Welcome to 20 product with me Harry Stepping. Now 20 product is the monthly show where we sit down with the best product leaders to reveal their tips, tactics and strategies to scaling the best products and product teams. Now the real question is who's going to win? Is it Codex? Is it Claude code? Or is it Curse? We'll stay joining us in the Houghts seat. We have Alexander and Beracos, product lead for Codex at OpenAI. This is an incredible discussion, time to get the notebook out. I want your feedback. Let me know what you think.
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[email protected], forward slash build, and use the code "20VC" that's 20VC for one month free of pro. You have now arrived at your destination. Alex, I'm so excited for this dude. I told you I've been at a PE conference, and all I could think was, thank God I've got Alex and Alex, because this is going to be a great one. So thank you so much for joining me, man. So excited to be here. Thank you. Now, this is weird first start, but roll with it. You'll understand my British intricacies. I'm fascinated by people's motivations. Are you motivated more by the fear of losing or the thrill and excitement of winning? I'm a maximalist. I'm definitely much more motivated by the idea of winning than the fear of losing, but I'll admit to you something. I was running a startup before joining OpenAI, and one of my darkest moments, and there were many dark moments while I was running the startup, was recognizing that I had spent the fast few months trying to avoid losing. All of a sudden I was like, "Oh my God, that is why I'm so unhappy, and that's probably why the startup isn't going well." You know, I basically, every now and then, I have to recash myself and flip back into this idea of winning. But really what motivates me even more than that is I think I just love building things and building things for people, and man, I am so excited for this year, because many amazing things that don't exist yet are going to be built and given to a lot of people. I'm diving right in. Elon said that coding is one of the first professions to be largely automated. Do you agree given your position in what you see day to day? For sure, I would agree that coding is one of the first domains where LLNs are really good, but what does it mean for coding to be automated? It's like kind of a heavy statement, right? For example, now that we no longer write assembly, like when that change happened and we move to high-level languages, did we say coding is automated? Not really, right? We were just able to write much more code, and then as a result, actually, there was much more demand for code, and there were many more software engineers required. But yeah, part of what they used to do was automated. And the same way that, like, do you know the origin of the word computer? No. I might pronounce the location wrong, but I think it was at Bletchley Park. There were all these machines for decoding German enigma, and there were humans who would punch out punch cards and put them into the machine and do a bunch of tabulated math. I'm probably butchering this. But basically, there was an intensely manual part of work. And even like the first spreadsheet software was kind of loosely based off this idea that you would have an office full of desks arranged in a grid and people doing tabulations and then passing their sheets to the next person. And so all these things, like, those specific tasks have become automated, but every time that's happened, there's been an explosion and demand for the output. And so you need many more people, actually, to do that kind of work, even if the specific task is changed. So you think we'll have more engineers in five years, no less. Yeah. And sometimes we change what terms mean, right? Like the term computer now refers to something else, but now we have the term software engineer. And so I definitely think we'll have many more builders. And something interesting that I'm observing now is like, there's this compression of the talent stack. You still need software engineers today. You still need designers. I'm a PM. Do you need PMs? You know, you can have fun fun jokes about that. I don't think you need them. But maybe when you say engineer, you might be thinking of someone who's like much more full stack than has been true before. Like even if you go back a few years, you had many more places where there was like the back end engineer in the front end engineer. Whereas like now, at least if I think about the codex team, that's much less the case and things are much more full stack. Right? And so I think this town stack will compress, but we'll still have people building. Why do you think we don't need PMs in this world? You dangled the carrot. Yeah, it's my fun, Jack. I think, well, first of all, I think it's incredibly hard to define what a PM is, what a product manager is. I kind of think of the role as like actually explicitly undefined in your goal is just to adapt to whatever the team or business needs. Often if you have a bunch of people like trying to build as quickly as possible, then what a product manager can do is spend time like taking a few steps back and trying to look around corners and figure out what to do, collaborate with the folks and go to market and maybe be the teams like greatest cheerleader and quality razor. But like all of those things I just described, which are maybe my current role, could be done by a really strong edge lead or a designer who thinks a lot about product. And so I think it's like often useful to have product managers but you probably don't want many of them until the team is really large. I was stalking the shit out of you for the last few days, which was a very fun expedition into your writing, into your tweets, into your prior interviews. And you said that human typing speed and validation work is the key bottleneck to AGI, not model, compute or architecture. And it kind of left there and I was like, help me understand why human typing speed and validation work is the key bottleneck and what you really meant by that. For sure, okay, that's a fun one. I think there are multiple bottlenecks but that's maybe the most sort of click bait you want. So if you don't mind, I will do the slightly secratically. Like how many times would you say you use AGI today? - So how do you plus times a day? - Okay, cool. How many times do you think it assuming it was like zero energy expenditure from you? How many times do you think AGI could help you per day? - I mean, in everything, I think we'll have - Yeah. - for money in 24 hours a day across every single thing. - Exactly. And like I hear things now from engineers like Adop and A.I. and also outside who were telling me like, you know, I constantly have codecs running. I never close my laptop. And if it's not running while I'm in a meeting, I'm like wasting my time. I need to make sure codecs always has work for me that it's doing. And that's like super cool and super exciting, but that's a lot of work, right? To like manage these agents and make sure they're always working. And going back to the 30 times per day thing. Yeah, like when we look at how often codecs users are using codecs, it's like kind of this like tens of times kind of range. And I think AGI should be helping us tens of thousands of times per day. You know, a compute budget permitting. Well, and we'll get there over time. But the problem is like, at least if I think of myself, like I work on this stuff, I know I should be using A.I for everything, but I'm too lazy to like type out that many prompts. And I am too uncreative to figure out all the ways that A.I can help me. And so I end up kind of at a similar number as you. You know, I still am at the point where when I use A.I to do something cool, like prep for this conversation with you, I'm like kind of proud of myself. I'm like, oh, cool. I managed to use A.I in this new way. That's fine for people like you and me who are like really. interested in this topic, right? But I don't think most people we should expect in order to benefit from AGI should need to like, put so much effort into how to use this tool. It should just be effortless for them. I think the world we wanna get to is one where, to use AI, you don't really need to like, figure out the right rate of prompt. It's just super easy for you. And you don't even need to recognize that AI could help you. It's just like, knows