a design team and, you know, um, not understanding how to hire or
58:39whatever. Um, I mean, just I I sort of felt like I was kind of failing every day, but just kind of like quickly trying to adjust and learn. Um, I think that that uh I I don't know. I mean, that's like maybe kind of a copout answer, but like really just feeling like every day I'm kind of like learning on the go. [laughter] I I feel that my whole career has sort of been that way and that I have never really kind of
59:07like planned like any any one step and I've in and sort of like quickly learning from your mistakes. I've shipped plenty of things that did not work out. Um and uh I've also shipped things that you know you know have worked out but like the most many times I I've shipped or you know you try something and it's kind of a failure and uh you know at Instagram we had flops and then we you know we'd like quickly move on. I mean, I worked on IGTV which
59:35was like a huge flop and then we shipped reals uh and reals was like we and and I mean that's a good example cuz like we had we we just like kind of baked in some wrong assumptions and we held on to a few constraints but then we learned from that quickly and we were like okay actually let's change that and then we sort of redid it and then it became a really successful product. Um and uh you know I I've seen that many cases many cases of like and that's helped I think
1:00:04that's helped harden me to the sort of critique and feedback of things because you know sometimes you get it wrong sometimes you try something and sometimes it is just about having to like put it out in the world and work through it and um and get the feedback and and iterate and I think that that's like the mo more importantly is not sort of what you shipped one time but how you react and how you um you know how you kind of like fix forward and how you continue to iterate and listen to listen to your users.
1:00:34This is a very common theme in this corner is just people's careers are like it's mostly failure along the way.
1:00:39[laughter] Yeah, definitely.
1:00:40And so I think that's helpful for people to hear.
1:00:43Yeah.
1:00:44Uh okay, before we get to a very exciting lightning round, is there anything else you wanted to share that we haven't covered? If I could distill it, it's like I hope that this is just like a really fun time to build build stuff. And I hope that we, you know, as designers can be really adaptive and focus on making really fun, making really great stuff. And I and I and that I think that designers are just like
1:01:12hope, you know, I think I think great companies are are seeking designers and seeking great great design. And I found that to be really true. There probably going to be a bunch of companies that will be left behind because they haven't shifted, but I think that that there's plenty of room for amazing, great design, and that's going to be more true than ever.
1:01:30I completely agree. I'm very bullish on design.
1:01:33Yes.
1:01:34Well, Ian, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?
1:01:39Okay. Yes.
1:01:40All right. Here we go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
1:01:46I'm not like, you know, it's funny. I'm not like a big big book recommener. Um I think like when people ask me uh I do get asked about like books for design and I'm not I haven't found that many that really have stuck with me like purely design. Although I will say I have I do love the design of everyday things. I think that's like such a classic.
1:02:07That's the one that's the one that you know it's not like yeah it's not a unique recommendation. Um, but it it is just kind of a classic of thinking about how you how we think how I think about design. Yeah, you have to read it if you're in tech or not in tech.
1:02:22Yeah.
1:02:24Awesome. Uh, anything else there or should we keep moving?
1:02:27We can keep moving. Yeah, let's do it. Favorite recent movie or TV show that you have really enjoyed?
1:02:33Okay, so I have one that actually is not a movie or TV show, but it's a I I'm in New York. I just saw a Broadway show um called Maybe Happy Ending.
1:02:44Yes. I've seen it. Love it so much. Yes.
1:02:47Oh, you saw it? Okay. Yeah. It was so unique, right? Um and of course it kind of hit home a little bit because it's about these like super intelligent humanoid uh robots and like you know um but um but the the production was incredible. the set uh design, everything about it I thought was like so unique. Um which was um I thought Yeah. So if you have the chance to see it, I thought it was really really good.
1:03:17Um I also just saw the invite which was I thought and [laughter] have you seen it?
1:03:23Yes. Also love it. So simple but so good.
1:03:26It that's what I loved about it is it's like so simple. It's like it actually is a like a play, you know, and it's just four people in one kind of beautiful apartment and the set design is amazing. Um, but like the writing, act, everything about it was like incredible and it's just kind of a wild ride [laughter] and I went in knowing nothing about it. I thought it was incredible.
1:03:52Excellent taste, sir. I love both those so much. Uh, and the invite just came out. It's in theaters right now.
1:03:57Yeah. Next question. Favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love. I I feel kind of like a typical Silicon Valley person recommending this one or something. But um I did finally switch to an EV after having uh many cars for a long time and I got a Rivian and um I don't know they just I do respect the design a lot of just kind of how they've really made it
1:04:26all of the they like I think if you know probably Tesla's similar but like there's a lot of assumptions that how get operating a car should work have gone away. You just walk up to it, it unlocks, you know? It's like you just like you don't have to like turn on and off the car. And it's cool to see like that evolving. Of course, I love, you know, at Whimos are probably if if I could like own a Whimo right now that that is the most magical experience in
1:04:53the world. Um, and uh I I'm waiting on baited breath for that to to be broadly accessible for everybody. Do you have a favorite life motto you find yourself coming back to in work or in life?
1:05:07Not necessarily other than I think it like kind of trying to sum up like how I felt about all of this is like have fun with it and like just try stuff. Um and you know I think don't feel like I've never felt like you have to fit into a specific box. Um, and know that it's perfectly all right to be very fluid about the way you work or the way you think about things and um, I don't know, be flexible and adaptable. But yeah,
1:05:36it's not quite a life motto. More of a vibe of just trying to like have fun with it and and build great stuff.
