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

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

“Those common threads, they're just so wild, and also the love that people have for it, like the excitement with which you're sharing their product. I kind of feel like it's special that people are so excited about to share what they're doing with your product. And I don't take that for granted either.”
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, and of course, I'm actually really excited to take some of that into the product. I think we shouldn't rest on the fact that there's so much out of product discovery happening. I actually think for the average consumer it would be amazing if the product did a little bit more work on really exposing to you what is possible. I still feel like ChatGPT feels a little bit like MS-DOS. We haven't built Windows yet. And it will be obvious once we do, but there's something that feels a little bit like imagine MS DOS like gone viral and you were just trying to hack like little conversation starters onto it. That might have missed sort of the big picture in terms of how to really communicate affordances and value to people. And so I think there's actually a ton more product work to do in addition to just seeing use cases spread.”
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 the Kapiri Air Table, which they had to do templates, they had to do all these kind of things of taking the horizontal product and making it use case driven compared to the Instapot, which there's recipes being shared everywhere online. There's kind of this whole ecosystem around it. I think we were really lucky with ChatGPT that that happened where there's just users sharing use cases with other users everywhere. And therefore, I think we kind of got very lucky by jumping ahead on that journey.”
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 the reason why is because it just went live. Talk about another consequential decision, actually. We were debating waitlist, no waitlist because we really knew we couldn't scale the engineering systems. And the fact that there was no waitlist, which no OpenAI release had worked like that before, and had been consequential because you were able to watch what everyone else was doing live. So I think when you launch these things all at once for everyone, there really is a special moment where you can see what other people are doing and learn from that. And a lot of that is actually out of product. There's these crazy TikTok posts that go viral and they have like 2,000 use cases in the comments. And I go through those in detail because it's not like I knew about those use cases either. Like they're very, very emergent. And I just go through the comments and process because there's so much to learn. And for that reason, I think we get to escape the empty box problem a little bit because so much learning is happening out of problem.”
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
“Someone at OpenA who really respects sometimes is like we're kind of like Disney where Disney has this like one kind of creative IP, which is like their content and they have cruises and they have theme parks and they have comics and they have all these different things. I think we have amazing models, but there's all these different ways that you can productize them and we kind of just have to maximize the impact in all these different ways.”
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
“Because ChatGPT is a very general purpose product, we see when you look at end users, there's actually an immense amount of overlap in terms of what they want, like primitives like projects or history search or sharing and collaboration, like all those kind of things, they are actually very, very present whether or not you're talking to people at work or you're talking to people at home and school. There's slightly different mechanics sometimes, but they're largely similar investments that I think we can get a lot of mileage out of. And then there's enterprise specific work that we just have to do. Like you got to do HIPAA, you got to do Soc2, you got to do all those things. If you want to be a serious player and those are just non-negotiable. So it's complex as you correctly identified, but it's kind of the curse of working on a very open-ended and powerful technology. One analogy 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
“You kind of have to prioritize in two different ways when you're building on this AI stuff. One is sort of working backwards from the model capabilities, and that is much more than science, where I think you really need to look at what tech do we have available and what is like the most awesome way to productize it. And if you apply to some sort of PM framework to that, I think you would do something horribly wrong. Because if you have tech that's, for example, GPT-5 is really, really good at front-end coding now. I think that means you got to reprioritize and you got to like actually bring that capability to life.”
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 a good question. And first off, I don't run the developer stuff anymore. We found some of the way more competent. It would be to do that, and he's amazing. So I still look after the various forms of chat, but luckily you don't have to make that trade-off. OpenAI does. And I can get it to that too. But it keeps me a little bit more sane. I will say 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
“Did we were starting to get banned in companies because they all felt rightfully or wrongfully that the privacy and deployment story, et cetera, wasn't there? So I was just like, man, we have to do something. We're going to miss out on a generational opportunity to build a work product. And we've literally defined AGI as outperforming most humans at economically valuable work, or I'd probably put you at that, but I think that's the way we put it. So I feel like we had to be present there. And it was a fairly quick decision at the time, but it's grown into an immense business. We just hit 5 million business subscribers up from three, I think, a month or two ago. So it is kind of this spin-off that it's taking a life of its own that I'm really, really excited about for its reason.”
