YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Embiricos

lines on the record: 67
first: 2026-02-21
most recent: 2026-02-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But at the end of the day, every tool, every feature, every workflow is for a human who is somewhere, an employee somewhere, and that employee is 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 OpenAI we're building a browser, Atlas, 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 safe, agentic browsing for enterprise that is a way to access things agentically that are otherwise not yet built out by FDEs.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaningful chunks of your work, but you've never heard of ChatGPT, nor 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 ChatGPT for work at the same time as like parts of your work are getting automated by an LLM, you have much more intuition.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're right if you're trying to go all the way from zero to one and you have this, and I say I don't mean grand negatively here, but if you have like a grand vision for some ultimate workflow automation system, then yeah, you're going to have to clear through all of these security hurdles, all these compliance hurdles that are really real, right, build connections to all these data systems and systems of record and action. Yeah, so you're going to need an FDD to do that. What I've seen is that when we do these things top down, we end up like massively under leveraging the potential of AI in 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 get a mental model for how AI can help and then they can start pulling AI into their workflows at the same time. Here'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.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 LLMs happen to be good at that. Next, let's realize that for an agent to be useful more generally, 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. 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 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 going to speedrun this entire one, two, three journey in the next months.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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-ended tool that someone can just use for any given task creatively.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so even though I am literally hiring FDs, and if you're an FD, 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 FDEs, as Fitzpatrick said on the podcast, like to automate workflows, right? But then you're limited by what you from your top-down perspective can do and what you from your FDE staffing can staff to be built, right? But for me, the most exciting future 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 when cloud code first shipped, 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.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. So I think that it is our job to make sure that we have the models with amazing capabilities and then eventually to get to a world where this is highly productized. And so you just have this magic text box or audio input or whatever, or you can just add AI to your group 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 specific market. And 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 FDEs.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm kind of proud of myself. I'm like, oh, cool. I managed to use AI in this new way. That's fine for people like you and me who are 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 put so much effort into how to use this tool. It should just be effortless for them. I think the world we want to 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.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And like I hear things now from engineers at OpenAI and also outside who are really telling me I constantly have codecs running. I never close my laptop. And if it's not running while I'm in a meeting, I'm wasting my time. I need to make sure codecs always has work for me that it's doing. And that's super cool and super exciting, but that's a lot of work, right? To 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 Codex users are using Codecs, it's like kind of this like tens of times kind of range. And I think AI should be helping us tens of thousands of times per day, you know, compute budget permitting and we'll get there over time. But the problem is, at least if I think of myself, like I work on this stuff, I know I should be using AI for everything, but I'm too lazy to type out that many prompts and I am too uncreative to figure out all the ways that AI 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 AI to do something cool like prep for this conversation with you.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, cool. How many times do you think, assuming it was like zero energy expenditure from you, how many times do you think AI could help you per day?”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure. Okay, that's a fun one. I think there are multiple bottlenecks, but that's maybe the most sort of clickbaity one. So if you don't mind, we'll do this slightly Socratically, like how many times would you say you use AI today?”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, it's my fun joke. I think 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 and 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 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 team's greatest cheerleader and quality raiser. But 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”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and sometimes we change what terms mean, right? 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 can have a 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 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 the back end engineer and the front end engineer. Whereas like now, at least if I think about the codex team, like that's much less the case and things are much more full stack.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 in demand for the output. And so you need many more people actually to do that kind of work, even if the specific task has changed.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure, I would agree that coding is one of the first domains where LLMs 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 changed happened and we moved to higher 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 is automated in the same way that like, do you know the origin of the word computer?”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alex, I'm so excited for this, dude. I told you, I've been at a P conference, and all I could think was, thank God I've got Alex next 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 a weird first start, but roll with it. You'll understand my British intricacies. I'm fascinated by people's motivations. Aren't you motivated more by the fear of losing or like 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. When 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 past 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 this startup isn't going well. Basically, every now and then I have to cash myself and like flip back into this idea of winning. But really what motivates me even more than that is I think I just love building.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source