you, connected to your context, and chimes in helpfully. - That's what I think like Claude has done well in terms of the packaging they've done. Like Claude for legal. Claude for Excel where you can implement it and have a DCF model, I'm not into models, but like, better than one could do before. Do you think it is your job then to productize the prompts and the human actions to remove that bottleneck? - Yeah, totally. So I think that it is our job to make sure that we have the models with amazing capable buddies. And then eventually to get to a world where this is like highly productized. And so you just have this like magic text box or audio input or whatever, or you can just add AI to your like, rub chat and it just starts to help. But I think there's quite an interesting in-between stage. And I think that that is actually where the most value lies right now. So here's what I mean. You could try to productize like a specific feature of AI for a specific market. And you know, the many companies are doing this. But I think it's a little bit hard to know what exactly will work, what is the right form factor. And someone was on your podcast earlier and they said something that I thought was quite interesting about how you cannot adopt AI at enterprise without FTEs. - Yeah, it was my face portrait from invisible AI. - Yeah, so even though I am literally hiring FTEs and if you're an FTE, please apply for a job with me, I actually disagree with that entirely. So what I think we need to do is build tools for people. Like you can use FTEs as a physical set on the podcast like to automate workflows, right? But then you're limited by like what you from your top down perspective can do and what you from your FTE staffing can staff to be built, right? But for me, the most exciting feature with AI is one where everyone just feels like a superhuman, just like empowered by AI. And for that, we need tools that are for people for individual users and that everyone feels fluent with. I think the phase that's most interesting that we're at now is building for the kind of people who are interested in figuring out how to use AI. So what we need to ship, and I think this was like the genius of like when Cloud Code for a ship, what they really got right, was they had this tool that was super easy to use in whatever context you want, just in your terminal. And people started experimenting with where to use it. And so I think as we think about AI being used outside of coding work, one of the most important things we can do is not overly build it like, okay, this is AI capabilities, but only specifically for finance, only for specifically for this workflow, but actually build a much more open and a tool that someone can just use for any given task creatively. But does that not put the owner saw the effort back on the user back to the point of your bottleneck of human action and lack of activity on them? If you don't define the task, you put the responsibility on them for the defining the task, which humans lack the ability or inclination to do. Yeah, so that's why I think it's the bottleneck. So basically here are the three phases in my mind. First, let's have agents work really well for software engineering and coding because LLM's happen to be good at that. Next, let's realize that for an agent to be useful more generally, it using a computer super valuable and also will realize that all agents are actually coding agents because coding is just the best way for an agent to use a computer. So let's take that same super flexible idea but make it available to anyone who's excited to explore and tinker and we're already seeing people start to do this with like the Codex app. Like Codex app is built for builders, but we're seeing builders use it for all sorts of non-coding tasks. Then finally, once we see what's working, let's build that like productization that you were talking about where you have highly specific features that just work immediately out of the box for people. And I think we're gonna speedrun this entire like one, two, three journey in the next months. - My challenge to what you said about kind of FDs and implementation within enterprise is data security, sensitivity, permissioning, access provisions is really freaking hard and people are much less intelligent and confident than we give them credit for I think, especially in large enterprise, sorry. And I think you actually need an FD to go in and custom fit a lot of the different horizontal solutions to make it work. Am I wrong? I think you're right if you're trying to go like all the way from zero to one and you have this like, and I said, I don't mean grand negatively here, but if you have like a grand vision for some like ultimate workflow automation system, then yeah, you're gonna have to clear through all of these security hurdles, always like compliance hurdles that are really real, right? Build connections to all these data systems and like systems of record and action. Yeah, so you're gonna need an FD to do that. What I've seen is that when we do these things top down, we end up like massively underleveraging the potential of AI in like helping that company. Whereas you can maybe do that in parallel, right? But if you can just give AI to the people like actually doing the work, they can start to like get a mental model for how AI can help and then they can start pulling AI into their workflows at the same time. She's just like an analogy or something here is like, imagine if you work in like a customer support role and AI is being brought into your role and starting to automate like meaningful chunks of your work, but you've never heard of a chat chat or are you allowed to use it? So in that scenario, you have like no intuition for what this thing is. Whereas in a world where actually you've been using chat chat for work at the same time as like parts of your work are getting automated by an LLM, you have much more intuition for how this works and you know, I would argue you feel much more empowered about this idea that it's being accelerated and you have some degree of control to steer like where these automations are built as opposed to like it's like this complete like X-mac and a kind of thing that is quite disempowering. So bringing this back, like I think there is a way to do this because the data control issues you mentioned are real. But at the end of the day, every tool, every feature, every workflow is for a human who is somewhere, an employee's somewhere and that employee's accessing that tooling via their browser or via their file system. Like at the end of the day. And so at the end of the day, everything comes to an interface that an agent running locally on your computer can work with and I think it's quite unusual like an opening eye we're building a browser at less and you might wonder why and there are many reasons why. But I think one of the key reasons is that by building a browser and by controlling it like tightly end to end, we can build like safe, agentic browsing for enterprise that is a way to access things agentically that are otherwise not yet built out by FDs. - There are so many questions that I have to ask you. I want to go back before I lose thread. You mentioned about engineers like not closing their laptops 'cause they don't actually want to lose productivity in time with building with codex. - You pawn up with cerebrus and cerebrus is the fastest provider of see of inference out there. Amazing when I think for both bluntly. How important is speed for developers when using codex and in the future of AI code? - I mean these simple answers, it's super important. - And so is it like inference monopoly? Like you have it now and competitors don't. - This is just my opinion, but I don't think we're gonna end up in like this kind of monopolistic world. I think there's so much competitive pressure that there'll be like multiple answers to this. But I will say that we have like news coming out about that partnership soon and I'm very excited for these kinds of things to ship. It's gonna be awesome. But even so like with GPT 5.3 codex, that model is like significantly more efficient than prior models. And so in the feedback we've heard is that people actually feel like now this is like a very competitively fast model than before. So there's a lot of things you can do just in terms of the model. There are also things you can do like improving how you do inference. So we recently