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
“Enterprise interesting one too because we've been seeing so much Incredible adoption in the enterprise. And it's sort of objectively crazy to try to take on building a developer business and a consumer business and an enterprise business and all at once. But the story there is in like month one or two, it was very clear that most of the usage was kind of worky usage, actually much more than today where you've got so many kind of consumers on the product and it's kind of sort of transcended into pop culture. But at the time it was like writing, coding, analysis, that kind of stuff. And we were pretty quickly in organically in like 98% of Fortune 500 companies in a way that I had seen maybe at Dropbox back when I was my two jobs ago where we had a similar story and since then there's been more PLG companies. But the real reason we did enterprise, remember we were debating should we do enterprise or should we launch an iOS app? Because that's also all the team was. The reason they did.”
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
“Purpose of the plus plan was to be able to ship first uptime and then be able to ship capabilities that we couldn't scale to everyone. And at some point, we got so many people in the plus tier that had just lost that property. So the main reason we came up with a $200 tier is just we had so much incredible research is actually really, really powerful. O3 Pro or tomorrow GPT-5 Pro. And just having a vehicle of shipping that to people who really, really care is exciting, even though it kind of violates the standard way a SaaS page should look. It's like a little jarring to see the 10x jump. Thank you for being a subscriber on that. And thank you everyone else who's watching. You subscribe to any tier. It's great.”
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, yeah. That's right. That's right. Definitely don't bring me on here as a pricing expert. I think you have got better people for 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
“It was the tough Google result. This was before ChatGPT had real time information, otherwise, it could have maybe priced itself. But it was Discord plus Google Forum plus a blog post on that methodology that got us there.”
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 next morning there was like a press article on, you won't believe the four genius questions the ChatGPT team asked to price their, it was like if only you knew. So there's like something about building in this extreme public where people interpret so much more intentionality into what you're doing than might have actually existed at the time. But we got with the 20. We were debating something slightly higher at the time. I often wonder what would have happened because so many other companies ended up copying the $20 price point. So I'm like, did we like erase a bunch of market cap by pricing it this way? But ultimately I don't care because the more accessible we can make this stuff, the better. And I think this is the price point that in Western countries has been reasonable to a lot of people in terms of the value that they get back. And more supportly, we were able to push things down to the free tier semi-regularly. And we always do that when we can, including with GP25.”
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
“Just doing that now. That one actually, I remember I had this kind of panic attack we really needed to launch subscriptions because at the time we were taking the product down every time. I don't know if you remember we had this like fail whale. There's like a little E3 generated poem on it. We had to get this out. And I remember calling up someone I greatly respect who's like, you know, incredible at pricing. And it was like, what should I do? And we talked a bunch. And I just ran out of time to incorporate most of that feedback. So what I did do is ship a Google form to Discord with like. I think the four questions you're supposed to ask on how to price something. Yeah, exactly. It literally had those four questions. And I remember distinctly, A, I got a price back. And that's kind of how we got to $20.”
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 consumer space and in the enterprise space, the birth of that was just to turn away demand originally. Shipping really kind of funky capabilities before they were polished is another thing where that feels like a tactical decision, but it became a playbook because we would learn so much. Like remember when we shipped code interpreter, we learned so much after we shipped it. Now it's known as, I think, data analysis and chat GPT or something like that. Just because we actually got real world use cases back that we could then optimize. So I think there's been a lot of decisions over time that proved pretty consequential, but we made them very, very quickly as we have to.”
