Hello and welcome to the global dialogue. I'm Shireen Bhan. 2024 was a breakout year for OpenAI's ChatGPT and 2025 promises to be equally exciting. Joining us now to talk about the innovation pipeline, what we can expect as far as the AI war and the AI race is concerned is Kevin Weil, the chief product officer at OpenAI. Kevin, many thanks for joining us. I know it's late in the evening for you and it's been a busy week, an exciting week with lots of launches lined up including tonight where you had the o3 and the o4 mini. So let me start by asking you Kevin to give us a snapshot in very simple language, what does ChatGPT 4.1 mean for OpenAI and for consumers and how do o3 and o4 mini change the game?
Yeah, well first of all thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Excited to be here with you. India is an incredibly important market for OpenAI and ChatGPT. It's our second largest market. It's our fastest growing market and it's also the market where we saw our image generation just take off. But we had some great launches this week. You mentioned GPT-4.1 which was a model for developers that is fantastic at coding and complex instruction following. And so, you know, for that that was a model that we released focused on developers. And we're seeing them, you know, we have over three million developers on the OpenAI platform and they're doing amazing things. That is one of our fastest growing models by usage ever. And then just this morning in the US, we launched o3 and o4 mini, which are our frontier reasoning models. They are the smartest, fastest, safest models that we have ever launched. They're incredible at things like computer programming. So if you look at measures like on competitive coding benchmarks, these models would be better at competitive coding than all but about 200 people in the world. And they can answer hard PhD level science questions better than 80% of PhDs in their field across all fields simultaneously. So they're really very intelligent models. But you can also use them for, you know, more mundane tasks, understanding medical jargon or looking at what's happening in the world, creating images, helping you with writing, translating languages. You know, these models are so dynamic and we're super excited to see what people can do with them.
Well, thanks very much for giving us that update. But, you know, I want to link this back to comments that you've made previously, including a tweet that I saw from you about 10 hours ago where you talk about the fact that these are the worst AI models that you'll ever use for the rest of your life as the chief product officer at OpenAI with things changing so quickly. And you, you know, in your words, you believe that these are the smartest models to date. How does that get you to kind of constantly reinvent yourself, constantly disrupt yourself? I mean, how concerned are you not just about competition, but about creating modes that continue to give you the advantage that you enjoy today?
Yeah, it's one of the most exciting things about this industry. These are simultaneously the most intelligent models in the world, the best that we've ever created. We believe the best in the world, and they're the worst that we will ever use because the models are progressing and getting more intelligent, getting safer, getting smarter. Every few months there's a new breakthrough and all of a sudden computers can do something that computers have never been able to do before. You know, if you go back two years or so to when ChatGPT launched, if I asked you to use those models at the time, they were amazing. They were mind-blowing. If I asked you to use those models now, you would be disappointed. And that's just because of the pace that everything is getting better. We've kind of whooshed past the Turing test which used to be the high watermark for, you know, is AI here and now that's in the distant past. Every AI model is passing the Turing test so it's an exciting time and the fact that ChatGPT has gone from zero users a couple years ago to over 500 million active users today just shows how valuable these things are in people's lives.
I want to double down on this Kevin because you know you've also said that models are getting smarter, faster, cheaper, safer, more personalized and more helpful. The future is bright. You know that's a lot to pack in. If I were to ask you what you prioritize today when you look at how you develop and build the next line of products, are you going to be prioritizing making this much more accessible i.e. cheaper. Given the kind of breakthroughs that we've just seen with DeepSeek, what do you prioritize in the attributes that you've outlined that models will need to focus on?
I think first and foremost, I care about making these models more broadly accessible and more useful to people. And that entails making them smarter and safer and things like that. But first and foremost, I want ChatGPT to help people live better lives, to help them accomplish their goals more quickly, to help them learn new languages, to help them learn new skills, to help them do the kinds of things they need to do for their family or their job faster so that they can spend more time on the stuff that they really care about. These models are, you know, and ChatGPT helps me do this every day as we think about building models for developers, for programmers, for entrepreneurs who are running startups or working at companies. One of the things that we care a lot about is reducing the cost of our models even as they get smarter. If you compare today to two years ago again when we launched, you know, GPT-3, GPT-3 was more than 100x more expensive than some of our models today and our models today are smarter and faster. And so, you know, I talked before about how rapidly this industry is progressing. You can do so much more today with an AI model than you could two years ago. And it's cheaper and it's faster and it's safer. And so that just affords an incredible set of opportunities for people, for businesses, for developers all over the world. And we're very, you know, proud and humbled to be able to help provide that.
But Kevin, how much cheaper can we expect things to get? In the near term, what are we talking about?