rolled out a change where in the API like those models are served like 40% faster and in codex they're served 25% faster. So I think like speed matters a lot and we're kind of approaching it from all angles. Like both the hardware, how you do inference and the model level. - You mentioned earlier back in the hands of users and we talked about inference there. One of my dear friends is Jason Lampkin from SASTA and he says that actually inference is the new sales in marketing. Instead of sales in marketing teams, you're paying for inference so users can on board quickly easily see value and you will actually see the removal of sales in marketing teams. It's kind of like next gen of PLG. - I don't know, I think I struggle with that. I think fundamentally in this new world where anyone can build and it is increasingly easy to build things, what is hard, right? I think having a good relationship with the customer and knowing what they need is as hard as ever. Maybe even harder as it's just like there's just more stuff in the market to choose from. You know, the other things that are harder like building the right thing, having a really high quality thing. But going back to the sales in marketing thing, like I don't think that goes away because I think that's, like I said, I think that's just gotten harder as the markets. Any given market gets more competitive with more software out there. - How much of internal code for you today is produced by codecs? I remember like, "Claude for work," Boris said was like 100% or nearly 100%. How much is internal codecs used? - So I'll speak for myself and then for the team. I would say like most people that I know are basically not opening editors anymore. And this was a step function change that happened in, it's been happening gradually, but I'd say the key external market touchpoint for this was like GPT-5.2 codecs, where all of a sudden the model was like, way better running for longer, handling tasks and to end managing its context and following instructions. And so we kind of saw this inflection point and that's actually part of why we built the app. So I think what before GPT-5.2 codecs, the kinds of AI features we were using to write code were like tab completion or maybe you were pair programming with the model. And in my mind, you still need it to be at your laptop with your hands on the keyboard-ish. And like it might go off and do a little bit of work, but you're kind of still need to be there and drive. It's just like canaling these small things for you. And then at the time of GPT-5.2 codecs in December, we kind of switched to like actually, I'm just gonna fully delegate this task. It's like, you know, I'm gonna do a plan
it, make sure we like the spec that it's going to do, and then I'm just going to go let it cook. And this is quite a different way of working. So it's like, it's changing literally as we speak. And so part of why we built this codex app that we released last week is because we wanted to build like a form factor or user experience where it felt like very ergonomic to be delegating instead of pairing with an agent. And so like delegating to multiple agents at once. And so even at OpenAI, this is changing massively. I don't have a percentage stat for you, but I would say like the vast majority of code is written by AI. And I would say that now probably like most people are not even like opening IDEs. Maybe if they are opening IDs to like, maybe you want to own the interface, right? So you'll like help flush out like the interface between like two modules and then like AI fills it out. Or maybe you want to like collaborate on a plan, but then have AI fill it out. The code itself is not being written by humans anymore. Well, we have IDs as a part of the stack in 24 months time. Depends how you define the full definition, right? Integrated development environment. I mean, that phrase is so squishy that like literally anything could be an IDE, right? So I don't think it's very useful. If that's the answer, then yes, you could even argue the codex app is an IDE. I don't think it is. Like for me, I think of an IDE as like a really powerful editor. And we explicitly didn't build editing into the codex app because we wanted it to be really clear how you're meant to use it. So you know, it has a lot of affordances from managing multiple agents for delegating, for reviewing changes. It has really prominent skills, which are an open standard that are really useful for doing non-coding work. Stuff like, you know, charging tasks or monitoring deploys or something, but it doesn't have text editing. If we assume a large percentage is done by codex in terms of the code produced, how do you do coding reviews and is AI responsible for internal coding reviews? There are a few things here. First off, the spec for what you want to do or the plan becomes more important than ever. I think like architecturally, like how should this code work? You know, we recently shipped like a very prominent plan mode that works a little differently than others where you have the agent go off and like propose how it's going to do something that's like quite a long plan. And then it asks you questions about if you agree on how it wants to do it or if you want to have input. And this is very similar to like if you had a new hire who was new to your code base, you know, they had to present a sort of request for comments to the rest of the team before they started doing the work. So even though that's not formally code review, I would say review of the plan is actually something that's becoming more important because we're entering more of this like delegation phase of working with agents. So that's an underrated thing. Then okay, there's actual code review. I think a problem that I hear a lot of people talking about, especially in the open source world is like a lot of AI sloped like people will just be submitting PRs to these open source repos and their trash and like maybe the user has an even the person submitting the PR hasn't even tested them or definitely hasn't reviewed the code. I think this is a problem. And so a common practice with codex is to have codex like review its own PR or its own change. And codex is actually incredibly good at this. We've explicitly trained the model to be good at code review. And you know, that included things like making sure it's like really good at creating like high signal feedback. So it'll like basically have few false positives of criticism, which means you can really trust when it has feedback. And so not only do we encourage people like on the team and elsewhere like to like just ask codex to review, you can then also set it up to just like automatically review. So like nearly all code at OpenAI is reviewed by codex automatically whenever you push it to a good repo. Actually like one one fun thing for people who haven't tried codex yet or didn't try it recently. Sometimes the way that people like see how good our models are is by asking codex to review a different models code. And basically they're like, oh shoot, I should probably just be using codex to write my code in general. You said something really interesting there. You said for those that maybe haven't tried it yet or yeah, coming back to it. How do you think about retention with this category? I remember Tom Blomfield, who's a YC partner tweeted months to months, but it stuck with me, the weird brain about the ease of transition between different providers, whether it was cursed or raw code or codex. I can't remember which one it was to be honest, but how sticky are users? And how do you think about retention? We've taken this like kind of counter intuitive approach with codex to just build it super openly. So like the codex core harness is open source and we're always trying to make it easier for people to switch. So for instance, when we first launched codex last year, we created like created as even a heavy word. It was just we just established convention, which is called agents.md. This is basically a file that you can put instructions for the agent in. And instead we didn't call it codex.md. We just wanted it to be something that all agents can use in pretty much every agent except cloud uses agent.md, which is awesome. And then just last week actually, we helped push for putting skills which are standard for like giving the agent instructions and scripts. We pushed for those to be sorted in sort of a neutral named