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
“Going to be chat with GBT 3.5. We really didn't think it was going to be a successful product. We were trying to actually be as nerdy as we could about it because that's really what it was. It was like, you know, a research demo, not a product. So we didn't think that was bad. But I think that in the original release, making it free was a big deal. I don't think we appreciate that because the GPT 3.5 model was in our API for at least six months prior to that. I think anyone could have built something like this might not have been quite as good on the modeling side, but I think it would have taken off. So making it free and putting a nice UI on it, very consequential in the way that you take for granted now. And this is why I think that, A, distribution and B, you know, the interface are continuedly important even in 2025, the paid business, which now it's a giant business, both in”
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
“There's so many, and it's funny because you have no time to think about them, and then they end up being super consequential. The day was what? chat with GPT 3.5 to chat GPT the night before slightly better but still really bad”
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
“On how people interact with AI. There's so many possibilities and you just got to try stuff. That's why chat stuck is like, you know, we just did it and people liked it. So I'm hoping that we see over there and we'll try to do our part.”
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
“Is really limiting. And this is one of the reasons I don't love the super assistant analogy, even though we still always use it, is because if you think that way, then you kind of feel like you're talking to a person. But GPT-5 is amazing at making great front-end applications. So I don't see a reason why you wouldn't have AIs that can render their own UI in some way. And you obviously want to make that predictable and feel good, but it feels limiting to me to think of the end-all be-all interface as a chatbot. It actually kind of feels dystopian almost, where like, I don't want to use all my software through the proxy of some interface. Like, I love being in Figma. I love being in Google Docs. Those are all great products to me. And they're not chatbots. So, yes, on natural language, but no on chat is where I would describe my point of view. And I'm just hoping general that we see more sort of consumer innovation.”
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 should either drop the chat or drop the GPT at some point because it is a mouthful. We're stuck with the name. But no matter what we do with that, the product will evolve. I think that I agree that there's something profound about natural language. It just really is the most natural form of communicating to humans. And therefore, it feels important that you should be communicating with your software and natural language. I think that's different from chat, though. I think chat was the simplest way to put something, to ship at the time. I'm baffled by how much it took off as a concept. I'm even more baffled by how many people have copied the paradigm rather than trying out a different way of interacting with AI. I'm still hoping that will happen. So I think natural language is here to stay, but this idea that it has to be a turn by turn chat interaction, 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
“Because we would ship it more like hardware where there'd be a release like GPT-3, and then we would start working on GPT-4 and these weird giant big spend R&D projects that would take a really long time. And you kind of, the spec was whatever the spec was, and then you'd have to wait another year. And ChatGPT really broke that down because we were able to make iterative improvements to it just like software. And really, my dream is that it would be amazing if we could just ship daily or even hourly, like in software land because you could just fix stuff, et cetera. But there's of course all kinds of challenges in how you do that while keeping the personality intact while not regressing other capabilities. So it's an open field to get there.”
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 know, the hackathon happened much earlier, and we were prototyping for a long time, but at some point we basically ran out of patience on trying to build something more bespoke. And again, that was mostly because people always wanted to do all this other stuff whenever we tested it. So it was 10 days from when we decided we were going to ship to when we shipped. And the research we'd been testing for a long time, it was kind of an evolution of what we'd called instruction following, which was the idea that instead of just completing the sentence, these models could actually follow you instruction. So if you said summarize this, it would actually do so. The research had evolved from that into a chat format where we could do it multi-turn. So that research took way longer than 10 days and that kind of baking in the background. But the productization of this thing was very, very fast. And lots of things didn't make it in. Like I remember we didn't have history, which of course was like the first user feedback we got. The model had a bunch of shortcomings. And it was so cool to be able to iterate on the model. The thing I just talked about, like treating the model as a product was not a thing before ChatGPT.”
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
“Do more with the product. Personalization, like this idea of advanced memory, where things can really get to know you over time is another example of a capability like that. I think that's another good chunk. And then the third stuff is the stuff you would do in any product. And those things exist too. Not having to log in was a huge hit because it removed a ton of the friction. I think we have this intuition from the beginning, but we never got to it because we didn't have enough GPU or other constraint to really, really, really go do that. So, you know, there's kind of traditional product work too. So I often think about it sort of as roughly a third, a third, a third, but really, you know, we're still learning and we're planning to evolve the product a ton, which is why I'm sure there's going to be new levers.”
