YouSaid · the spoken record

Kevin Weil

lines on the record: 102
first: 2025-04-10
most recent: 2025-04-10
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

“I am at Kevin Wheel, K-E-V-I-N-W-E-I-L, on pretty much every platform. Guess an XDAU, LinkedIn, wherever. I think the thing I would love from people, give me feedback. People are using ChatGPT. Tell me where it's working really well for you and where you want us to double down. Tell me where it's failing. I'm very active and engaged on Twitter. I love hearing from people what's working and what's not. So don't be shy.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you so much for having me. I feel really, I get to work with the world's best team and all credit to them, but really appreciate you having me on. It's been super fun”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, by the way, back to our other point that we made a few times you do do that sometimes with people, right? You sort of put them, you frame things, you get them into a certain mindset, and the answer. Different. So I think there are like human analogs of this one more time.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really weird. There's probably a good explanation for this, but you can also say things. So yes, I think there is some validity to that. You can also say things like I want you to be Einstein. Now answer this physics problem for me or you are the world's greatest marketer, the world's greatest brand marketer. Now here's a naming question. And there is something where it sort of shifts the model into a certain mindset that can actually be really positive.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can do effectively poor man's fine tuning by including examples in your prompt of the kinds of things that you might want and a good answer. So like here's an example and here's a good answer. Here's an example, here's a good answer. Now go solve this problem for me. And the model really will listen and learn from that. Not as well as if you do a full fine tune, but much more than if you don't provide any examples. And I think people don't do that often enough.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'll say first of all, I want to kill the idea that you have to be a good prompt engineer. I think if we do our jobs, that stops being true. It's just one of those sharp edges of models that experts can learn, but then you just over time, you shouldn't need to know all that the same way you used to have to get deep into like, you know, what's your storage engine and MySQL? Are you using Inodb 4.1? And there's still use cases for that if you're at the sort of deep edge of MySQL performance, but most people don't need to care. And you shouldn't need to care about minute details of prompting if AI is really going to become broadly adopted. But today, we're not totally there. I think, by the way, we are making progress there. I think there is less prompt engineering than there had to be before. But in line with some of the fine-tuning stuff I was talking about and the importance of giving examples,”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Silver bullet when a lot of life is and a lot of like excellence is actually showing up day in and day out, doing good work, getting a little bit better every single day. And you may not notice it over a week or even a month. And a lot of people then, you know, kind of get dismayed and stop. But actually, you keep doing it. The gains keep compounding. And over the course of a year, two years, five years, it adds up like crazy. So good work consistently over a long period of time.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so actually this is, interestingly enough, it's more of a philosophy, but then I thought Zuck encapsulated it one time on a Facebook earnings call. So I actually had this made into a poster. It sits in my room. But somebody was asking Mark, this is literally on an earnings call. So it's like an analyst on an earnings call asking him, you know, it was some quarter where Facebook had grown a lot. This was back in the 20 teens sometime, I think. But it's like, you know, so what did you do? What was it that you launched? What was the one thing that drove all this growth for you? And he said something to the effect of sometimes it's not any one thing. It's just good work consistently over a long period of time. And that's always stuck with me. And I think it is, I mean, I run ultra marathons. It's like it's just about grinding. I think people too often look for like the”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Internally, if you are. Well, I think like vibe coding with products like Windsurf is just super fun. I'm having a great time doing that. I still just love that our chief people officer vibe some tools. Maybe the other one is Waymo. Every chance I get, I'll take a Waymo. It's just a better way of riding and it still feels like the future. So they've done an amazing job.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The movie was, but I like the idea, I want more Americana. I want more being proud of being strong. And I thought Top Gun 2 did a really good job of that. Pride and patriotism. I think the US could use more of that.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right. I don't know. I read when I was a kid, I read The Wheel of Time series. And now Amazon has it as they're in like the third season of it. So I want to watch that. I haven't yet. Top Gun 2 was an awesome movie. I think that's no longer new.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Co intelligence by Ethan Mullock, a really good book about AI and how to use it in your daily life as a student, as a teacher. He's super thoughtful. Also, by the way, a very good follow on Twitter. The accidental superpower by Peter Zion, very good if you're interested in geopolitics and the forces that sort of shape the dynamics happening. And then I really enjoyed Cable Cowboy. I don't know who the author is, but the biography of John Malone just fascinating if you like business, especially if you want to get into like, I mean, the man was an incredible dealmaker and shaped a lot of the modern cable industry. So that was a good biography.