folder called agents instead of in like codex or something. And again, everyone has jumped on it except the usual suspect. I think it's really great for the developers to have a lot of choice. And we're trying to make it even easier for people to try different things. Now that said, these coding tasks where you're asking an agent to write some code, they're quite hermetic. And what I mean by this is maybe an analogy in TV would be like episodic, right? Like you can come in and you've got this like open ended agents file that any agent can read from. You've got these skills that any agent can use. And you can ask the agent to write some code and it produces a patch and that patch goes into Git. So kind of like both ends of this are pretty neutral vendor neutral. So very easy to move between for now. As agents start to do work that is not writing code, but more general work, again, for software engineers or beyond for any builder, they're going to need to start interfacing with other systems. So as they start, maybe your agent is talking to century, right? Or it's talking to your Google box or something. Then I think these agents become much stickier because actually deciding to connect an agent to that system is a sticky decision. And if you're an enterprise really trusting that the agent is going to have access to these tools, but there are really good secure guardrails and sandbox and like controls over how the agent works with these systems, I think is critically important. And that's not something that you're going to want to do multiple times. And so you know, we've been kind of building codex knowing that this is coming. And so we have like the most conservative sandboxing approach. Sandboxing is kind of like a set of controls, OS level controls over what the agent can do. But I'm a fan of seven powers. It's brilliant book, which talks about kind of seven ways that businesses accrue value and sustainability. And like, you know, you're sticking this with your retention as one. If we're on the same team with codex, how do we create attentive patterns, behaviors, programs to ensure that people stay with codex and they don't flip to car. So when there's a better model or claw code when there's a better model. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I think on the one hand, like we think about this, obviously we're running a business. But you know, our mission here is to like ensure that like we safely deliver the benefits of AI to all humanity. And so something that's like unintuitive to people about like the codex team. As you actually, I know, but your job is the success of codex. I got asked what our job is the distribution of intelligence. And so we're obviously building out codex. And this is really unintuitive to a lot of listeners, but like we put all this effort into trading these models. And then we serve these models to our competitors. And from our perspective, this is so difficult for me as a venture capitalist to understand you are aware of this. Oh, we were. It's like we're opening eyes like a really interesting and unusual place to work. But basically because we're playing such a long game for us, if the competition gets better, we learn. It's actually helpful for us. And so we're pushing really hard at growing codex. You learn because if if that closed and they improve, you don't learn. I don't think so. For example, there are a bunch of recent launches. Like even today, I literally just like could tweeted a thing this morning about a launch from Warp. No particular affiliation, right? And there are a bunch of cool ideas in there about how they like framed up the way that their agent can work in the cloud at the same time as working locally. And for me, that's like inspiring. And I think I see all these things from various companies. And like one of the coolest things about the space is it's like we're all kind of inevitably reaching the same conclusions together and then building things out. And so, you know, on the codex team, I think we have some massive advantages, right? We have the massive distribution advantage with chat GPT. We have the massive like capability advantage of training our own models to be good in our harness and building our harness to be good at the new models and like know what else has early access to those. And so I think we're playing to win and we have a really big advantage or a number of advantages. But we're also playing this long game where, you know, again, we serve our models to everyone where we push for open standards so that everyone can use like all the things that we're pushing for as well. Can I ask you, what will be the defining factor of winning? And I know I'm using venture language and you're brilliant and kind of much more free and open. But it was like the defining factor of winning. Again, if I push you, is it like GTM, which is like the biggest enterprise in the world, do want to work with OpenAI. I have many friends in your sales team. The inbound that you get from the largest brands is incredible. So GTM, because of the incredible brand, product execution and just codex being a freaking awesome product, or compute inference speed, actual compute advantage. Which one is the defining winner? Okay. So I think if we're going to talk about it more from an OpenAI perspective, obviously this is way above my pay grade, but I would say it's compute advantage in having the best models. And in order to achieve that, we then need to build businesses that generate revenue. And also that something that's really interesting, we notice with having the codex team, which is sort of combined team of research and product, is also by building these the successful products. We create a lot of pressure to improve the model in sort of a faster way. That's maybe the company perspective, right? If we come to the product perspective, I think the single most important thing we can do is build a really good product that people want to use. And like I was saying earlier, I think we really want to build products for individuals and then allow people to be confluent in those products and then pull in automation. And I think that maybe counter-tuitive, but will result in way more impact than anyone purely approaching it from the enterprise workflow perspective. I think that's mostly a question of product execution. And then that works for say like ProSumer. When it comes to enterprise, the go
the photo market side is really important. Something that I've learned the hard way is if we go to an enterprise and we're just like, hey, we're here, like, feel free to use the stuff, that doesn't work. There's actually quite a lot of education that needs to be done and there's a lot of like configuration that we need to support and sort of like education of the broader team. So like that motion looks much more like coming in, pitching, meeting the head of developer experience or whatever, understanding how they want their team to operate and then giving them tools to like propagate that mechanism of operating to the rest of the team. - You set the word revenue there, which is one metric to measure a business against. When you think about like your metric of success, which you sit down with, "Bram or broad or whatever it is," and say, "Hey, this is what we're optimizing for. What is the metric that you use as the defining north star for your progression?" - It's actually not revenues the primary, the primary is active users, which you know. - How do you measure active users, like day after? - Okay, so we measure weekly active users and it's, you know, did this person like actually do a turn in our product, you know, did they send a prompt? Is weekly active a frequent enough metric, do you think? Sounds nice, but if this is actually replacing the IDE, is daily active, not better? - I think daily active will be better soon. We just happen to use weekly active, it's like a standard here. And I think as we were getting started, it made sense, but I actually agree with the criticism there. It's like, which probably just be it daily. Like I think we need to be getting to a world where for any given task that you have, your first instinct is to ask an agent to help. Right, it's kind of like, you know how like with Google search, it's like, okay, anything I need to do, I just like go into this text box and I can get navigated to the right location. Then you had chat to BT, it's like for any information I need, I can go