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
“Third of the retention improvements that we see are so just roughly. And then I think another third is what I would call sort of product research capabilities. They're research driven for sure. They have a research component, but they're really new product features or capabilities. And like search is one example of that where if you remember in the olden days aka like, you know, maybe 20 months ago or something, you would talk to ChatGPT and it'd be like, you know, as of my knowledge cut off, or I can't answer that because that happened recently or something like that. you know, that is the type of capability that has been incredibly retentive. And for good reason, it just allows you to.”
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
“Because I'm sure you know, and that's one of the things that I'm excited about in GPT 5 is the vibes are really good. So that too is, you know, we have a model behavior team and they really focus on what is the personality of this model and how does it speak and talk. So does that kind of work? I would say that's”
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
“One thing we've learned to answer that question in a minute, but the one thing we've learned with ChatGPT is that there really is no distinction between the model and the product. The model is the product. And therefore you need to iterate on it like a product. And by that I mean if there's obviously you typically start by shipping something very open-ended, at least if you're open AI, that's kind of a playbook. But then you really have to look at what are people trying to do. Okay, they're trying to write, they're trying to code, they're trying to get advice. They're trying to get recommendations. And you need to systematically improve on those use cases. And that is pretty similar to product development work. Obviously, the methodology is a bit different. But the discovery is the same. You've got to talk to people. You got to do data science and you got to try stuff and get feedback. So that's like one chunk of work that we've been very consciously doing is improving the model on the use cases people care about. And there's also such a thing as vibes as”
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, yeah. Some smiling going on just on the team. And I feel like I have to acknowledge that some of it is not the product. I think people are actually just getting used to this technology and like a really interesting way where I find, and this is why the product needs to evolve too, that this idea of delegating to an AI, it's not natural to most people. It's not like you're going through life and figuring out what can I delegate. Certain sphere of Silicon Valley does that, you know, because they're in like a self-optimization mode and they're trying to delegate everything they can. But I think for most people in the world, it's actually quite unnatural and you really have to learn, okay, what are my goals actually and what could another intelligence help me with? And I think that just takes time. And people do figure it out once they've had enough time with the product. But then, of course, there's been tons of things that we've done in the product too, whether or not it's making the core models better, whether or not it's new capabilities like search and personalization and all of that kind of stuff.”
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 fact, our incentive is just to solve your problem. And if you really like the product, you'll subscribe. But there's no incentive to keep you in the product for long. But we are obviously really, really happy if over the long run, a three-month period, et cetera, you're still using this thing. And for me, this was always the elephant in the room early on. It's like, hey, this may be really cool product, but is this really the type of thing that you come back to? And it's been incredible to not just see strong retention numbers, but to see, you know, improvement in retention over time, even as our cohorts become less of an early adopter and more the average person.”
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 obviously limited on what exactly I can share, but it is true that our retention numbers are really exciting. And that is actually the thing we look at. We don't care at all how much time you spend in the 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
“And then you put things out with confidence that it's gone through the right safeguards. So again, it's a nuanced concept, but I found it very, very useful when we needed. And for everything product development, you're a dead on arrival, so it's important to get stuff out.”
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, and you know, we use that sparingly, right? Because it has to needs to be appropriate to the context. There's some things where you don't want to accelerate as quickly as possible because you kind of want process. And we're very, very deliberate on that, where process is a tool. And one of the areas where we have an immense amount of process is safety. Because A, the stakes are already really high, especially with these models. GPT-5 pushes the frontier in so many different ways. But B, you kind of, if you believe in the exponential, which I do, and most people work on this stuff do, you have to play practice for a time where you really, really need the process for sure, for sure. And that's why I think it's been really important to separate out the product development velocity, which has to be super high from, okay, for things like frontier models, there actually needs to be a rigorous process where you red team, you work on the system card, you get external.”
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
“News on that. And I really think that execution is one of the most important things in the space. And this is a tool. So it's funny that that became a meme. It's like a little pink slack emoji that people just put on whatever they're trying to force the question.”
