YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Turley

lines on the record: 112
first: 2025-08-09
most recent: 2025-08-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Just use the product. You don't even have to pay. Should be your default model starting tomorrow and just use it. And don't think about models anymore unless you want to in your pro user, in which case you get all the old models. So rest assured. And useful. Honestly, I learned so much from people at large and ChatGPT users, et cetera. So just keep doing your thing. watching and learning and I appreciate all the feedback. So I'm sure after we fix the model chooser, you guys will rust me for something else. And I'll take it. So keep it coming.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, actually, I feel like you could think of software development as like, you know, or being a product person as you could be a conductor of an orchestra or you could be in a jazz band. And I think of it as a jazz band where I don't believe in the idea of everyone having this set part that they have to play in me kind of, you know. Telling people when to play. I love how in jazz or other forms of it provides music, you're kind of riffing off of each other and you listen to what one person played and then you play something back. And I think that great product development is like that in the sense that ideas could come from anywhere. It shouldn't be a scripted process. You should be like trying stuff out, having fun, having play in what you do. So I use that analogy a lot for those who like music. It tends to resonate.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love Might still happen. Now I'm like, I'm in some for fun bands, and we will kick from time to time. It's like the one thing I can do when I'm otherwise super tired and can't think anymore because it balances me out in good ways. But yeah, hopefully I'll get to do more of it in the future.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I chickened out that at the very last minute, but I was going to go to school for music, and that's still my hopefully chapter two. Wow.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The average of the five people you spend the most time with is a thing that really internalizes. And both of my personal life where there's people who give me energy and who lift me up and make me a better person, my fiance is one of those people, but there's many people in my life. But then there's also just like, you know, at work, there's the equivalent. And again, that's how I've made all the career decisions. It's like, you know, who do I want to learn from? So I apply that principle constantly.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I am like at extreme capacity. It's kind of interesting. Sometimes API developers ask me, it's like, hey, are you like, you know, going to copy all of our products? I actually just do not have time to follow up what's going on outside of OpenAI because the pace here is so, so intense. Don't have good recs for you, I'm afraid.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got to do a little bit of sci-fi to be in this space. You shouldn't copy any of it, but I think you learn from it. So regularly rewatch her and Restworld, Severance was great. I think that's the stuff that when I have time, I'll meddle with.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like anything by Rawls and Nozick, like I like the political stuff. I think it's really fun. That is the type of thing I recommend. I don't think there's a practical reason to read that stuff, but I will nerd out about it with you. So at your own peril.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the product space, probably things like high output management or the design of everyday things, or those kind of classic type things, because I think they're extremely applicable in AI.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's quite interesting to see that stuff play out because I think all these people entered school for genuine reasons. They were excited about the space. They were researching it. They were pursuing knowledge. And I'm happy that that's being rewarded. And I don't know what the rewards will look like in the future, especially in a post-AGI world, but I just have a feeling that if you follow that advice, you'll end up okay.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tried to share a little bit about how I made decisions because I hope to, yeah, I'm not that far out of school. I relate a lot to people who are coming on the job market who are trying to figure out what to do with their life right now. And I feel very confident that if you surround yourself with people that give you energy and if you follow the things you're actually curious about, that you're going to be successful in this era. So parting advice to folks really is put yourself around good people and do the things you're actually passionate about because in a world where this thing can answer any question, asking the right question is very, very important. And the only way to get learn how to do that is to nurture your own curiosity. So it worked for me and it's the one repeatable thing that I can share everything else's luck.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And actually, that's something we still test for curiosity, is like a good attribute that we think matters so much more than your ML knowledge. I'm not making a comment on research hiring. I think you do need some ML knowledge, I'm afraid. But for product and engineering and design people and those kinds of functions, I actually think that if you are just curious about the stuff works, it doesn't matter at all if you've never done it before. In fact, if you were to filter for people who've done it before, you would have a very narrow filter of very lucky people rather than necessarily the best people you can get. So I think we've scaled that. Certainly what got me here, but I think it's actually just generically been a good predictor of success open.