into this text box, type it out and get information that helps me. And I think the next phase that we'll see this year is like for any task I need to do, as opposed to just get information, I go to this text box or this input and something happens that helps me. Even if it's not the full task, even if it's only a small part of it. You said about kind of chat that I, again, I jump around, sorry, my brain, my mother has to walk with me around London and she like deals with this manic, episodic brain. But you said about chat and the interface there. I'm really fascinated by this because it is a seemingly incredibly efficient input function for busy humans. But I spoke to Anish Akaya, who's a GP at Andreessen and he came out the other day and he's like, no, no, this was created by Salmon Elon and it works for very efficient people. But most of the planet want browser-based discovery interactions, you eyes. Do you think that chat will be the enduring UI in the next wave of AI interaction with humanity? - The simple answer is yes, but actually I think there's two components here. Like if we just imagine the future, like just like let's think of some sci-fi movie, right? Like what does AI look like? I believe that sci-fi is a really good predictor of what the future should look like and usually it's pretty simple because it's a story and I think simple is usually right. It's gonna be some just like entity that I can talk to however I want about whatever I want, right? And I shouldn't have to navigate to a place where I work with like my coding AI and then I have this like different place for my like sales AI and I have to like be like, hey, I am now talking to sales thing and like do that. It's just like, I'm just gonna talk to a thing and it's just gonna help. So I think what we're gonna have is that we'll have chat or voice, basically conversational interface will be sort of the pillar of everything that you can talk to about anything and that you can add into any group chat or whatever so it can like discover how to help you. But then if you're like a power user and you're very good at a specific thing you probably don't wanna be disintermediated by having to talk to another person. It'd be like if you had an executive assistant but you can only work by talking to them that's super annoying, right? So at some point you wanna get to the show notes and like look at them yourself and like edit them yourself, right? You wanna edit the thing yourself. So I think we'll pair chat with like functional like graphical interfaces that are bespoke to like what someone needs. So like in my case, I will probably chat to like do my you know podcast prep but when it comes to like actually looking at product and code I probably want like the codex app that I can go into and get deep in, right? Whereas maybe if we're talking to a marketer maybe that marketer will like chats to ask questions about the product, they're not gonna download the codex app just to ask questions about the product but maybe they'll have like a super custom GUI for like add analytics or something that they go into. Totally get that. And it kind of wrongly assumes on my behalf a consumer interaction at some point in that journey and I wanna ask you how do you think about like agent to agent experiences and designing experiences for agents? So we spoke about for example, going into our enterprises and how you can be helpful. I'm just using the most boring thing ever, expense approval. You could have agent submission of expenses on my behalf for my trip to San Francisco and then the agent on the flip side doing approvals for that from open AI's compliance department. How do you think about that and that paradigm shift? - That's interesting. You know, to be honest, I'm not sure what that's gonna look like. My like quickest answer to this is that like we've noticed as we build codecs that the best interfaces for codecs to do work are also tend to be the best interfaces for humans. So like when people ask like, oh, like how can I make my code base like more efficient for the agent to work with? The answer is often like, well, have you looked at it yourself and is it easy for a human to work with? So like a very specific example would be like running tests in the code base. Nyevly if you just like set up most test runners, they just like emit all the outputs of all the tests. And so like as a human it's really annoying because you have to go in and like find the one that failed and it's like you've got to read hundreds of thousands of lines. Turns out that's terrible for AI as well. But if you filter it down to just only emit the failed test better for humans, also better for agents. So probably the agent to agent interaction points will be very similar to like if there was a human in the loop. And that's nice because it means you can kind of automatically replace individual systems. - I mentioned our show on LinkedIn and a wonderful investor from a different company. It's that Harry Potter, you know, Voldemort. He's like, you know, he who shall not be named. I don't want Sam to kill me. But from another company, was like, you got to, you ask him, how do you think about a coding data mode and does anthropic have all the data now? - I think that from what we've seen, and you know, I would defer to my research team on this, but I feel like we feel like we have plenty enough data to build really good coding models. I actually think the place that's more interesting for getting data now is like as we get into like knowledge work tasks, that's kind of data that's like not really like available most places on the internet. And so you start to have like really interesting brainstorms for like how to help a model be good at it. Like maybe you have to like pay people to like simulate doing tasks so that you can like learn these trajectories for the model. Maybe you should acquire startups, you know, that are no longer a business, but have have a lot of like data like say they're slack or something. Yeah, I think that that kind of knowledge work task distribution is like much harder than coding. - That's so interesting. So they're about kind of the data that doesn't exist, so to speak. How do you think about your interactions with the data providers, your macaws, your churings, your invisible, your did it, did it, did it of the world? Like will your span tan ice there? Or will you go, we are spanning too much on data, we should do it ourselves and do data acquisition. - Yeah, I mean, I think the way that we think about these things is just like how do we move as quickly as possible? And so becoming able to set these things up in-house is like very expensive in time and we're a small team. So what I have observed so far is that if we need to run a data campaign at scale, we're usually going to endless help from one of these companies. - On the consumer side for code apps, we've spoken about like enterprises and going into them how to engage in terms of developer experience, developer relations. Do you compete with a lovable and a rapid or not like low end consumer basis in a year or two's time? Is that a business way of like, you know, what code apps is not for every person to create and about me or small business to create their own site? How do you think about consumer in that way? - Yeah, I would say that right now, it doesn't feel like we're competing super directly. But you know, I don't know if you saw our super bowl ad of the tagline of which is this, you can just build things. With the app, we notice that like many people who are less technical are starting to build things. And so the kinds of things they're building are much more hello worldy. And so I think that we will see some overlap in use cases where you have people just pulling up code apps because they have it as part of their chat GPT. Actually like a big announcement last week was that we're now offering some codex to people even on free chat GPT plans or on the go chat GPT plan. So this is massive just in terms of like bringing availability to everyone. And so I think we're definitely gonna see people with like a free chat GPT plan coming in and just like building simple things where they otherwise might have gone to a specialized tool. - Well, would you most like to do differently? But for whatever reason you can't. - I feel like it's been a very good few weeks for us. So we're very, I'm pretty jazz about everything that's happening. - That's