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
“That's funny. We have a slack emoji apparently for this day because I used to say that now I try to paraphrase. Sometimes I just really want to jump to the... To the punchline of like, okay, why can't we do this now, or why can't we do it tomorrow? And I think that it's a good way to cut through a huge number of blockers with the team. And just instill, especially if you come from a larger company, at some point we started hiring people from larger tech companies. I think they're used to let's check in on this in a week or let's circle back next quarter to see if we can go on the plan. kind of as a thought exercise always like people asking like okay if like this was the most important thing and you wanted to truly maximally accelerate it what would you do that doesn't mean that you go do that but it's really a good forcing function for understanding what's critical path versus what you know can happen later and i just always felt like you know execution is incredibly important like these ideas are they're everywhere everyone's talking about you know a personal ai you know you might”
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 actually learned that at Instacart when I shit up there because we were in the pandemic and it was kind of all hands on deck for a while there was this like I think it was a company-wide standup because we disbanded all teams we were just trying to keep the site. I had been used to kind of taking my sweet time and just thinking really hard about things, and that's important. But I really learned to hustle over there. And I think that's coming handy at OpenAM.”
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 pivot from yesterday, et cetera. Obviously, at some point, that doesn't scale, but I always felt like part of my role here obviously was to think about the direction of the product, but also to just set the pace and the resting heartbeat for our teams. And again, this is important anywhere, but it's especially important when the only way to find out what people like and what's valuable is to bring it into the external world. For that reason, I think it's become a superpower of OpenAI. And I'm glad that Joanne thinks I had some part in that, but it really has taken a village.”
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
“Well, they started to say that. I spent a lot of two things. With ChatGPT, when we decided to do it, we had been prototyping for so long and I was just in 10 days we're going to ship this thing. And we did. So that was maybe a moment in time thing where I just really wanted to make sure that we go learn something. But for, you know, ever since then, I spent so much time thinking about why ChatGPT became successful in the first place. And I think there was some element of just doing things where there was many other companies that had technology in the LM space that just never got shipped. And I just felt like, you know, of all the things we could optimize for, learning as fast as possible is incredibly important. So I just started rallying people around that. And that took different forms. Like for a while when we were of that size, I just ran this like, you know, daily release sync and I had everyone who was required to make a decision in it and we would just talk about what to 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
“Sprint marathon, that's right, or interval training or something. I don't know how to exactly describe the OpenAI launch cadence, but you got to set yourself up in a way that is sustainable. Even if this wasn't AI and it didn't have the interesting attributes that I just mentioned, I think you would need to do that. But especially with AI, it's important to go watch.”
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, yeah. And I need to hard unplug, you know, on a Saturday or something like that. Obviously. But it's just not possible otherwise. This has been a giant marathon for three years now.”
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
“Is so empirical in its nature, where if you don't stop and watch and listen to what people are doing, you're going to miss so much. Both on the utility and on the risks, actually, because normally, you know, by the time you ship a product, you know what it's going to do. You don't know if people are going to like it. That's always empirical. But you know what it can do. And with AI, because I think so much of it is emergent. You actually really need to stop and listen after you launch something and then iterate on the things people are trying to do and on the things that aren't quite working yet. So for that reason alone, I think it's very important to take a break and just watch what's going on.”
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 have to, it's quite humbling to get to run a product like that. And I have to binge myself very frequently. And I also have to sometimes sit back and just think, which is really hard when things are moving so quickly. I love setting a fast pace at the company, but in order to do that with confidence, I need at least one day every week that I'm entirely unplugged and I'm just thinking about what to do in process the week, et cetera. The other thing is, I've never ever worked on a product 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
“The tiers are largely still around some of the researchers working on GPT 5, actually. We're always part of the ChatGPT team. Engineers are still around, designers are still around. I'm still here, I guess. So you got the team still running things, but obviously we've grown up tremendously, and we've had to because with scale comes responsibility and we're going to hit a billion users soon. And you kind of have to begin acting in a way that is appropriate to that scale.”
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 like to tell his story when we talk about when we do our hackathons because I really do want people to feel like they can ship their idea and it's certainly been true in the past and we'll continue to make it true.”
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
“Broken, oh, wait, people are liking it. I'm sure it's just going viral and stuff is going to die down to like, oh wow, people are retaining, but I don't understand why. And then eventually we kind of like, you know, fell into product development mode, but it was a little bit by accident.”
