OpenAI’s Head of ChatGPT: We’re entering a new era of AI (again) | Tibo Sottiaux

Tibo Sottiaux (0:00)

Often, when I look at what people are building out there, it's just like, you're not quite getting it. If you were just pushing yourself and just really imagining all of this being roughly 10 times better than it is today, like in a year, you would build in a different way.

Lenny Rachitsky (0:13)

What do you think people aren't pricing in in terms of where things are going?

Tibo Sottiaux (0:16)

The majority of actions on the internet will be taken by agents. If you want your product to be successful for agents, you have to build for a certain level of scale.

Lenny Rachitsky (0:23)

How many agents do you find yourself running in parallel just in your day-to-day work?

Tibo Sottiaux (0:27)

As I'm pushing the frontier, I find myself building larger and larger teams of agents. Then when we have the next breakthrough with models, suddenly it's just a guy like, well, a bigger agent can just do all of it. So I shrink the team again, and then it just goes through this expansion and shrinking expansion.

Lenny Rachitsky (0:43)

It makes me think about there's this whole loops thing and then this little graphs thing.

Tibo Sottiaux (0:46)

Having to set up and fiddle with your loops is something that maybe people got excited about, but I don't think this is the way that it's going to work. Over time, you just want the system that learns. You don't want to necessarily think about, oh, I'm going to loop it exactly this way in order to get results.

Lenny Rachitsky (1:00)

Do you think there's still more radical change happening to how we work?

Tibo Sottiaux (1:03)

It's going to continue to change quite radically. Even today, it still feels like a bit clunky, and I think it will feel clunky until it isn't.

Lenny Rachitsky (1:16)

Tibo, thank you for doing this.

Tibo Sottiaux (1:18)

Yeah, like for me, of course. Nice room.

Lenny Rachitsky (1:21)

You launched a ton of stuff today. How's your sleep? How are you sleeping? Are you doing all right?

Tibo Sottiaux (1:26)

I'm doing great. I'm fortunate to have a very good team.

While I sleep, they were awake most of the night. We have this amazing room at the office called the library, which we completely repurposed as a mega war room, and the vibes in there are just immaculate. People were there until very, very late.

Lenny Rachitsky (1:44)

You've been a long-time engineer. Are you coding at all anymore? Are you shipping PRs? Are you mostly in docs and meetings now?

Tibo Sottiaux (1:51)

What is coding?

Lenny Rachitsky (1:53)

Exactly. Are you shipping PRs?

Tibo Sottiaux (1:57)

Merging some code every once in a while. Technically, a lot of code is getting written for me to do all sorts of analysis, understand trends, understand the business, understand the next feature, how well our previous launches are doing. A lot of code is written by Codex for that. I'm obviously not writing it by hand anymore. Occasionally, during the weekends, I will have a little therapeutic moment where I do a little lead code just by hand.

But that's the only actual hand coding that I do.

Lenny Rachitsky (2:26)

How many agents do you find yourself running in parallel in your day-to-day work?

Tibo Sottiaux (2:31)

I used to run a lot more in parallel, and then we were fortunate enough to get a breakthrough at ultra-fast. And so now I feel like I'm able to be in the flow again, and so just having a faster agent helps me a lot. I'm excited that we're getting 6.1. So ultra-fast out there soon.

And then, yeah, I think it sort of varies. As I'm kind of pushing the frontier, I find myself building larger and larger teams of agents. And then when we have the next breakthrough with models, suddenly it's just a kind of like, oh, well, a bigger agent can just do all of it, and keep everything in memory and learn. And so I kind of shrink the team again, and then it just kind of goes through this expansion and shrinking expansion.

Lenny Rachitsky (3:12)

Can you say more about that? It kind of makes me think about there's this whole loops thing, and then this whole graphs thing.

Is this like an evolution of that in some way, or?

Tibo Sottiaux (3:19)

I think like having to set up and fiddle with your loops and figuring that out is something that maybe people got excited about, but I don't think this is the way that it's going to work. I think the way that it's going to work is how we're positioning and what we're shipping with dots, where you have an incredibly smart agent that works 24-7, understands your goals, understands your preferences, learns from feedback.