Copying a competitor can keep a company behind

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 21:50

   Speaking of social, actually, can I ask you about the whole Meta scale? Of course. So what's the situation there? Look, I've heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor. And, you know, I think it is rational for them to keep trying. Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they've hoped. And I respect, like, being aggressive and continuing to try new things. And again, given that I think this is like rational, I expect that if this one doesn't work out, they'll keep trying new ones after that.

2. 22:22

   I remember once hearing Zuck talk about how, you know, Google in the early days of Facebook, it was rational for them to try social, even though it was like clear to people at Facebook that that was not going to work. And I feel a little bit similar here, but they started making these like giant offers to, you know, a lot of people on our team, you know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that comp per year.

3. 22:46

   and i'm actually it is crazy i'm really happy that at least so far uh none of our best people have decided to take them up on that i think that people sort of look at the two paths and say all right open eyes got a really good shot a much better shot at actually delivering on super intelligence uh and also may eventually be the more valuable company but i think the strategy of a ton of upfront guaranteed comp and that being the reason you tell someone to join like really the degree to which they're focusing on that and not the work and not the mission.

4. 23:16

   I don't think that's going to set up a great culture. And, you know, I hope that we can be the best place in the world to do this kind of research. I think we built a really special culture for it. And I think that we're set up such that if we succeed to that, and a lot of people on our research team believe we will, or we have a good chance at it, then everybody will do great financially and it's i think it's incentive aligned with like mission first and then economic awards and everything else flying from that so i think that's good there's many things i respect about meta as a company um but i don't think they're a company that's like great at innovation and i think the special thing about open ai is we've managed to build a culture that is good at repeatable innovation and i think We understand a lot of things that they don't about what it takes to succeed at that, but I don't know. It's been like, in some sense, I think it's been a clarifying thing for our team. Wish them luck.

5. 24:14

   Yeah, I guess some of what it comes down to probably is to what degree do you think AI work to date is, that copying AI work to date is enough versus how much of the innovation is in front? I don't think it's enough. I think that there's a lot of people in meta will be a new one that are saying, we're just going to try to like copy OpenAI. We're going to like, I mean, if you look at how much a lot of these other companies, chat apps look like chat GPT, even copying like the UI mistakes, it's crazy how much the research thing is just trying to get to where we are.

6. 24:44

   And this was like a lesson I learned, a lesson I learned at YC. That basically never works. You're always like going to where your competitor was. Yeah. And you don't build up a culture of learning what it's like to innovate. And I think it's like much more deeply challenging than people realize once you're in that state.