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
“With consumers. So we were trying to figure out where to start in classic open AI fashion, especially back then. We put together a hackathon of enthusiasts of just hacking on GPT-4. So, after a couple of months of prototyping, we took that same kind of crew of volunteers and it was truly a volunteer group, right? We had like someone from the supercomputing team who would build an iOS app before. We had someone on the research team who had written some backend code in their life. They were all part of this initial ChatGPT team. And we decided to ship something open-ended because we just wanted a real use case distribution. And this is a pattern with AI, I think, where you really have to ship to understand what is even possible and what people want rather than being able to reason about that a priori. So ChatGPT came together at the end because we just wanted the learnings as soon as we could and we shipped it right before the holiday thinking we would sort of come back and get the data and then wind it down. And obviously that part turned out super differently because people really liked the product as is. So I remember sort of going through the motions of like, oh man, dashboards.”
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, so we had decided that we wanted to do something consumer facing, I think, right around the time that GPT-4 finished training. And it was actually mainly for a couple reasons. We already had a product out there, which is our developer product. That's actually what I came in to help with initially. And that has been amazing for the mission. In fact, it's growing up and now it's the open AI platform with, I don't know, 4 million developers, I think. But at the time, it was early stage. And we were running into some constraints with it because there was two problems. One, you couldn't iterate very quickly because every time you would change the model, you'd break everyone's app. So it was really hard to try things. And then the other thing was that it was really hard to learn because the feedback we would get was like the feedback from the end user to the developer, to us. So it was very disintermediated. And we were excited to make fast progress towards AGI. And I just felt like we needed a more direct relationship.”
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 same way that when you're in a Waymo, you get that screen for those of you who've tried Waymo. You can see the other cars. It's not like you're going to actually watch, but it gives you the sense that you know how this thing works and what's happening. Or we always check with you to confirm things. It's a little bit annoying, but it puts you in the driver's seat, which is important. And for that reason, we always view technology and the technology that we build as something that amplifies what you're capable of rather than replacing it. And that becomes important as the deck gets more powerful.”
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
“Is really scary to people, and I understand there's decades of movies on AI that have a certain mental model kind of baked in. And even if you just look at the technology today, once everyone, I think, has this moment where the AI does something that was really deeply personal to them and you're like kind of thought, hey, AI can never do that. For me, it was like weird music theory things where I was like, wow, this thing actually understands music better than I do. And that's something I'm passionate about. So it's naturally scary. And I think the thing that's been really important to us for a long time is to build something that feels like it's helpful to you, but you're in the driver's seat. And that's even more important as the stuff becomes agendic, right? Like the feeling of being in control. And that can be small things like, you know, we built this way of sort of watching what the AI is doing when it's an agent mode. It's not that you actually are going to watch it the whole time, but it gives you a mental model and makes you feel in control.”
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
“Technology is also incredibly important. So that's maybe the third piece that I'm excited about is building a product that can truly get to know you over time. And you saw us launch some of those things with improved memory earlier this year. And that's just the beginning of what we're hoping to do so that it really feels like your AI. I don't know if SuperSysn is still the right exact analogy, but I think people just think of it as their AI. And I think we can put one in everyone's pocket and help them solve real problems with or not. becoming healthy, whether or not that's starting a business, whether or not that's just having a second opinion on anything. There's so many different problems that you can help with people in their daily life. And that's what motivates me.”
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
“Don't have to describe your problem in minutes to detail because it already stands your overarching goals and it has context on your life, et cetera. So that's one thing that we're really excited about. The sort of inverse of giving it more inputs on your life is giving it more action space. So we're really excited to allow it to do over time what a smart, apathetic human with a computer could do for you. And I think the limit of the types of problems that you can solve for people once you give it access to tools like that is very, very different than what you might be able to do in a chatbot today. So that's more outputs. And I often think, okay, I'm a general intelligence. What happened if I became Lenny's intern or something? And I wouldn't be particularly effective despite having both of those attributes that I just mentioned. And it's because, you know, I think this idea of building a relationship 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