Nick Turley

I think the duty is to make it awesome and to do the work, talk to experts, figure out how good it really is, where it breaks down, communicate that.

"That" refers to ChatGPT's paid subscription business model that OpenAI launched after the free version became overwhelmed with demand.

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?'

Every time we tested these more bespoke ideas, people wanted to use it for all this other stuff because it's just a very, very generically powerful technology.

We set out to build a super assistant. It was supposed to be a hackathon code base.

Nick Turley from OpenAI is referring to ChatGPT's chat interface, which they shipped in 10 days and has been widely copied by other AI companies.

Chat was the simplest way to ship at the time. I'm baffled by how much it took off, even more baffled by how many people have copied.

We set out to build a super assistant. It was supposed to be a hackathon code base.

Amazing ideas come from anywhere. The thing about running a research lab is you really don't tell people what to research. That's not what you do.

You really have to look at what tech do we have available and what is the most awesome way to productize it? And if you applied to some sort of PM framework to that, I think you would do something horrible wrong.

I think this idea of delegating to an AI, it's not natural to most people. It's not like you're going through life and figuring out what can I delegate?

If you surround yourself with people that give you energy and if you follow the things you're actually curious about, that you're going to be successful in this era.

The "empty box problem" refers to the challenge horizontal platforms face when users don't know what to do with a general-purpose tool.

For that reason, I think we get to skip the empty box problem a little bit because so much learning is happening out of product as people are watching each other either in IRL or online.

"It" refers to GPT-5, OpenAI's latest AI model that Turley was discussing as their vision for a universal assistant.

We were excited to allow it to do, over time, what a smart, empathetic human with a computer could do for you.

ChatGPT feels a little bit like MS-DOS. We haven't built Windows yet, and it will be obvious once we do.

Every single career decisions I ever made, including my first one out of college, was just figuring out who are the smartest people I know that I want to hang out with and learn from, and can I work with them?

This is a pattern with AI, you won't know what to polish until after you ship.

Every single career decisions I ever made, including my first one out of college, was just figuring out who are the smartest people I know that I want to hang out with and learn from, and can I work with them?

Nick Turley is discussing OpenAI's decision to make ChatGPT free at launch, with "this" referring to ChatGPT and "modeling" referring to AI language models.

Making it free was a big deal. 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.

The only way to find out what people like and what's valuable is to bring it into the external world.

It was 10 days from when we decided we were going to ship to when we shipped.

I called up someone I greatly respect who's incredible at pricing and I was like, 'What should I do?' And we talked a bunch and I just ran out of time to incorporate most of that feedback. So, what I did do is ship a Google Form to Discord.