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't know it was a rocket ship. I just thought it was. I kind of got nerd sniped, is what I would describe it as. As I prepared for the conversation to get off the Dolly waitlist, really, I just started reading about the space and that, you know, the like philosophy brain and then also actually the computer science brain. I was like, wait, this is cool. And I started reading all the academic papers. Of that era. And so I just, it was intellectual itch and the people. But then I stayed for the product opportunity, obviously. I post ChatGBT when that took off realized that we'd built a rocket ship or we'd launched it while building it. Maybe this is analogy. But I can't say that it felt like a hyped job or anything like that when I applied.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here because it was a research lab, and I was a product person. And they said, Oh, you know, don't worry, we'll figure it out. And they were sort of being cagy. And I thought they were being cagey because it's Open AI and they can't share anything. But they were being cagey because we actually just didn't know yet. At the time, so I showed up and I kind of did everything under the sun. And it definitely wasn't product. You know, it was like, you know, I think my first task was fixed the blinds or something like that. And then, you know, I started sending out NDAs for people because they were needed some operational help. And then, you know, I started asking, why am I sending out NDA? So it's, oh, so we could talk to users. And I was like, talking to users, that sounds like the thing I know how to do. And I quickly stumbled into doing product work. And then eventually, you know, leading a bunch of product work, but it was organic by just, you know, showing up and doing what had to be done because, again, the company I joined was not a product company by any means.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Single career decisions ever made, including my first one out of college, was just figuring out who are the smartest people I know that I want to hang out with and learn from and can I work with them. And I don't know how to vet companies. I don't know how to really logically think through what space is going to take off or something like that. But I just do feel like I have a sense on people. for Dropbox, followed like they had teaching assistant for a class that I was TA and followed some of the smartest product people I knew and for open AI the person who I recruited who recruited me Joanne I had messaged her about getting off the Dolly waitlist and she said only if you interview here so she like kind of turned it into like a reverse recruiting thing and you know initially honestly I didn't know what I would do”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, there's so many. I wrote my senior thesis on whether and why rational people can disagree, which also comes in handy when a lot of people with very different values have opinions on your model behavior or on how things should work. So I really like 20th century analytical philosophers. It's kind of nerdy stuff. I don't know if I have a favorite. It's too many to count. But that's the kind of stuff I like. And some of it ends up being quite analytical. Like you have like let P be this theory of love and let Q be this other theory of love and then you do some sort of symbolic manipulation. So it is just as much a like sort of brain thought exercise as it is or it is much more that than practical, but it taught me how to think in a way that continues to be pretty valuable.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's true. It is really coming in full circle in a way that I couldn't have predicted. Like the amount of questions you have to grapple with are truly super interesting. And philosophy, it's not a traditionally practical skill, but it does really teach you to think things through from scratch and to articulate a point of view. And I think that has come in handy numerous times.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I started as a philosophy major and took one coding class because I really liked logic and programming was most similar to that. And then I fell in love with coding and then eventually computer science and I just kept doing more and more of it. But until then, I'd never really thought of myself as a technical person. So it was kind of a late discovery in my life that I'm very grateful for.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Packed into AI, it feels really powerful to allow people to package that up in ways that have a clear affordance, a clear use case, and are differentiated from each other. I also would love it if you could start a business on ChatGPT. Like, I think there really is a world where as this thing hits, billions of scale, it can get your distribution, it can get you started on making something in the same way that people built on the internet. And there was entirely new businesses to be built. I think we'll have more to share there in the future. GBTs was an early stab, and I'm just excited to evolve the thinking there as the models get good and our reach increases as well.