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a couple of current blockchains that are built on the tech because the tech was open sourced in the beginning. Aptos and Mistin are two companies that are built off of this tech. So at least all of the work that we did did not die and lives on in these two companies and they're both doing really well. But still, we should be able to send each other money in WhatsApp, and we can't today.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know to be honest, the current administration is super friendly to crypto. Facebook's reputation, Meadow's reputation is in a very different place. Maybe they should go build it now.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We knew all that going in, but we went for it. I think if we're a bunch of ways that we could do that that would have introduced the change a little bit more gently, you know, maybe still gotten to that same outcome, but fewer new things at once and introduced the new things one at a time. Who knows? Those were decisions we made together. So we all own them. Certainly I own them. But it just fundamentally disappoints me that this doesn't exist in the world today because the world would be a better place if we'd been able to ship that product. I would be able to send you 50 cents in WhatsApp for free. It would settle instantly. Everybody would have a balance in their WhatsApp account. I mean, it was just. It should exist”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who'd send money to each other? Why can't you send money as immediately, as cheaply, as simply as you send a text message? It's one of those things when you sit back and think about it, that should just exist. And that was what we set out to try and do. Now, I don't think we played all of our cards perfectly. If I could go back and do things. There are a bunch of things I would do differently. We tried to kind of get it all at once. We tried to launch a new blockchain. It was a basket of currencies originally. It was integration into WhatsApp and Messenger. And I think the whole world kind of went like, oh my God, that's a lot of change at once. And it happened also to be at the time that Facebook was at the absolute like nature of its reputation. And so that didn't help, right? It was also not the messenger that people wanted for this kind of change.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, David Marcus led it, and I happily work for him and with him. I think he's a visionary and also a mentor and a friend. Honestly, Libra is probably the biggest disappointment of my career. When I think about the problems we were solving, which are very real problems, if you look at, for example, the remittance space, people sending money to family members in other countries, it is maybe, I mean, it's incredibly regressive, right? People that don't have the money to spend are having to pay 20% to send money home to their family. So outrageous fees. It takes multiple days. You have to go then pick up cash from, it's just, it's all bad. And here we are with like 3 billion people using WhatsApp all over the world talking to each other every day, especially friends and family, exactly the kind of people.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, model maximalism. Building for the capabilities that are almost there, and the model is going to catch up and be amazing.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much more intelligence. And so I don't know where there's another series of trends like that in the world. Models are getting smarter. They're getting faster. They're getting cheaper. And they're getting safer too. They hallucinate less every iteration. And so there's just the Moore's Law and transistors becoming ubiquitous. That was a law around doubling the number of transistors on a chip every 18 months. If you're talking about something where you're getting 10x every year, that's a massively steeper exponential. And it just, you know. It tells us that the future is going to be very different than today. The worst AI model you will ever use for the rest of your life. And when you actually get that in your head, it's kind of wild.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are increasing at a massive pace. They're also getting cheaper as they scale. You look at where we were even a couple years ago. The original, I think the original, I don't know, what was it, GBT 3.5 or something was like 100x the cost of GPT 40 mini today in the API. So a couple years, you've gone down two orders of magnitude in cost.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't piss people off. The amazing thing to me is we were talking earlier about how far models have come in just a couple years. If you went back to GPT-3, you'd be like disgusted by how bad it was, even though Lenny of two years ago was mind-blown by how good these were. For a long time, we were iterating every six to nine months on a new GPT model. It was like GPT-3, GPT 3.5. And now with this O series of reasoning models, we're moving even faster, where like every roughly three months, maybe four months, there's a new O series model. And each of them is a step up in capability. And so the capabilities of these models.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's some exciting stuff happening internally with some new research techniques. So we'll have more to say about that at some point. But yeah, Sam, sometimes likes to show off some of the stuff that's coming. By the way, it's very sort of indicative of this iterative deployment philosophy. We don't have some breakthrough and keep it to ourselves forever and then bestow it upon the world someday. We kind of just talk about the things we're working on and share when we can and launch early and often and then iterate in public. And I really like that philosophy.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now look at what you can do with Sora, and his point was now I can use Sora, our video model, and I can get 50 different variations of this cutscene, just, you know, me brainstorming into a prompt and the model brainstorming a little bit with me. I've got 50 different versions. And then, of course, I can iterate off of those and refine them and take different ideas. And now I'm still going to go to that 3D effect studio to produce the final one, but I'm going to go having brainstormed and like had this at a much more creative approach with an outcome that's much better. And like I did that assisted by AI. So my personal view on creativity in general is that no one's going to, you don't type into Sora like make me a great movie. It requires creativity and ingenuity and all these things, but it can help you explore more. It can help you get to a better final result.