OpenAI researcher on why soft skills are the future of work | Karina Nguyen (Research at OpenAI, ex-Anthropic)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
Not only are you working at the cutting edge of AI and LLMs, you're actually building the cutting edge.

**Karina Nguyen** (0:06)
When I first came to Andorra, I was like, oh, I really love from the engineering. And then the reason why I switched to research is because I realized, oh my god, Claude is getting better at front end. Claude is getting better at coding. I think Claude can develop new apps.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:20)
What skills do you think will be most valuable going forward for product teams in particular?

**Karina Nguyen** (0:26)
Creative thinking, you kind of want to generate a bunch of ideas and filter through them in order to build the best product experience. I think it's actually really, really hard to teach the model how to be aesthetic, a really good visual design, or how to be extremely creative in the way they write.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:41)
What do you think people most misunderstand about how models are created?

**Karina Nguyen** (0:45)
When you taught the model some of the self-knowledge of, you actually don't have a physical body to operate in the physical world, the model would get extremely confused.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:58)
Today, my guest is Karina Nguyen. Karina is an AI researcher at OpenAI, where she helped build Canvas, Tasks, the O1 Chain of Thought Model, and more. Prior to OpenAI, she was at Anthropic, where she led work on post-training and evaluation for the Claude 3 models, built a document upload feature with 100k context windows, and so much more. She was also an engineer at New York Times, was a designer at Dropbox and at Square. It's very rare to get a glimpse into how someone working on the bleeding edge of AI and LLMs operates, and how they think about where things are heading. In our conversation, we talk about how teams at OpenAI operate and build products, what skills she thinks you should be building as AI gets smarter, how models are created, why synthetic data will allow models to keep getting smarter, and why she moved from engineering to research after realizing how good LLMs are going to be at coding. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Karina Nguyen. This episode is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret unifies all your customer interactions from GONG calls to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads to App Store reviews, and makes it available for analysis. It's trusted by leading product orgs like Canva, Notion, Loom, Linear, monday.com and Strava to bring the voice of the customer into the product development process, helping you build best-in-class products faster. What makes Interpret special is its ability to build and update customer-specific AI models that provide the most granular and accurate insights into your business, connect customer insights to revenue and operational data in your CRM or data warehouse to map the business impact of each customer need and prioritize confidently, and empower your entire team to easily take action on use cases like win-loss analysis, critical bug detection, and identifying drivers of churn with Interpret's AI assistant, Wisdom. Looking to automate your feedback loops and prioritize your roadmap with confidence like Notion, Canva, and Linear? Visit enterpret.com/lenny to connect with the team and get two free months when you sign up for an annual plan. This is a limited-time offer that's interpret.com/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** (3:22)
Great to be here. Big fan of the podcast and the newsletter.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:24)
Vanta is a longtime sponsor of the show, but for some of our newer listeners, what does Vanta do and who is it for?

**Christina Casioppo** (3:32)
Sure. We started Vanta in 2018 focused on founders, helping them start to build out their security programs and get credit for all of that hard security work with compliance certifications like SOC 2 or ISO 2701 Today, we currently help over 9,000 companies, including some startup household names like Atlassian, Ramp and Langchain, start and scale their security programs and ultimately build trust by automating compliance, centralizing GRC and accelerating security reviews.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:02)
That is awesome. I know from experience that these things take a lot of time and a lot of resources and nobody wants to spend time doing this.

**Christina Casioppo** (4:10)
That is very much our experience, but before the company in some extent during it. But the idea is with automation, with AI, with software, we are helping customers build trust with prospects and customers in an efficient way. And you know, our joke, we started this compliance company so you don't have to.