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“GPTs are cool. They're kind of ahead of their time in the sense that we built that kind of concept before you could really build very differentiated things, at least in the consumer space. You're learning GPT is going to be pretty similar to what the model could already do out of the box. So it's mainly like a way of articulating a use case to people. But it doesn't have enough tools yet to make something that feels like an app, so to speak. Different in the enterprise, by the way, we're seeing a ton of adoption of GPTs there because just every single company has very bespoke business processes and problems, et cetera. And it's a really, really useful tool there. They also have unique data that they can hook up to these things that it can retrieve over. So we've seen a lot of success there. I think the idea is the right one. And I think we're going to figure out a good mechanism for it because when you have so much capability,”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Optimization No, no. I tried to shy away from these terms unless they become inevitable. I am not entirely sure if that should be a concept or not. Again, I think Ideally, ChatGPT understands your goals and therefore understands what content would be interesting to you. And the content creator's job is to share enough information and metadata about that content such that the AM model can make a user-aligned decision. And therefore, I'm not sure if giving this thing a name and making a thing is what we should be doing or not. I'm very eager to learn from folks making content about what this could look like because, again, we're still working through.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work to do because maybe there's a better mechanism or protocol that we could come up with. But I'm excited. This is driving meaningful traffic for you. And I hope that other people making great content start to feel this way. Because, again, it's a very nice scenario.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quality content like this podcast to people who want to see it. And of course, there's so many interesting questions about, well, in the sort of Google era, there was the search engine optimization and there was a clearly understood mechanisms of how to show up and get more traffic. So I get a lot of questions from people like, what is the equivalent of that? The IRA, if I'm Lenny and I want to like 10x the traffic to my podcast, what do I actually need to do? The truth is we don't have amazing answers there simply because the way to appeal to an AI model ideally is the same way that you would appeal to a real user because the model is supposed to proxy the interests of the user and nothing else. At least that's how I want our product to work. And for that reason, my advice is super late, which is like make really high quality content, which is not as actionable as I think people making content would ideally like. And I think this is why we have.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm really excited about it because in the same way that I find it dystopian to talk to everything through a chatbot, I also find it dystopian to not have amazing new high quality content out there. And for that reason, I talked a little bit earlier about search and how that solved like a really important user problem early on because you had this like knowledge cutoff thing and you suddenly could talk about anything very obvious in retrospect. It wasn't just a user problem, right? It's an ecosystem problem where like the original chat GPT, it didn't have outlinks. It would just answer your question and it would keep you in the product. And even if you wanted to keep reading or go deeper, there was no way for us to drive traffic back to the content ecosystem. And I've been really excited about what we've been doing in search, not just because it gives people more accurate answers, because it allows us to surface really high.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can do it in a spreadsheet. You do it anywhere, and I really want to demystify it for people who heal that term. It's not some technical magic that you have to understand. It's really just about articulating success in a way that is maximally useful for training”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Entire open ed journey has been this journey of rediscovering eternal product wisdom and principles in like slightly new contexts. So I started writing emails before I knew what an eval was because like I was just outlining sort of very clearly specified ideal behavior for various use cases until someone told me, hey, you should make an eval. And I realized there was this entire world of research evaluation benchmarks that had nothing to do with the product that I was trying to make. And I was like, wow, this might be the lingua franca of how to communicate what the product should be doing to people who do AI research. And that really clicked for me. And at the end of the day, it's not that different from the wisdom of you ought to articulate success before you do anything else.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. The models are changing. The best way to improve them, whether or not you're a lab or actually just someone who's doing context engineering or fine-tuning a model maybe, you need failure cases, real failure cases to make these things better. Benchmarks are increasingly saturated, so really, you need real world scenarios where your product or model is not actually doing the thing it was supposed to do. And the only way you get that is by shipping because you get back to sort of use case distribution and you can make those things good. And therefore, it's actually the best way to then go articulate to your team, especially your MEL teams, what to hill climb on. It's like, oh, people are trying to do X and the model's failing in ways Y. Now let's make those things really good.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use what I just said as an excuse not to eventually build a great product. So I often tell my teams that shipping is just kind of one point on the journey towards awesomeness. And you should pick that point intentionally, where it doesn't have to be the end of your iteration at all. It can be the beginning, but you better follow through. So we've been doing a bunch of work, especially over the last quarter of really cleaning up the UI of ChatGPT. I'm really excited to do the same for the sort of the response layouts and formats next, simply because once you know what people are doing, there's no excuse to not polish your product. It's just really in a world where you don't know yet, you might get very distracted. So it's situational. Again, you kind of have to be first principles about it, but I do think using velocity, especially early on as a tool. Actually, this has been said about consumer social, for example. It's not the first space where people have said, hey, you just got to try 10 things because you're probably going to be wrong.