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are we going to manage that cutscene and that transition? And he was saying in the world of two years ago, I would have paid a 3D effects company 100 grand and they would have taken a month and they would have produced two versions of this cutscene for me. And I would have evaluated them. We would have chosen one because what are you going to do? Like pay another 50 grand and wait another month. And we would have just gone with it. And it would be fine. Like, movies are great. I love them. And there have been obviously we can do great things with the technology that we've had.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We would all know, and he was saying for a film that he's doing, like say, take the example of some sort of sci-fi-ish, you know, think of like Star Wars, and you've got some scene where there's a plane zooming into some Death Star-like thing. And so you've got the plane looking at the whole planet, and then you want to cut to a scene where the plane's like, you know, kind of at the ground level. All of a sudden you see the city and everything else, right?”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is also an area where I'm a big optimist if you look at Sora, for example. We talked about ImageGen earlier and the absolute fount of creativity that people are putting across Twitter and Instagram and other places. I am the world's worst artist, like the worst. Maybe the only thing I'm worse at than art is singing. Give me a pencil and a pad of paper and I can't draw better than our eight-year-old. You know, it's just like it's, but give me Image Gen. And, you know, I can think some creative thoughts and put something into the model. And suddenly have output that I couldn't have possibly done myself. That's pretty cool. Even you look at folks that are really talented. I was talking to a director recently about Sora, someone who's directed films that”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's something that we think a lot about and as we work with the administration, as we work with policy, we try and help wherever we can. We do a lot with education. One of the benefits here is that ChatGPT is also perhaps the best reskilling app you could possibly want. It knows a lot of things. It can teach you a lot of things. If you're interested in learning new things. But these are very real issues. I'm super optimistic about the long run and we're going to need to do everything we can as a society to ensure that we like make this transition as graceful and as well supported as we can.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm a big technology optimist. I think if you look over the last 200 years, maybe more, technology has driven a lot of the advancements that have made us the world and the society that we are today. It drives economic advancements. It drives geopolitical advancements, quality of life, longevity advancement. I mean, technology is at the root of just about everything. I think there are very few examples where this is anything but a great thing over the longer term. That doesn't mean that there aren't temporary dislocations or where there aren't individuals that are impacted. And that's that matters too. So it can't just be that the average is good. You've got to also think about how you take care of each individual person as best you can.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have Android devices everywhere, like this could. I really just think this could change the world, and I'm surprised it doesn't exist and I want it to exist.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI personalized tutoring thing because the models are good enough to do it now. And every study out there that's ever been done seems to show that when you have classrooms like education is still important, but when you combine that with personalized tutoring, you get like multiple standard deviation improvements in learning speed. So it's just uncontroversial. It's good for kids. It's free. ChatGPT is free. You don't need to pay for it. And the models are good enough. It still just kind of blows my mind that there isn't something amazing out there that, you know, our kids are using and your future kids are using and like people in all sorts of places around the world that aren't as lucky as our kids to be able to like have this sort of built-in solid education. Again, ChatGPT is free.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is something that Maybe the most important thing that AI could do, maybe that's a grand statement. There are lots of important things that AI can do, including speeding up the pace of fundamental science research and discovery, which maybe is actually the most important thing AI can do. But one of the most important things would be personalized tutoring. And it kind of blows my mind that there is still, I know there are a bunch of good products out there. Khan Academy does great things. They're a wonderful partner of ours. Vinod Kosla has a nonprofit that has, that's doing some really interesting stuff in this space and is making an impact. But I'm kind of surprised that there isn't a 2 billion kid.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think, who knows what the future holds, I think, things like coding skills are going to be relevant for a long time. Who knows? But I think if you teach your kids to be curious, to be independent, to be self-confident, you teach them how to think. I don't know what the future holds, but I think that those are going to be skills that are going to be important in any configuration of the future. And so it's not like we have all the answers, but that's how Elizabeth and I think about our kids.