Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI)

You were a product leader at Dropbox, then Instacart, now you're the PM of the most consequential product in history. I didn't know what I would do here because it was a research lab. The first task was like fix the blinds or something like that. When someone offers you a rocket ship, don't ask which seat. We set out to build a super assistant. It was supposed to be a hackathon code base. What was it called before? It was gonna be chat with GBT three point five. Because I really didn't think it was gonna be. And then Sam Alman's just like hey let me tweet about it. This is a pattern with a you won't know what to polish until after you ship. My dream is that we ship daily. By the time people hear this, they're gonna have their hands on GPT five. About 10% of the world population uses it every week. With scale comes responsibility, it just feels a little bit more alive, a bit more human. This model has taste. Kevin We all, your CPO, said to ask you about this principle of is it maximally accelerated? I just really want to jump to the punchline. Why can't we do this now? I always felt like part of my role here is just set the pace and the resting heartbeat. Everyone's always wondering is chat the future of all of the stuff? Chat was the simplest way to ship at the time. I'm baffled by how much it took off. I'm even more baffled by how many people have copied. Chat GPT is now driving more traffic to my newsletter than Twitter. That is a type of capability that has been incredibly retention. I've been really excited about what we've been doing in search. Can you give us a peek into where this goes long term? ChatGPT feels a little bit like MS DOS. We haven't built windows yet, and it will be obvious once we do. Today my guest is Nick Turley.

Nick is head of Chat GPT at OpenAI. He joined the company three years ago when it was still primarily a research lab. He helped come up with the idea of ChatGPT and took it from zero to over 700 million weekly active users, billions in revenue. And arguably the most successful and impactful consumer software product in human history. Nick is incredible.

He's been very much under the radar. This is the first major podcast interview that he has ever done, and you are in for a treat. We talk about all the things, including the just launched GPT five. A huge thank you to Kevin We, Claire Vogue, George O'Brien, Joanne Jing, and Peter Ding for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products. Including Lovable, Replic, Bold, N8N, Linear Superhuman, D Script, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chapier, D and Mobbin. Check it out at Lenny's Newsletter.com and click bundle.

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