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the boring answer would be it's competitive and everyone's an AI, and they're trying to compete each other. I think that's maybe true, but that's not the reason that I believe this. The reason really is that you're going to be polishing the wrong things in the space. You absolutely should polish things like the model output, et cetera, but you won't know what to polish until after you ship. And I think that is uniquely true in an environment where the properties of your product are emergent. and not knowable in advance. And I think many people get that wrong because the best prod, people tend to be craftspeople. And they have a traditional definition of craft. I also think it would be easy to, you know.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or to ship out something raw, even if it makes less sense and start learning and getting it into people's hands, I think a company with a lot of process or a lot of just learned behaviors will make one call, which is we have like a quality environment when we ship and that's what we do if your first principle is about it, I think you're like, you know what? We should ship. It's embarrassing, but that's strictly less bad than not getting the feedback you wanted. So I think just approaching each scenario from scratch is so important in this space because there is no analogy for what we're building. Like there's just, you can't copy an existing thing. There is no, you know, are we like an Instagram or are we like, you know, Google or like a, you know, productivity tool or something like that? I don't know, but you can learn from everywhere, but you have to do it from scratch. And I think that's why that trait tends to make.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is not something I'd ever say about myself. It's nice that someone else would say it, but it's a mysterious thing. I think you just really got to. To ground truth on You're really trying to solve, like, for example, as I mentioned with the recruiting thing. I'm not dogmatic that you have to have product manager and an engineering manager and a designer or whatever. We're just trying to make an awesome team that can ship. So in that case, first principles means just really understanding what we actually need and what we're missing rather than applying a previously learned process or behavior. I think that's a good example. Another good example of, I think being first principles in this environment is, you know, does this feature need to be polished? We get a lot of crap for the model chooser and I own it. I've tried to say that to everyone who will listen. For those who don't know Model Chooser is this like giant dropdown in the product that is like literally the anti-pattern of any good product traditionally. But if you are actually the reason from scratch, is it better to wait until you got a product product?”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just love whiteboarding with teams. I just love getting into a generative mindset. It breaks down everything So that's the thing that I try. It's not particularly creative, but I find it to be a universal tool where the minute you can get people to stop thinking about what's my job versus other person's job and more like, you know, we're all in a room trying to crack something together. That is incredible.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think to make that go super well, you need to spend time team building and making sure that people have a huge amount of trust for each other's skill sets, feel like they can think across their boundaries. I really believe that product is everyone's job, for example. And for that reason, the recruiting sort of doesn't stop when the people are on the door. It actually starts because you have to start making the teams awesome.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where he thinks, I think this comes from him. But the idea being that sort of the throughput of your org depends on how many barrels you have, which is like people who can make stuff happen. And I think you can hire, and then you can add ammunition around them, which is people helping those people. And I think that's been really true for our recruiting too, where we try to maximize sort of the number of empowered people who can ship, because that's how you have a small team and still get a ton done. So, those are a couple of things. And I spent a lot of time on vibes too with each team because I think one of the things that is challenging when you try to do research and product together is that the cultures are different. People have different backgrounds.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A product person at heart, but sometimes a team doesn't need a product person because there's already someone doing that role in many cases we have a really talented engineering leader who has amazing product sense or we have a researcher who has product ideas and then in my mind they can play that role and maybe we have something else missing instead like maybe we need like a little bit more front end or something like that in other cases maybe what you're missing is incredible data scientists so i really like to go through every single team and figure out what is the skill sets that that team needs and how do you put it together from principles rather than just assuming hey we're going to do like you know a bunch of pipeline recruiting for all these different roles and then you know people will find a team later so i think that's always felt really important to me um it's the way that you keep your team really small get super high throughput also allows you to hire people who i think keith rabois causes like like like like like like barrels i think um barrels in image”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the other inherences of being in a research lab is that you take recruiting really seriously. That's something that AI labs know every person matters. But many tech companies, they go through hypergrowth and they kind of lose. Their identity, their talent bars, they just kind of have chaos. So we've always had this tendency to run relatively lean. So it is a small team that is running ChatGPT. I take inspiration from WhatsApp, where it was a very small team running a very global scope product. And more importantly, you have to treat hiring a little bit more like executive recruiting and less like just pure pipelined recruiting where you really need to understand what is the gap you're trying to fill on each team, what is the specific skill set and how do you fill it. To give you an example, you know.