really interesting. He said it's been a very good few weeks for us and I feel that. Does the team feel the changing winds of momentum both in positive and negative cycles? - Absolutely. We are very attuned to it. Like if you look at the history of codex, the first thing we launched last year was like this amazing idea that people were super excited about. It's like, hey, we're gonna give the agent its own computer in the cloud. You're gonna have it as many of them as you want. It worked for you in parallel on tasks. Super great idea. To be honest, it didn't work as well as what we shipped later. It was not the best. And then since August with GPT-5, we started pushing really hard on interactive coding which is where most of the competition in the market is. You know, we went on an absolute tear. I feel like the public metric we have was like since August, we grew by like 20X and then like even like late in the year we like doubled from December to now. I tried the exact number there. But like that was competing neck and neck. But the shift that we feel last week is, you know, we felt like we had the most intelligent model that was cemented with 5 free codex. We had feedback around our model being slower and like maybe less fun to work with and like being less good at communicating with you while it was working. We addressed that feedback. And that's true even compared to like the other competitor model that launched like 20 minutes before us. And was like maybe this is spicy. It was like soda for 20 minutes. So do I mean, state of the art.
And then we'd always been getting a lot of feedback on the quality of the user experience in Codex. Our most popular surface was the IDE extension and our CLI, which is a command line interface, was less polished. But with the app, the feedback has been resounding from the market. This is a really high quality experience. It's simple, unintuitively simple, and people are just loving using. Even our biggest critics are converted. And then we had the Super Bowl ad, and then we went to free. And so going back to your question of like, what am I supposed to want to do differently? I have two things for you. The first is I actually want to get back to Cloud. When we pivoted our strategy from like focusing on the Cloud agent last year to working interactively, the thinking was very simple. It was just, and it's kind of like what I was telling you about FDE's actually. If you go too far ahead to workflow automation before your end user is fluent with the tooling and can get it to work simply, then there's like this disconnect. And you just have this pipe dream idea that's not like effective for except for the most power users. But once you have this base where people are using your tool every day, and they're configuring it, and every time they use it, it gets better, then like the step up to like letting it run independently in the Cloud is a much smaller step up. So I think it's time for us to like get back to like building out the Cloud product and making it super tightly integrated with the local product. It already is somewhat integrated. And the other thing I want to do differently is start thinking more about the bottlenecks. Like code gen writing code has become like basically trivial now. But the hard part is like what you were talking about with like code review, right? Like how do we know the code quality is good? How do we know we're doing the right things? And those bottlenecks I think are under under appreciated still and under invested in. So like I think we want to get to a world where you can have an agent that is unbottle next that you trust to like own an entire micro system or internal tool or whatever and can do the full iterative loop, including feedback from users without having to go through human review. And that is a really hard problem to solve both from an intelligence perspective, but also from like a safety perspective and a controls perspective. How much weight should we place on benchmarks and evals? Probably, there's an annoying answer for you. It's like some, right? Like they do tell you, in my mind, they give you a good measure of intelligence. And so you can put weight on those for intelligence. And especially before evals are saturated, I think when you see meaningful progress in those benchmarks, it's like very, very helpful. And then I think you have to pair that though with like what it feels like to use the model. And that's a vibes thing. Whenever I talk to any, even internally or even talking to like customers of our models, I'm all surprised by how vibes based the evaluation of how it feels to work with the model is. How vibes based life is. People want to work with people they like is the lesson that I give to kids. People want to work with models they like. In terms of like market composition, as an investor, I have to think through how do I think about the eventual state of this given market kind of a terminal state. How do you think about that? Is it like Uber and Lyft? And like the majority of the market will be on code as orclaw code. Or is it like a AWS as your Google Cloud and a 333333? Okay. So I think this might end up with fewer providers that are capturing a lot of value in the long run. And here's why like, and maybe this is a bit spicy, but I think that we are kind of in this temporary phase where we have agents that are really good at coding, right? And if you look back last year, like maybe more people thought we would have agents that are good at other domains too, but that didn't happen last year. So we only have PMF for coding agents like in the industry overall, I would say, right? And then this is like very narrow other use cases like customer support, etc. But I think that's probably temporary. And then over time, we're going to end up with agents that kind of can do anything for you. This kind of what I was saying earlier, like there's just like a super assistant, you talk it to it about anything. And then there is like specific UI that you can go look at if you happen to be deep in specific function. So in that world, I don't think you want like 12 agents at the company and you have to like go, your employees have to go figure out the right ones to talk to because then they won't achieve fluency. And if they don't want to achieve fluency, then they will also won't like pull automation into their roles. But if you have this one thing that you can talk to about anything, right? So you're onboarding, it's just like go talk to this thing about anything you need. Then people will develop muscle memory to go to it. It'll become the center of gravity of work and people will pull an automation. So I think that that future makes much more sense. And I think like as the people building chat's BTE were like really well set up to deliver that. This is kind of a stretch, but an analogy here is I used to work at Dropbox. And for a while, this is before Slack was big. And for a while, we thought we wondered if people should like go comment on like documents in Dropbox or if they should like go talk about the documents in Slack. And it was like obvious that it was like more optimal for people to like put comments on the right time stamp in the video in Dropbox or like comment on the document in Dropbox. Right. So there's more optimal. However, what we saw is that Slack is just such a center of gravity of people just like talking to each other. Like nobody wants to comment on the document. I just want to slack you. And so we saw that like there was this really big pull towards things happening in Slack, even if it was less efficient. And I think we're going to see something similar at work where if there is a single agent you can use for nearly anything, it will just be this giant pull and everyone will talk about how they use that one agent for things. Teams will share best practices with each other. There'll be hackathons around how to use that best thing. Yeah. And you'll end up with just a handful of these. You said about kind of agents not really proliferating in terms of use each other than coding. And actually maybe this being the time and customer support is one of the examples. My question to you is I'm an ambassador today. I'm looking for companies which would accrue value over time and provide incredible products to customers. There is a belief that the durability of revenue of large SaaS companies today is zero and that SaaS is dead because the model