Decoder with Nilay Patel · 2025-08-14 · 51 min · 10,669 words

ChatGPT chief Nick Turley doesn't want you too attached to AI

Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio

Welcome to Decoder. I'm Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. Today I've got a very special guest, Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT at OpenAI. While Sam Altman is definitely the public face of the company, Nick has been leading ChatGPT's development since the very beginning. It's now the fastest growing software product of all time, reaching 700 million people each week.

Nick hasn't done a lot of interviews and I had a lot of ideas for where I wanted to take this conversation initially. But then something eye-opening happened after the launch of GPT-5 last week. People really missed talking to OpenAI's last model, 4.0. So much so that the company quickly brought it back. As you'll hear Nick say, he wasn't expecting this kind of backlash.

It's already changed how OpenAI plans to shut down models in the future, and to me, the whole episode says a lot about how attached people are becoming to ChatGPT. I press Nick a lot on this topic. We also talked a lot about the future of ChatGPT itself, including whether it will ever show ads, hallucinations, and why he thinks it eventually won't look like a chatbot at all. Okay, here's Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT at OpenAI. Nick, I really appreciate you doing this.

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