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made Open AI successful and makes successful the interdisciplinariness of really making sure that you put research and engineering and design and product together rather than treating them as silos. I think that's the thing that has made us successful in that you see come through in every product we ship. Like if for shipping a feature and it doesn't get 2x better as the model gets to X smider, it's probably not a feature we should be shipping. Not always true, Stock 2 doesn't get better with Spider models. But I think for many of the core capabilities, that's a good litmus test. So I've always found you really have to lean into why is this place successful and then maximally accelerate that, so to speak, because it's what allows you to turn something that feels like an accident into something that is a repeatable.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's a few things that come to mind that have driven many decisions. One is the empiricism. We talked about that a bit, the fact that you can only find out by shipping, which is why I'm maximally leaned to that. And that's a huge part of why we ship so much. One of them is that amazing ideas come from anywhere. The thing about running a research lab is you really don't tell people what to research. That's not what you do. And we inherited that culture even as we become a research ant product company. So just letting people do things who have amazing ideas rather than sort of being the gatekeeper or prioritizer of everything or something like that has been proven immensely valuable to us. And that's where much of the innovation comes from is empowered smart people on any function, really. So that was a good inheritance from what I think.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each time I always tried to pick the most different, maximally different job whenever I made a job change. So after Dropbox, I was craving a real world product because it was just so different than working on SaaS, et cetera. And after Instacart, I was craving on working on something that intellectually was interesting and had this kind of sort of invoked the nerd in me. So I've always looked for things that are really different. And then once I showed up at these places, I tried to understand what makes that place successful like what is truly the thing that they cracked and how we can lean in that into that even more. And I think I spent a lot of time thinking about this with OpenAI, especially after ChatGPT. Before that, it was kind of a moot point because we didn't really have much revenue or products or anything that, you know, like that.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're just at the beginning of watching how this stuff can transform people. It's incredibly democratizing. If you compare, you know, you roll out of this with the rollout of the personal computer, computers were so scarce when they first came out. And this stuff is ubiquitous in a way where you have access to a second opinion on medical stuff. You have access to a relationship buddy. You have access to a personal tutor on literally any topic that makes you curious. It's really, really special that we get to do that. So unique point in history.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like we would have immense regret if you had a model that was state of the art on health bench, which is GPT-5 is state of the art on a bunch of these medical benchmarks, right? And you didn't use that to help people. If you just disable that use case because you wanted to avoid all possible downside. I think the duty is to make it awesome and to do the work, talk to experts, figure out how good it really is, where it breaks down, communicate that. I think this technology is too important and has too much potential positive impact on people to run away from these high stakes use cases.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scenarios you get right. And you could easily run away from these use cases. You and your wife going to this thing for input on a relationship question or a dispute could very easily run away if you were totally risk avoidant and say, sorry, I can't help you with that. I think that's what most tech companies do when they hit a certain scale. They run away from these use cases. And I think it's a lost opportunity to help people. We want to run towards these use cases by making the model behavior really, really great that can mean connecting you with external resources when you're struggling. That can mean not directly answering your question, but instead of giving you a helpful framework, you know, in the case of like, should I break up with my boyfriend? ChatGPT should probably not answer that question for you, but it should help you think through that question in the way that a thought”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's where it came from, right? And I think that's very, very important. So I would take a good look at our mission, our business model, the type of product we're trying to build. And, you know, I really think that ChatGPT is a very special product because I think in the vast majority of cases it makes you leave it feeling