# Most finance AI product work is buildable by startups

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/most-finance-ai-product-work-is-buildable-by-startups/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Joseph Kim](https://realalpha.app/people/joseph-kim/) · Joseph Kim is a leads ChatGPT for Financial Services at OpenAI.
- Host: [Shawn Wang (swyx)](https://realalpha.app/people/swyx/) · Co-founder, AI Engineer · Wrote “The Rise of the AI Engineer” and founded Smol AI, maker of AI News.
- Show: Latent Space
- Episode: [Building ChatGPT for Finance — Joseph Kim, OpenAI's Head of Financial Services](https://realalpha.app/v/v-d1WTqIULs/), Oct 31, 2026
- Moment: 7:00 to 9:21 of the episode (2 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/most-finance-ai-product-work-is-buildable-by-startups/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/v-d1WTqIULs/?t=420

## Quote

> “**95% of what we built** was something that absolutely a startup could do, another company could do.”
> — [Joseph Kim](https://realalpha.app/people/joseph-kim/) at [7:16](https://realalpha.app/v/v-d1WTqIULs/?t=436) · Latent Space

## Takeaways

1. About 95% of the product could have been built by another company.
2. ChatGPT gets a product roughly 80% of the way there, Kim argues.
3. A focused layer of data, UI, or integrations can create real value.

## About this segment

Joseph Kim says most of OpenAI’s finance product used shared ChatGPT plugin primitives, with the team adding the missing product-specific layer. Builders can pair that horizontal functionality with their own data, UI, or integrations.

From “Building ChatGPT for Finance — Joseph Kim, OpenAI's Head of Financial Services”, Oct 31, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/v-d1WTqIULs/)

## Transcript

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

[7:04](https://realalpha.app/v/v-d1WTqIULs/?t=424) and actually making a certain product around it? Yeah, I like the question a lot. I try to allude to this in my keynote as well, but the interesting thing is, it's fun to talk about the post-training stuff because it's unique to what we do and gets people excited. But 95% of what we built was something that absolutely a startup could do, another company could do. And we didn't really have to go leverage our ability to go make changes in the model to go about building fantastic product, right? And so I think it's a great call to kind of mention that piece. What I would say is like a fewfold. One is most of the product that we built was built on top of the Codex, or I should say ChatGPT now, plug-in architecture and plug-in primitives. And that is something that we've been investing a lot of time and energy in. You know, OpenAI is like an interesting

[7:50](https://realalpha.app/v/v-d1WTqIULs/?t=470) company where we kind of face the same problems internally that a startup would face if they were to build on top of OpenAI. So in a lot of ways, my team is kind of like a startup that's building on top of OpenAI technology. And so even internally, we need to find scalable ways for teams like myself to stand on the shoulders of giants and build on top of Codex. Codex is fantastic. It's got great memory.

[8:12](https://realalpha.app/v/v-d1WTqIULs/?t=492) It's got good skills. It's persistent. There's a lot of things that are wonderful about Codex. But the thesis of my team was Codex will get you about 80% of the way to a product that would be successful in the market, but the 20% is missing. And so we need to find some way for my team to go build that 20% to actually go win. Because the other half of the thesis was if you just took Codex and launched it as a finance product, it would fail.

[8:35](https://realalpha.app/v/v-d1WTqIULs/?t=515) And so that 20% is actually pivotal. And so what I would say is we went and we built on top of the plugin architecture. It's using the same primitives that are available to any of the builders that want to go build on top of ChatGPT. and I had a line in my presentation but I really do think that there's going to be a billion dollar business built on top of a ChatGPT plugin. You're going to be able to leverage all of that horizontal functionality and just add your secret sauce on top and that secret sauce might be data, it might be UI changes, it could be an integration but that secret sauce is really valuable and I think there's a billion dollars worth of value to be built there.

[9:08](https://realalpha.app/v/v-d1WTqIULs/?t=548) So yeah, it's an interesting time for the industry because we're at a time now where orchestration is becoming a lot more automated. Teams of agents going out and doing things. But for finance, obviously,