OpenAI Co-Founder: How to Turn AI Into a Business Advantage | Greg Brockman

We're going to see this massive renaissance of entrepreneurship. Like, I think it is coming. I think it's really going to kick in over the next year to two years.

I'm pretty good at writing software. I don't write software anymore. I direct an AI for it to write software. I provide lots of feedback and guidance.

Well, I think the answer to being ambitious enough will always be no, because there's always more we can do.

Well, it's been very interesting to see, first of all, how many people use ChatGPT. You know, we have 1.2 billion weekly active users. We have like 300 million people who use chat every single week for health queries, right? To help them in their personal lives. At the same time, how many of those use cases just scratch the surface? And we see this in the metrics that if people use chat for three different use cases, so three different things that you realize chat could do for you, you become a power user. You become, you retain, you keep using chat and you want to use it more. But getting to those three use cases, it's such a hard challenge.

Exactly. Right. And so really finding that magic that speaks to you, but also at the same time, I think it shows this massive opportunity, this massive space that's almost a gap where you have, you're talking to an AI and the AI knows what it's capable of and it can suggest to you, hey, you asked me to do this thing for you. Actually, I could do even more, right? Here's an idea. I can make a whole presentation, a spreadsheet. So that's actually been something we've been exploring. But I feel like there's something here about the fact that what you want out of AI is simplicity, right? You don't want an interface that has buttons and sliders and model pickers. Like none of that. That's not the AI we were promised.

You want something you can talk to that can solve problems, that can help you, can help solve goals, but that can actually even be proactive, that can say to you, 'Hey, you got this email that's in your inbox that you've been ignoring this person for the past couple days, and that actually I did some research and it turns out that here's like the right answer to the question, and I've drafted an answer. Do you approve?'

And by the way, the use case I just mentioned, it's not theoretical with dots. I actually got that exactly, this use case happening to me right before we started this podcast. And so I think we're at a point now where AI is actually able to be much more proactive and to remove so much of the burden of figuring out like what is this system capable of and to really help you and then help you be able to achieve whatever it is that you want to do.

Well, I think so many, right? There's a whole spectrum of them. And I think the way that I always recommend going to discovery is you got to play with the system, right? You got to see what it's capable of. And so, when it comes to coding, like these models, they're now better at writing software than basically anyone I know, right? I'm pretty good at writing software. Like, I don't write software anymore. I direct an AI for it to write software. I provide lots of feedback and guidance. So, it's always fun to like make a little game and just kind of get this quick hit on just seeing like, okay, how long did it take to deliver on that? And then ask for something more complex. I think that we're at a point now where Astra is so good at Blender, so good at 3D modeling. And so it's kind of fun to ask it to produce 3D models of a photo and those kinds of things. You can see it using software like using Microsoft Paint to sketch out a photo. But you can ask for more real things, too. Like I know for example a friend who was designing or wanted to have a guest house built and used Astra to actually produce CAD plans and then brought those to a contractor and now it's being built.

And so it's a very empowering thing. Normally you'd have to hire someone else, like I don't know how to make CAD plans, but now we have this intelligence in our pocket that can actually do these kinds of things for us. To me, one of the things I really like to do is to try to push the AI in different dimensions of my life. And so I think that voice mode is something that makes AI so accessible, right? You just go into voice mode and you start talking to it. Voice mode now is hooked up to tools. So you can actually ask it to do anything that your chat can do. And if you're hooked up to your email, to your calendar, now you can ask it about like what's my schedule for today or like what should I, you know, I want to free up some time for some deep thought. How can I do that? And it can actually go and have context on what's going on in each part of your calendar. So, I think that in my mind that there's this activity of just stepping back and thinking about what's a slightly more ambitious thing I can ask my AI to do than it's done for me to date. Let's see if it works.

Well, I think the answer to being ambitious enough will always be no, because there's always more we can do, right? And that's the beauty of AI is that it's really about solving problems, helping you achieve what you want to achieve. You know, there's no ceiling to what you might imagine, right? And so, it's really just about sort of tuning that you were able to achieve a thing means maybe you can dream a little bit bigger. And so, in my mind, yeah, I think this is a super, super cool app. So, first of all, in terms of just doing the background research, and maybe when this was being built, they already went and looked at all my interviews that I've ever done and did.