better, not worse. Feeling like you're achieving something you're trying to do. And so I think that those incentives really matter because it helps you reason about, okay, when there isn't behavior in the wild, that's not good. Was that a bug or was that by design? And was sick of it, see, I can very much say that to us that's a bug. And then on the forward-looking work, there's so many kind of challenging”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spend a bunch of time on a blog post that we just published on Monday what we're optimizing ChatGPT for. And it really is for your, you know, to help you thrive and achieve your goals, not to keep you in the product. And so there was a bunch of good outcomes from that incident. It's a good example of how contact for reality is not just important for the use cases, but also for learning what to avoid because you would have never discovered this issue purely in a lab unless you actually heard it from the service.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To have a mission that affords us to really help people, a business model that does not incentivize maximizing engagement or time spent in the product. So it's really important to us that you feel like this product is helping you with your goals, whether or not that's your current goals or even your long-term goals. And oftentimes being extremely complementary with the user isn't actually in service of that. We instilled new measurement techniques. Like, you know, whenever we put these models in contact with reality and we learn about a problem, we actually go back and make sure we have good metrics for this stuff. So we measure sick of fitzing now with every release to make sure we don't regress and can actually improve on that metric. GPT-5 is an improvement, which is really exciting for me, but we have more work from there. And more broadly, it causes us to articulate our point of view, actually.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we have all kinds of collateral online because we really felt like we should overcommunicate on how we discovered it, what we did about it, et cetera. So I encourage people to check that out. We have a whole retro on that model release. But basically what happened is that we pushed out an update that made the model more likely to tell you things that sound good in the moment. You're totally right. should break up with your boyfriend or something like that and that's just really dangerous and it's in we took it more seriously than you even might expect because again at current technology levels you can kind of laugh about it maybe is like ah this thing's always complimenting me i thought it was just me i saw those comments online but you know it actually is is really important to make sure that um these models are optimized for the right things and we have an immense i think lecture”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, totally. A lot of those micro interactions talk about interesting product work. Those are micro interactions that are important. Did it definitively weigh in or did it help you guys think through that disagreement and solve it on your own? I think those details actually matter a lot. And it's where we're spending a bunch of time.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And work that we have to do to make those things like life advice great, but it also is really, really important to me because you can't run away from those use cases. You have to run towards them and make them awesome. And that's part of what we're trying to do. So that immersion behavior is really, really cool. And more broadly, I am so excited about education. I'm so excited about health. I think it would really be a waste if we didn't take the opportunity of using ChatGPT to really, really help people. And I think we've just begun to scratch the surface on that. So there's many aspirational use cases that I want to make happen.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mentioned this earlier, but I had always conceptualized ChatGPT as a worky product, whether or not you're at home or you or work. I feel like helping getting help with your taxes is very similar to the types of things you do at work or planning a trip is actually very similar to planning an event for work. So I always felt like, okay, this thing is going to kind of be your productivity tool. And I think something has happened over the last few months where that has begun to change. And I really do think The fact that you have consumers turning to this thing for day-to-day advice helping them like have better relationships. Like seeing, like, you know, people talk about how this thing saved their marriage is really exciting to me because they, you know, use it to process their own emotions, get feedback on their communication style. They just have a buddy to talk to about like really difficult things. And that comes with a ton of response.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before I built the product team, I actually built the data science team because I was getting frustrated. I was talking to as many users as I could in my calendar, the weeks after ChatGPT was just 15 minute user review the whole week through. And it was usually I stopped doing interviews when I can predict what the next person is going to say. That's how I know I've touched enough users. But it just wasn't happening. I just kept getting new stuff. Data is one way out where I think you have conversation classifiers that without us having to look at the conversations allow us to kind of figure out what are people talking about, what use cases are taking off, et cetera. And I think that's very, very helpful. The qualitative stuff is important for empathy, even though you're never going to get a wrap on all the use cases people have. I still spend a huge amount of my time doing that. And then, yeah, things like those TikToks, collections of threads. I think they're really, really useful.”
2025-08-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source