providers, you and the other, are going to come for our launch. So to speak, what would you advise me? Things are built for humans. Like, otherwise what's the point? Even SaaS tools are built for humans. So for me, I think my question is like, does this SaaS company own a relationship with a human on the other end of things? And if it does, then I suspect it's not going away. Or does the SaaS company own some really important system of record? It's probably not going away. Maybe both of those tough to two things, the interaction with the human and the system of record are more important than ever actually. On the other hand, is the SaaS company a kind of a glue layer, but it doesn't own either of those two things? Well, I'm not the expert here, but I'm more nervous about that kind of company. If we take that stance, Salesforce and Service now, they're down 20, 30, 40%. I think it's massively exaggerated. I think there are some companies that legitimately should be respectfully, I think Dropbox is in a very difficult position. And I think your Monday.com's a little hard, though, for the majority of SMBs and consumers who use it, which is the majority of their market, actually, could they vibe-coded to-do list? Yes. Would it be cost-efficient to do so? Not really, actually, by the time you customize it and perfect it. And to be honest, the to-do list is generally pretty bland in terms of what you need to do. That task, complete task, show historical tasks assigned to new members. It is not very difficult. And so, actually, I think you just keep it. And so, I think it's massively overblown. I don't think that's the classic Negear reaction from markets. I do think you're going to come for customer support, and I wouldn't want to be in that category. I think there's maybe changes what kind of founder you invest in, right? I think there was this maybe temporary phase where that I liked personally as a product builder. There was this phase where you would invest in the person who can just build good products. And you could kind of ignore they had a good thesis around a customer or go to market or distribution or anything like that, because it was so hard to build good product, right? And I think that was an anomaly. If we look at where we are now, maybe that kind of founder is not the founder you should invest in, because it's kind of relatively easier to build good product. You need to go back to investing the founder who's thought through distribution, as a good domain expertise of what to build for a specific customer, etc. So again, if you were on my team as an investor, how would you think about interesting areas for us to invest in companies that will accrue value and not be threatened by model providers? Because again, you're going into health. You're going to code, obviously code ice is very clear. You're going to customer support. Where are you not going? Where is Claude code not going? I'm tempted to say like, I don't know, I think it's a hard time to be an investor. The market is so dynamic. It's hard to say. It's a really tough time to be investing today. My answer is kind of twofold actually, which is like number one, I look for things with physical infrastructure. I don't think you're going into energy supply. And then two is like the FinTech and banking integrations, gnarly financial products. I don't think OpenAI is going to go into building 500 relationships with banks in Southeast Asia. I tend to agree. It comes back to, are you going into a gnarly complicated market where customer relationships and knowledge of the market are everything? That still seems great. How bad is the war for talent? From the UK, we look at SF and I say to companies it's better to build in Europe because it's impossible to acquire talent and it's impossible to retain it. Am I wrong? I think that the war for talent is incredibly fierce right now. Obviously at OpenAI we have an incredibly strong brand and so we're able to attract a lot of talent. And even so we put a ton of effort into closing candidates that we're really excited about, even we feel it. It's not like you don't just get whoever you want for free. Can I ask, are the entry price that you get stalking at? Is it still attractive for the best talent? I haven't had anyone tell me anything to the contrary. To what extent do you think about finding the perfect fit versus finding someone who's good enough? So earlier I made my joke about PMs being optional. I think that's not actually true, you still need product people. But I do think that they have to be the perfect fit. And if you have someone who's not the perfect fit, they might just do more harm than good. It kind of means that we're way more selective than I might have been in other roles. I'm a CS student. I'm at Stanford, I'm an Imperial, I'm at Cambridge, I'm wherever, ETH, great institution. What would you advise?
me knowing all that you know now that would help me navigate the next five years of my career. I want to be valuable to the AI ecosystem environment as an engineer entering the workforce in the next year. Basically, there's actually never been a better time to be an engineer because you have incredible tooling available to you to get incredible amount done and your ability to like ramp into a complex code base that you might be hired into has never been faster because you can go ask AI like a ton of questions about the code base and you can ask it to plan out changes that would otherwise take you like days to research maybe. I think first off, I would say like you should be like very optimistic but then of course like about your abilities once you're at the job. Then not the question is how do you get the job because it's never been like easier to build things. The thing that becomes scarcer is like agency, taste and like quality. I would urge you to like just build things and demonstrate your agency and your taste around what you build and like build things that are of high quality and then share those things. You know, we get a lot of inbound from folks both applying for jobs through the careers page or also on social and this is just me but when someone writes to me with like some interesting thoughts and like a link to an interesting project that gets my attention much more than like a normal resume does. Final questions we do a quick fire. You mentioned Dropbox earlier. The alumni from Dropbox is incredible. I'm really like amazing to see the talent that's come out of Dropbox. What's your single biggest lesson from Dropbox that has shaped some of your thinking now with OpenAI? I don't need to think about that one. That's kind of the thing I was telling you about earlier, right? Like when you're building tooling for people like for end users, you have to think about like that tooling as a system of engagement. Right? If people don't want to use your tool if it doesn't like naturally feel like the easiest way to get something done then people just won't use it. Again, I learned that from watching how slack just absolutely took off. And so I think about that a lot now when we're building these agents. I'm like if we build our agent purely as like workflow automation then it's always going to be like pulling teeth to get that thing started, right? You're going to need to hire Accenture or someone to come in. They're going to deploy FTEs. It's going to be tough. But if you can build a system that like people just love using even if they only use it for partial tasks over time they'll get better and better at using it and then that you'll get connected to the tools you want over time and then you can start laddering in automation. Obviously these aren't mutually exclusive. How an earth do you reinvigorate growth at Dropbox today? At least from when I was a Dropbox the thing we were uniquely good at was desktop software. And desktop software it's it's funny it was never not back but anyways it's so back. Basically because if you're solving for productivity and knowledge work yes their systems of record everywhere that you need to connect with but everything at the end of the day happens on the users computer either in their browser or just like locally and apps on their computer. I do think that the the fastest way we're going to see productivity gains from agents at work is going to be at first meeting users on their computer working with the stuff that they have available to them you know without having deployed FTEs to set anything up