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's funny. So our kids are, we have a 10 year old and eight year old twins. So they're still pretty young. They're kind of, I mean, it's amazing how AI native they are. It's completely normal to them that there are self-driving cars, that they can talk to AI all day long. They have full conversations with ChatGPT and Alexa and everything else”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because so much of this really is talking to a model. There's a lot of prior art because we talk to other humans all the time and encounter them in all sorts of different situations. And so there's a lot to learn from that.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's maybe not always the answer to think about how a person would do it, but sometimes to gain intuition for how you might solve a problem, you think about what an equivalent human would do in those situations and use that to at least gain a different perspective on the problem.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're using it various places. Some of these places you want a little bit more reasoning is not super latency sensitive. So you want a little more reasoning and we'll use one of our O-Series models. In other places, you want a quick check on something. And so you're fine to use like 40 mini, which is super fast and super cheap. And in general, it's like specific models for specific purposes. And then you ensemble them together to solve problems. By the way, again, not unlike how we as humans solve problems. A company is arguably an ensemble of models that have all been fine-tuned based on what we studied in college and what we have learned over the course of our careers. We've all been fine-tuned to have different sets of skills. And you like group them together in different configurations and the output of the ensemble is much better than the output of any one individual.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's earlier because it's cheaper. There'll be parts of our internal stack. So we do, if you give you an example, customer support. With 400 plus weekly active users, we get a lot of inbound tickets. I don't know how many customer support folks we have, but it's not very many. 30, 40, I'm not sure, way smaller than you would have at any comparable company. And it's because we've automated a lot of our flows. We've got most questions using our internal resources, knowledge base. guidelines for how we answer questions, what kind of personality, et cetera. You can teach the model those things and then have it do a lot of its answers automatically or where it doesn't have the full confidence to answer a particular question, it can still suggest an answer, request a human to look at it, and then that human's answer actually is its own sort of fine-tuning data for the model. You're telling it the right answer in a particular case.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fine tuned models. They're using models of different sizes because maybe you have different latency requirements or cost requirements. They are probably using custom prompts for each one. Basically, you want to teach the model to be really good at, you want to break the problem down into more specific tasks versus some broader set of high-level tasks. And then you can use models very specifically to get very good at each individual thing. And then you have an ensemble that sort of tackles the whole thing. I think a lot of good companies are doing that today. I still see a lot of companies kind of giving the model single generic broad problems versus breaking the problem down. And I think there will be more breaking the problem down using specific models for specific things, including fine-tuning.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so when you're fine tuning a model, you're basically giving the model a bunch of examples of the kinds of things you want it to be better at. So here's the problem, here's a good answer, here's a problem, here's a good answer, or here's a question, here's a good answer, times 1,000 or 10,000. And suddenly you're teaching the model to be much better than it was out of the gate at that particular thing. We use it everywhere internally. We also use ensembles of models much more internally than people might think. So it's not, here is, I have 10 different problems. I'll just ask, you know, baseline GPT-40 about a bunch of these things. If we have 10 different problems, we might solve them using 20 different model calls, some of which are using specialized.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to more specifically customize a model against a particular use case. And so I think you're going to want sort of quasi-researcher machine learning engineer types as part of pretty much every team, because fine-tuning a model is just going to be part of the core workflow for building most products. So that's one change that maybe you're starting to see at foundation model companies that will propagate out to more teams over time.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you're definitely going to live in a world where you have more researchers built into every product team. And I don't even mean just at foundation model companies because I think the future, actually frankly, one thing that I'm sort of surprised about our industry in general is that there's not a greater use of fine-tuned models. Like a lot of people, you know, these models are very good. So our API does a lot of things really well. But when you have particular use cases, you can always make the model perform better on a particular use case by fine-tuning it. It's probably just a matter of time. Folks aren't quite comfortable yet with doing that in every case. But to me, there's no question that that's the future. Every models are going to be everywhere, just like transistors are everywhere. AI is going to be just a part of the fabric of everything we do. But I think there are going to be a lot of fine-tuned models because why would you not?”