ChatGPT – The Super Assistant Era | BG2 Guest Interview

**Nick Turley** (0:00)
ChatGPT originally was entirely free, and the reason for that was that it was intended to be a demo, and we were going to wind it down after a month. We then realized that the demo went viral, and people loved the demo, and it was actually a product. And we realized it would be a product. You can't take the product down every time you're at capacity, so we shipped subscriptions simply because it could shape the demand. It was a way of gracefully turning users away, when we had to turn away someone.

**Apoorv Agrawal** (0:26)
You know, you guys are at 900 million VT active users now, and that growth has been incredible. The next billion users, where are they going to come from?

**Nick Turley** (0:35)
We've got about 10% of the world coming to us now, 90% left to go, right? There's so much more opportunity.

**Apoorv Agrawal** (0:48)
Well, Nick, so excited to have you here.

**Nick Turley** (0:50)
Thank you for having me, Apoorv.

**Apoorv Agrawal** (0:51)
You've had quite the journey from Germany to the US, from Brown.

**Nick Turley** (0:56)
That's true.

**Apoorv Agrawal** (0:57)
Most recently at Instacart, delivering groceries in 30 minutes, you're now delivering AGI to billions. I'm sure that was a plan all along.

**Nick Turley** (1:04)
Yeah, clearly, total master plan.

**Apoorv Agrawal** (1:08)
Well, tell us about your journey. What, how did you get to OpenAI? I know it's a fun, fun story. And your three and a half years or so at OpenAI, how have they gone?

**Nick Turley** (1:15)
Well, the only through-lead in how I've made any sort of employment decision has been entirely people-based. So, I don't claim any credit for joining OpenAI or predicting ChatGPT or anything like it. But I hit up someone who I admire a lot, who I got to know at Dropbox, Joanne, who worked here at the time. And she, I asked her to get off the Dali 2 waitlist. And she told me I had to interview if I wanted to get off the waitlist. So, I took the bait and got totally nerd sniped in the process and here I am.

**Apoorv Agrawal** (1:52)
There you go. The Dali 2 waitlist will get you.

**Nick Turley** (1:55)
It's a great recruiting tool.

**Apoorv Agrawal** (1:56)
Nice, nice, nice.

**Nick Turley** (1:57)
We should do more waitlists, probably.

**Apoorv Agrawal** (1:58)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, the big super cycle we're in is ChatGPT. Now, I am using over a billion users on the monthly side, 900 million weekly active users that recently reported up from zero, three and a half years ago. You could have, if I imagine what the dashboard of Nick Turley looks like, it could have users, it could have paying subscribers, it could have daily active users, it could have retention, engagement. I mean, there's like 15 things, maybe all of them. What is your North Star?
How do you, what are you optimizing for? What is Nick looking at on his daily dashboard?

**Nick Turley** (2:37)
It's funny, right, because it's such a young product. It's been, to your point, three and a half years.
And this kind of question, it kind of changes as you evolve and you grow up and you ask yourself, you know, what are we really building here? And to this day, I want to build a super assistant that can actually help people achieve their goals. And ultimately, the thing we care about is like, is our product doing that? Is it actually helping you do the thing that you're coming to the product to do? And it's so different for different people, right? Some people are trying to get healthy. Other people are trying to start a company, learn a new topic, do their taxes. There's all these different things that you might be doing. And the true measure of success is that we're helping you do that. And obviously, we look at WAU in particular, because we want to know if you're coming back to the product. We look at retention. But we look at all kinds of stuff in aggregate, because really there isn't this one single thing that you can optimize for.

**Apoorv Agrawal** (3:38)
If you were to allocate 100 units of points to these metrics, can you distribute the 100 units across these metrics in order of importance? Could you write this second?

**Nick Turley** (3:49)
It's a good question. I care a lot about long-term retention, and I would put all my points there, because I'm really proud of the retention stats we have. But ultimately, the sign of durable values is that people are coming back in three months, because that means you're really solving their problems. I think things like revenue, they follow from that, versus trying to go on those things directly. We've had a lot of success making very principled decisions on this stuff. One good example is GPT-4 used to be behind a paywall, because we couldn't serve it to everyone. Then we had GPT-4, which was a total breakthrough in our ability to inference it.