1:05:42I I I should shift this question to what's just like the vibe. What's [laughter] the vibe that's been helpful to you? Because I love that. It's very a Sam Alman in terms of just you can just build stuff.
1:05:50Exactly. Yeah.
1:05:52Okay. Last question. Something I love about your career history. If you look at your LinkedIn, you were a designer at Groupon. I love that you are at Groupon and now you're heading design for essentially super intelligence.
1:06:02[laughter] Uh what's something you learned at Groupon that is is being is maybe helpful these days building super intelligent AI?
1:06:10I love that. Groupon was a really fun company. Um, Andrew Mason was like a really incredible CEO and just that he brought such character uh to the product, you know, it was like kind of a brandled product. Um, and um, you know, like we we had a there was like a a comedy
1:06:40team. Uh there was like a writer team at at at but they were like all comedians basically and the product really did not take itself seriously at least in its early early couple years. It was like it was it didn't take itself seriously and I think that the brand really stuck out, right? You weren't signing up for Groupon because NEC I mean of course the daily deal was great. You were getting like 50% off something but people loved that email because it was like really
1:07:08well written and it was funny and it was and it had character and I thought that like the early on the company did a really good job with with brand and sort of embracing uh that side of things. Um and and I think the other thing if I were to carry that forward is I found that every company that I've worked for has such unique DNA and the way you have to work kind of maybe changes a little bit based on that right. So I you know Groupon was run one way you know then I
1:07:37went to Instagram which was like this very design and and creativity focused and Kevin's you know Kevin Cyrum was you know really like an incredible designer and he he sort of saw himself or like worked in that way with us which was really cool and it just created a different way of working and then you have like Sam Alman who's like a completely different way of operating and he's like uh you know I you know, and then and open being a
1:08:06research lab. And so learning that companies have these really different DNAs and understanding how to sort of embrace them and kind of leverage that to your uh like or help kind of like empower that or like I guess lean into that um has been something that I've learned a lot um from moving around and getting the opportunity to work at very very different companies.
1:08:26And also just to add to that, it's also important to realize you're not going to change that. you're not gonna like come in and change that culture because that's just that's very hard especially if it's very founder oriented.
1:08:36I think it's about finding like oh wow like at OpenAI you know yeah sure like we spent more time at Instagram we definitely moved slower and I would say that we um we changed the product less and that actually worked really well for most stages uh of of Instagram.
1:08:57uh but I don't think that that would work in in the current stage of where we're at with open AI and that way of working. Of course, I bring a lot to that and I think like you know at at um at Instagram we have this motto like do the simple thing first and we always use that and we really embrace that. I've tried to carry that through to the way I think about building product at at OpenAI. Um but that's not the only way I think of working. You know, sometimes it's actually not necessarily the right way to think about. Sometimes we
1:09:26actually do throw some things out that we're still experimenting with. And so just being really I found that having to yeah be flexible and yeah, not necessarily trying to change it, but try trying to kind of like help round it out. Maybe.
1:09:36Ian, what a what an incredible uh place you have in the world right now. Just being on the inside of such cool technology, such cutting edge stuff that's happening. Uh, and I feel very fortunate that you found time to chat with us and share what you're seeing, where things are heading. Two final questions. Where do you want to point people? If you want to plug anything and how can listeners be useful to you?
1:10:00Where do I want to point people? I mean, I think that um please, you know, I guess use, you know, have fun with with the stuff we're making with JBT and Codex and fire away feedback and thoughts. I'm on Twitter. Uh I love to talk with designers uh at all sort of stages. Um or not just designers, engineers, PMs, whatever. Um, that's probably where I'm most uh sort of
1:10:26reachable and accessible. Um, and you know, how can you? Yeah, I think to be useful. Again, it's like I love when when people do show off the way they are kind of working and how that's kind of shifting and that's like a great way for us to learn how we can we can build better products both like internally at OpenAI but just as a as a design community like maybe showcasing a little bit more of our process because it is becoming a little bit more opaque like
1:10:53well how is it working just um I think sharing that is is like such a gift to the community so doing more of that also point people to your website which I have here now. And I think my face is probably changing colors because the site [laughter] has all these crazy colors.
1:11:09So, if you go to Iansber.com, you could see this uh insane website. That's [laughter] your personal website and there's a Yeah, that's a deep dive into all of my past work. You can see there. Yeah. [laughter] And the trick is you Yeah. You'll have to discover the Easter egg where there's a game in involved.
1:11:25That's right.
1:11:25Uh see if you can set the high score.
1:11:28Yeah. This high scores are out of control. I don't know what's happening. [laughter] Someone's found a cheat code. Uh, Ian, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for doing this.
1:11:36Buddy, this was awesome. Super fun.
1:11:38Same. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennispodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Insights
Lenny's Podcast
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6t1O76G0jYXOAoYCm153dA
Resource recommendations from Lenny's Podcast:
- The host recommended Elena Vera's post "Stop the AI Confidence Theater" as a great post that criticizes people posting AI accomplishments and pretending they have it all figured out, noting few of those things are actually that great and working .
- Ian Silber, head of product design at OpenAI, recommended "The Design of Everyday Things" as one of the books he recommends most to others, calling it a classic of how he thinks about design and saying "You have to read it if you're in tech or not in tech" . He added that it's not a unique recommendation and that few purely design books have stuck with him .