and then over time you'll connect in these various systems. And so if I was Dropbox I'd be thinking about how do we leverage our unique domain expertise in like building really good like desktop software and this sort of collaborative layer on top of your computer. How do we leverage that to enable productivity agents? It's a bit broad but I think that's the angle you go. No I love it and I really appreciate the response. Final one before we do a quick fire promise. I've been brought up in a world by margin matters software margins are wonderful and it's what makes software a brilliant category to invest in. We've seen margin profiles that are very different in inference heavy players in particular. To what extent should I put that out of mind and appreciate that cost will come down cost tokens will come down and actually it's about usage and customer love margins will come or no margins are actually freaking important keep that focus. I think both costs are going to come down significantly and I also think that you know if this is the year of agents being deployed like broadly at work then this is also the year where they're going to have to be connected to all these various systems and I think that's going to be very sticky and so I view this year as a race and so if you want to win that race and you should be okay taking some hit to margin in the meantime. Did a quick fire answer I say a short statement you give me your immediate thoughts that sound okay? Yeah what if you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months? When I joined OpenEI I thought that this was a little longer than 12 months ago but when I joined OpenEI I thought that we would all just be hanging out with our computer screen sharing but within a year from there. You know we'd have this agent that we're just talking to that was completely wrong. I think the rate of like progress in like multimodal models was like slower than I expected. Multimodal means you know like models that work with like video and audio so instead what happened was that we saw that like agents that work with your computer through code are the way and so for me that's been a complete rethink in terms of like how we bring the benefits of AI to like just people generally it's not through video and audio primarily. Which lesson known compasse do you respect most and why? First one that came to mind was AMP. I think they're really yeah AMP it's out of the folks at source graph their product has a great reputation of just being like you know punching way above its weight but I think the other thing that I really respect is that they helped initiate this whole like standardization around like agents.md and like dot agent slash skills which are what I was saying earlier about like making it so that's easier for users to manage all these different agents that they're trying. We obviously put out agents.md but they put out agent.md and basically Quinn started this all I'm putting out a tweet that said hey do you guys buy the domain agents.md will standardize to your your spelling and as small as that was that initiated this whole standardization that I think has been also in the community. Do you think the response to anthropase ads was to write response? I mean there were so many different responses the one that I heard obviously I think was right the one that I heard was well one company's being pretty negative about the future and the other company us open AI is being really positive and just telling people they can build things into dream. I thought that response was brilliant. What's the hardest product decision you've had to make since being a code ace? Well I can tell you the most painful product decision we have to make. For a while Codex Cloud was like effectively unlimited not free like you needed to pay for chat to be deep but then you had unlimited usage. Every day that we left it that way we knew that it would be harder to wind back at being like unlimited but we were just so focused on competing on our other things that had more PMF that we kind of planted that decision out when we wound back that unlimited use to some like more reasonable limit there was a lot of blowback from users and it was a very small minority of users who like thought everything should be kind of like pseudo free forever but that blowback affected us everywhere because like the social chatter doesn't really distinguish between these things. I think the less than I learned the hard way there is like you can't make things unlimited for too long. Data site pricing grandfathering pricing is such a hot thing. What do we do today in engineering or product that in five years time you'll look back on and go oh my god can you believe that we did that? Well one is just editing code by hand. I think probably another one this is maybe spice here but another one might even be like actually managing the deployment and monitoring of systems by hand. Like I basically think that probably big companies will take a long time to like deploy this but many startups might actually kind of start building on a completely new stack that's like fully AI managed to be clear as stack doesn't exist yet but a fully managed AI stack where because the basically it's been built to give you really strong deterministic guard rails over what the agent can do and like control of to like world back deploy and everything like that and so we'll get to a world where the way you start a company is you start by getting an agent and just asking it to build things and then you get more agents in that and then maybe eventually you add you add your co-founders to this service that you use to work with agents and so you end up like maybe your main communication tool is actually your agent communication tool and then maybe you're not actually handholding this like very point painful CI and deploy process but you're just like having agents do things. Weird question but I'm intrigued. Are you the one providing agent guard rails and what I mean by that is your agents can go anywhere within that price? Are you responsible providing those guard rails or is there a third party matter provider who is saying hey well Alice you can't go into that that's human resources or you can't go into that that's marketing how do you think about guard rail provisioning and is that the role of the agent provider or a third party provider? I think we'll probably see both like we are putting a lot of effort into agent guard rails like I said we have we're basically the only company that cares about OS level sandboxing for coding agents for instance there's none that exists on Windows we're the ones building that and we're doing it in open source so hopefully other people can use it we think about that a lot chat chat support connectors so you know you can talk to your like Google Docs or something and we put a lot of effort into guard rails around what the agent can do with your Google Docs those are just two examples but we think a lot about this and I think probably though the way that we'll do it will not be sufficient like there'll be third parties who provide like various bespoke things for various bespoke you know company needs and will probably be a mix of both final one for you my friend what are you most excited about when you look forward 10 years? This is probably going to happen in much less than 10 years but my mission sort of personally when I joined the company was I just felt like even with the models we had a year and a half ago there was so much just capability overhang or just like ability for these things to be useful but we hadn't built the right products around that and so people like me were getting more benefit than like people like my grandma what I'm most excited for is to get to like a form factor for AI that means that they're just helping everyone regardless of whether they're in tech and especially if they're not in tech or especially if they're older and so you know the concrete vision I have is like at some point we'll like add an agent to like our family what's up or something and it'll just start like being useful to the family without anyone having to think harder about that there are many other ways that that could happen but I think concretely that's the most obvious thing we can do with like my grandma. Dude I so appreciate you I so appreciate you putting up with my wandering questions and my very
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