OpenAI plans for alignment, not a fixed roadmap

Transcript

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

1. 26:25

   point about the tech changing constantly and getting faster, not exactly knowing what you'll have by the time you launch something in terms of the power of the model. I'm curious what allows you to ship quickly and consistently and such great stuff. And it sounds like one answer is bottoms up, empowered teams versus a very top down roadmap that's planned out for a quarter. What what are some of those things that allow you to ship such great stuff so often, so quickly?

2. 26:53

   Yeah, I mean, we try and we try and have a sense of where we're trying to go, you know, point ourselves in a direction so that we have some rough sense of alignment. Like thematically, I don't for a second and we do quarterly roadmapping. You know, we laid out sort of a year long strategy. i don't for a second believe that what we write down in these documents is what we're going to actually ship you know three months from now let alone six or nine but that's okay there's a um i think it's like an eisenhower quote plans are useless planning is helpful uh which i totally subscribe to especially in this world it's really valuable if you think about quarterly roadmapping for example it's really valuable to have a moment where you stop and go okay what did we do what worked what went well what didn't go well what did we learn and now what do we think we're going

3. 27:43

   to do next and by the way everybody has some dependencies you you know you need the infrastructure team to do the following things partnership with research here and so you want to have a second to kind of check your dependencies make sure you're good to go and then start executing we try and keep that really lightweight because Thank you. Because it's not going to be right. You know, we're going to throw it out halfway because we will have learned new things. So the moment of planning is helpful, even if you're only going to, you know, it's only partially right. So that's, I think, just expecting that you're going to be super agile, and that there's no sense writing a three month roadmap, let alone a year long roadmap, because the technology is changing underneath you so quickly. We really do try and go like very strongly bottoms up, kind of subject to our overall directional.

4. 28:30

   alignment. We have great people. We have engineers and PMs and designers and researchers who are passionate about the products they're building and have strong opinions about them and are also the ones building them. They have a real sense of what the capabilities are too, which is super important. I think you want to be more bottoms up in this way. We operate that way. We are happy making mistakes we make mistakes all the time it's one of the things i really appreciate about sam he pushes us really hard to move fast but he also understands that with moving fast comes uh we didn't quite get this right or you know that we launched this thing it didn't work we'll roll it back you know look at our naming our naming is horrible there's a lot of questions people had for you yeah model names yeah it's absolutely atrocious and we know it um and we'll

5. 29:22

   get around to fixing it at some point but it's not the most important thing and so we don't spend a lot of time on it but it also shows you how it doesn't matter uh again chat gpt the most popular fastest growing product in history uh models are it's the number one ai api and model so clearly it doesn't matter that much and we name things like oh three mini high oh man i love it um okay so you talked about road mapping um and bottoms up and i'm really curious how you is there like a cadence or ritual of aligning with you or sam or he or you review everything that's going out like is there a meeting every week or every month where you guys see what's happening on key projects so we do product reviews and things like that like you would expect um there isn't a ritual because there isn't uh we we i would never want us to be blocked

6. 30:13

   on launching something you know waiting for a review with me or sam if we can't get there if i'm traveling or sam's you know busy or whatever that's a bad reason for us not to ship so obviously for the biggest most high priority stuff we have a pretty close beat on it but we really try not to frankly like we want to empower teams to move quickly and uh i think it's more important to ship and iterate so we have this philosophy that we call iterative deployment and the idea is like we're all learning about these models together so there's a real sense in which it's way better to like ship something even when you don't know the full set of capabilities and iterate together like in public and we kind of co-evolve together with the rest of society as we learn about these things and where they're different and where they're good

7. 31:06

   and bad and weird i really like that philosophy um there's also a bit of i think the other thing that ends up being a part of our product philosophy is the sense of model maximalism. The models are not perfect. They're going to make mistakes. You could spend a lot of time building all kinds of different scaffolding around them. And by the way, sometimes we do because sometimes there are things, kinds of errors that you just don't want to make.

8. 31:37

   But we don't spend that much time building scaffolding around the parts that don't match that. Because our general mindset is in two months, there's going to be a better model and it's going to blow away whatever the current set of limitations are. And so if you're building, and we say this to developers too, if you're building and the product that you're building is kind of right on the edge. Edge of the capabilities of the models. Keep going, because you're doing something right. Because you give it another couple months, and the models are going to be great. And suddenly, the product that you have that just barely worked is really going to sing. And, you know, that's, that's kind of how you make sure that you're really pushing the envelope and building new things.