How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise)

Sora is OpenAI's AI video generation model that was released to the public in late 2024.

One of the most mind-blowing examples of acceleration, the Sora Android app, like a fully new app, we built it in 18 days and then 10 days later, so 28 days total, we went to the public.

I think because we don't exactly know what capabilities will even come up soon and we don't know what's going to work technically, and then we also don't know what's going to land even if it works technically, it's much more important for us to be very humble and learn a lot more empirically and just try things quickly.

I think we might've been in this weird temporary phase where, for a while, it was so hard to build product that you mostly just had to be really good at building product and it maybe didn't matter if you had an intimate understanding of a specific customer. But now I think we're getting to this point where actually if I could only choose one thing to understand, it would be really meaningful understanding of the problems that a certain customer has.

One of the learnings over the past year is that for models to do stuff, they're much more effective when they can use a computer. It turns out the best way for models to use computers is simply to write code. And so we're kind of getting to this idea where if you want to build any agent, maybe you should be building a coding agent.

I think because we don't exactly know what capabilities will even come up soon and we don't know what's going to work technically, and then we also don't know what's going to land even if it works technically, it's much more important for us to be very humble and learn a lot more empirically and just try things quickly.

What we can do is as a product team just try to always think about how are we building a tool so that it feels like we're maximally accelerating people rather than building a tool that makes it more unclear what you should do as the human?

I think if you don't believe it, you can't will it into existence. So you need a balance.