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the models are getting better, and as people are getting more used to it, you can kind of just let go of the wheel a little bit. And when the model's suggesting stuff, it's just tap, tap, tap, tap, tab. Like, keep going, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And of course, the model makes mistakes or it does something that doesn't compile. But when it doesn't compile, you paste the error in and you say, go, go, go, go, go, go. And then you test it out. And does one thing that you don't want it to do? So you enter in an instruction and say, go, go, go, go, go. And you just kind of like let the model do its thing. And it's not that you would do that for production code that needed to be super tight today yet. But for so many things, you're trying to get to a proof of concept. You're getting to a demo. And you can really take your hands off the wheel and the model will do an amazing job. And that's vibe coding.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Andre Carpathy, yeah. Where it's just so you have these tools like Cursor and Windsurf and GitHub Copilot that are very good at suggesting what code you might want to write so you can give them a prompt and it will write code and then as you go to edit it's suggesting what you might want to do and the way that that everyone started using that stuff was give it a prompt, have it do stuff, you go edit it, give it a prompt, you know, and you're kind of like really going back and forth with the model the whole time.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why shouldn't we be like vibe coding demos right, left, and center? Like instead of showing stuff in Figma, we should be showing prototypes that people are vibe coding over the course of 30 minutes to illustrate proofs of concept and to explore ideas. That's totally possible today, and we're not doing it enough. Actually, our chief people officer, Julia, was telling me the other day, she vibe-coded an internal tool that she had at a previous job that she really wanted to have here at OpenAI. And she opened, I don't know, Windsurf or something and vibe coded it. Like, how cool is that? And if our chief people officer is doing it, we have no excuse to not be doing it more.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That all said, I still don't. I'm still sort of disappointed by us and despite, I really mean me. If I were to just teleport my five-year-old self leading product at some other company into my day job, I would recognize it still. And I think we should be in a world certainly a year from now, probably even more now, that where I almost wouldn't recognize it because the workflows are so different and I'm using AI so heavily. And I'd still recognize it today. So I think in some sense I'm not doing a good enough job of that. You know, just to give an example like.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We use it a lot. I mean, every one of us is in ChatGPT all the time, summarizing docs using it to help write docs with GPTs that write product specs and things like that. All the stuff that you would imagine, I mean, talk about writing evals, like you can actually use models to help you write evals and they're pretty good at it.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But just like Sam in his role would be making mistakes if he made every single decision and every meeting that he was in. And he would also be making mistakes if he made no decisions in any meetings that he was in, right? It's understanding when to defer to your team and to let people innovate. And when there is a decision to be made that people either don't feel comfortable with or don't feel empowered to make or a decision that has too many different disparate pros and cons that are spread out across a big group and someone needs to be decisive and make a call, it's a really important trait of a CEO. It's something Sam does well. And it's also a really important trait of a PM kind of at a more microscopic level. And so because there's so much ambiguity, it's not obvious what the answer is in a lot of cases. And so having a PM, they can come in and like, and by the way, this doesn't need to be a PM. I'm perfectly happy if it's anybody else. But I kind of looked at the PM to say like, if there's ambiguity and no one's making a call, you better make sure that we get a call made and we move.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's kind of our recipe. And I think also happy leading through influence because, I mean, as usual as a PM, people don't report to you. Your team doesn't report to you, et cetera. But you also have the complexity of a research function, which is even more sort of self-directed. And it's really important to build a good rapport with the research team. And so I think the EQ side of things is also super important for us. Yeah, I think people appreciate it done right, but you bring people along. I think one of the most important things that PM can do well is be decisive. There's a real fine line. You don't want to be making it. I mean, it's kind of like I don't love the PM as the CEO of the product illusion all the time.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think people that are happy with ambiguity because there is a massive amount of ambiguity here is not the kind of place. And we have trouble sometimes with more junior PMs because of this because it's just not the place where someone is going to come in and say, okay, here's the landscape. Here is your area. I want you to go do this thing. And that's what you want as an early career PM. Just, I mean, no one here has time, and nobody, the problems are too ill formed, and we're figuring them all out as we go. And so high agency, very comfortable with ambiguity Ready to come in and help execute and move really quickly.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A PM that's trying to really understand the problems and kind of gently guide the team a little bit, but has too much going on to get too far into the details. And you end up being able to move really fast. So that's kind of the philosophy we take. We want product ENG leads and product E engineers all the way through. We want not too many PMs, but really awesome high quality ones. And so far that seems to be working pretty well. Think I've said this a few times, but like high agency is something that we really look for. People that are not going to come in and kind of wait for everyone else to allow them to do something, they're just going to see a problem and go do it. It's just a core part of how we work.”
2025-04-10 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source