The Agent Reasoning Interface: o1/o3, Claude 3, ChatGPT Canvas, Tasks, and Operator — with Karina Nguyen of OpenAI

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome back. From Sam Altman to Satya Nadella, many people are saying that 2025 is the year of agents. Since our podcast conversation is about DeepSeek, the mainstream narrative has become obsessed with DeepSeek R1 and what it means to have a competitive open weights reasoning model from China. Swicks wrote a viral blog post about the reasoning price war of January 2025, and today, OpenAI has responded by slashing the price of O1mini from $12 per million tokens to $4.40, and also released O3mini in ChatGPT and to level 3 and above API users for the exact same price. Given the O3mini matches or exceeds O1 especially with medium or high reasoning effort, this is an enormous leap in performance per dollar. In the meantime, the rest of OpenAI has been busy shipping. ChatGPT has slowly accelerated from shipping canvas during the 12 days of Shipmas last month to shipping recurring tasks and, most recently, operator, the hosted virtual agent response to Claude's computer use. We are very proud to host today's guest, Karina Nguyen, who was at Anthropic for the launch of Claude 3 and wrote the first 50,000 lines of Claude.AI before joining OpenAI to work on the future of what she calls reasoning interfaces. We are very proud to also announce that Karina will be the closing keynote speaker for the second AI engineer summit in New York City from February 20th to 22nd. This is the last call for applications for the AI leadership track for CTOs and VPs of AI. If you are building agents in 2025, this is the single best conference of the year. Our new website now lists our speakers and talks from DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Jane Street, Bloomberg, BlackRock, LinkedIn and more. Look for more sponsor and attendee information at apply.ai.engineer and see you there. Watch out and take care.

**Alessio** (2:16)
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel, and I'm joined by my usual co-host, Swix.

**Swyx** (2:24)
Hey, and today we're very, very blessed to have Karina Nguyen in the studio. Welcome.

**Karina Nguyen** (2:28)
Nice to meet you.

**Alessio** (2:29)
We finally made it happen.

**Swyx** (2:30)
My finally made it happen. First time we tried this, you were working at a different company, and now we're here. Fortunately, you had some time, so thank you so much.

**Karina Nguyen** (2:37)
Thank you for joining us.

**Swyx** (2:39)
Karina, now your website says you lead a research team in OpenAI, creating new interaction paradigms for reasoning interfaces and capabilities like CHPT Canvas, and most recently CHPT TAS, I don't know if that's what we're calling it, streaming chain of thought for O1 models and more via novel synthetic model training. What is this research team?

**Karina Nguyen** (2:57)
Yeah, I need to clarify this a little bit more. I think it changed a lot since the last time we launched Canvas, and it was the first project that I was a tech lead basically. And then I think over time I was trying to refine what my team is, and I feel like it's at an intersection of human-computer interaction, defining what's the next interaction paradigms might look like with some of the most recent reasoning models, as well as actually trying to come up with novel methods, how to improve those models for certain tasks that we want to. So for Canvas, for example, one of the most common use cases is basically writing and coding. And we're continually working on, okay, how do we make Canvas coding to go beyond what is possible right now? And that requires us to actually do our own training and coming up with new methods of synthetic data generation. The way I'm thinking about it is that my team is going from a very full stack, from training models all the way up to deployment and making sure that we create novel product features that is coherent to what ChachiPT can become. There are different types of features like Canvas, tasks, but all those components that go, they compose together to evolve ChachiPT into something completely new I think in the new year.

**Swyx** (4:20)
It's evolving. I like your tweet about that. It's modular. You can compose it with the stocks feature, the creative writing feature. I forgot what else. We have a list of other use cases, but we don't have to go into that yet.

**Alessio** (4:34)
Can we maybe go back to when you first started working with LLMs? I know you had some early UX prototypes with GPD3 as well, and maybe how that has informed the way you build products.

**Karina Nguyen** (4:44)
I think my background was mostly working on computer vision applications for investigative journalism back when I was at school at Berkeley. I was working a lot with human rights center and investigative journalists from various media. That's how I learned more about AI with Fusion Transformers. At that time, I was working with some of the professors at Berkeley AI research.