Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
You were a product leader at Dropbox and Instacart, now you're the PM of the most consequential product in history.

**Nick Turley** (0:05)
I didn't know what I would do here because it was a research lab. My first task was to fix the blinds or something like that.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:10)
When someone offers you a rocket ship, don't ask which seat.

**Nick Turley** (0:13)
We set out to build a super assistant. It was supposed to be a hackathon code base.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:16)
What was it called before?

**Nick Turley** (0:17)
It was going to be Chat with GBT 3.5. We really didn't think it was going to be a successful product.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:20)
And then Sam Altman's just like, hey, let me tweet about it.

**Nick Turley** (0:23)
This is a pattern with AI. You won't know what to polish until after you ship. My dream is that we ship daily.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:27)
By the time people hear this, they're going to have their hands on GBT 5

**Nick Turley** (0:30)
About 10% of the world population uses it every week. With scale comes responsibility. It just feels a little more alive, a bit more human. This model has taste.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:38)
Kevin Wheel, your CPO, is set to ask you about this principle of, is it maximally accelerated?

**Nick Turley** (0:43)
I just really want to jump to the punchline. Why can't we do this now? I always felt like part of my role here is to set the pace and the resting heartbeat.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:49)
Everyone's always wondering, is Chat the future of all of this stuff?

**Nick Turley** (0:52)
Chat was the simplest way to ship at the time. I'm baffled by how much it took off. I'm even more baffled by how many people have copied.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:58)
ChatGPT is now driving more traffic to my newsletter than Twitter.

**Nick Turley** (1:01)
That is a type of capability that has been incredibly retentive. I've been really excited about what we've been doing in search.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:06)
Leave us a peek into where this goes long term.

**Nick Turley** (1:08)
ChatGPT feels a little bit like MS-DOS. We haven't built Windows yet, and it will be obvious once we do.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:14)
Today, my guest is Nick Turley. Nick is head of ChatGPT at OpenAI. He joined the company three years ago when it was still primarily a research lab. He helped come up with the idea of ChatGPT and took it from zero to over 700 million weekly active users, billions in revenue, and arguably the most successful and impactful consumer software product in human history. Nick is incredible. He's been very much under the radar. This is the first major podcast interview that he has ever done, and you are in for a treat. We talk about all the things, including the just launched GPT-5. A huge thank you to Kevin Wiel, Claire Vo, George O'Brien, Joanne Zheng and Peter Deng for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products, including lovable, replete, bold, N8N, linear, superhuman, dscript, whisperflow, gamma, perplexity, warp, granola, magic patterns, raycast, chapier, D and mobbin. Check it out, lennysnewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Nick Turley. This episode is brought to you by Orkes, the company behind Open Source Conductor, the orchestration platform powering modern enterprise apps and agentic workflows. Legacy automation tools can't keep pace. Siloed low-code platforms, outdated process management, and disconnected API tooling fall short in today's event-driven AI-powered agentic landscape. Orkes changes this. With Orkes Conductor, you gain an agentic orchestration layer that seamlessly connects humans, AI agents, APIs, microservices, and data pipelines in real time at enterprise scale. Visual and code-first development, built-in compliance, observability, and rock solid reliability ensure workflows evolve dynamically with your needs. It's not just about automating tasks, it's orchestrating autonomous agents and complex workflows to deliver smarter outcomes faster. Whether modernizing legacy systems or scaling next-gen AI-driven apps, Orkes accelerates your journey from idea to production. Learn more and start building at orkes.io/lenny.
That's O-R-K-E-S dot I-O slash Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, and I am very excited to have Christina Casioppo, CEO and co-founder of Vanta, joining me for this very short conversation.

**Christina Casioppo** (3:31)
Great to be here. Big fan of the podcast and the newsletter.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:34)
Vanta is a longtime sponsor of the show, but for some of our newer listeners, what does Vanta do and who is it for?