It did. It did the background. The only thing is it still can't connect to social media, but I think it's a plug-in thing.

There we go. And then all of OpenAI's past press releases. Oh, there we got a questions tab. I like that.

Yes. I'd be curious how much it helps with the post-processing and the actual production of the final video once it's done. Right. Because this thing has all this context on me, on OpenAI, on the kinds of things that you've covered in your past episodes, and then how do you want to cut it? Like, I've heard there's so many good use cases of Astra helping with post-production for videos and proactively being able to do that. And so, I think actually I'd be very curious if you could have an app where it's just like the only thing you have to do is basically look over the questions, make sure you like them, and if you don't, provide some feedback, and it can do better. You show up, you actually do the interview, and then everything else is taken care of. How much work do you put in right now from the interview part to something actually being live on YouTube?

Wow. And if you could get back that time, right, so that kind of all of the mechanics are taken care of. So you can spend so much time really thinking about what the right interview is and all of the other things that go into this, or really thinking about if you could scale, you could do way more interviews. Like, yeah, what would you do with that additional time?

I think that there's something fundamental. So first of all, we see so many small businesses that are being started because people feel secure with the fact that they have ChatGPT, right? That there's so many pieces of expertise that if you want to get a business off the ground, it's hard, right? But you actually have a PhD-level intelligence, a world expert business consultant. You have all these things in your pocket now for free. It's like pretty remarkable, right? And if you're willing, if you're able to pay, you can get even so much more depth and so much more compute towards any problem you want. So small businesses easier to start than ever, and we're seeing it very concretely. And then people are able to, when you talk to many of these small business owners, that there's just so many tasks that they outsource to an AI that, you know, certainly there's the ones that they knew that they had to do, but there's so many tasks that they would just, no one would have done it before, and so little holes in their business strategy are thinking about how do you actually produce this document. The other thing too is small business owners who don't even realize what they could be doing. Like one of our employees was telling me that he was shopping for watches in this antique watch store and that he started talking to the owner about AI and that the owner was like, 'Oh, AI, I can't use that for anything. Like, you know, I'm a watch store.' And he was like, 'No, no, AI can help everyone. Let me show you.' And so he talked about some of the problems he has and he's like, 'Well, yeah, he doesn't really have a website.' And so you just... Exactly. Right. And just like ChatGPT voice being like, 'Build me a website. Build an awesome website.' And then the owner said, 'Hey, I also have each watch has its own story, right?' And so it's just like then becomes very easy like, 'Okay, talk to the AI about here's the story behind each watch.' And you end up with this beautiful visualization of everything. And you just realize that there's this way that technology becomes alive that normally it's almost inaccessible to so many people. And so I think that this really pushing on if you had like the world's best programmer on your payroll, what would you put them to work on? And that now you can do. I think you mentioned somewhere that it's actually ambition that small businesses have to start working on, right?

I agree, and I think it is really about we can all raise a ceiling of ambition, right? We can all accomplish more. People who really lean into that, I think we're already starting to see really remarkable things. I'll tell you another example, by the way, is that we have, there are these two brothers who are blind who use our technology and that they use it both in their daily life and for their work and even for tasks like being able to plug the cable into the right port on a computer, right? You can use ChatGPT to actually basically provide that information when normally they would have to ask someone for help. And so I think this kind of empowerment, you know, being able to help people be able to be more independent, be able to live their life the way that they want, all of that, it's happening. It's happening right now at massive scale.

There's definitely parts of what app building used to be that's becoming commoditized. It's becoming accessible to everyone. It's becoming massively democratized. And I think that's a really important thing, a beautiful thing, right? That there can just be more software. And so then the question of, yeah, what is differentiation becomes even more important. I think that there is going to be more room than ever for software that adds value in unique ways. And some of this is really about deeply understanding the problem. Some of this is deeply understanding your users, right? You think about something like if you want to build something for education, there's teachers, there's parents, there's students, right? That there's so many stakeholders that you have to really think about. There's administrators. How do you build a product that actually gives the right information, has the right guardrails, that is useful in the right ways, and who are you selling to? All these questions. So, I think that these like human factors of what is the core of the business? What is it that you have discovered? What is it that's your insight? What is your unique way of looking at the world? And I think that the mechanics of how you instantiate that, how does, you know, do you have to write in C++ or Swift or something like, who cares about that? Like that was never what the barrier should have been.