I've been doing this sentiment survey of the tech workforce. Surprisingly, designers are just the most unhappy on every dimension. We're unclear right now what is expected of a designer. Someone who might be classically trained in a certain way of working, now feeling like, oh my gosh, I need to really change everything. You believe this is the best time in history to be a designer. We're all extremely early in this process. There's just a huge opportunity for designers. Nobody should feel behind right now. I think that if you literally started today, you're going to have a leg up on pretty much most people.
There's just so much opportunity to change the way we work, to make great things. If you look at engineering, it's just a completely new job versus a few years ago. I'm curious how that translates to product design. Engineers have 10 or sometimes 100x their productivity, but our design team hasn't because the design process still takes time. It's still sometimes you have to try a bunch of things and throw them out. Still very messy and fluid. We had a podcast with the head of Design Cloud Code, Jenny Wen. She talked about there's been this traditional design process: prototype, mock, test, user research, iterate, and now there's just no time for that.
There are certain features for ChatGPT where we really obsess and we really spend a lot of time. We try a hundred things and we throw out 99, and we finally ship one. And other things, we really embrace building in public. We take big swings and then we learn quickly. Do you think AI will ever be an extremely good product designer? I think it already is an incredible product designer. Today, my guest is Ian Silber, head of product design at OpenAI. Ian's been in this role for three years now, which is a lifetime in AI time. Prior to OpenAI, he was at Artifact, the news app from the founders of Instagram that I absolutely loved.
Before that, he spent eight years at Instagram. The role of design is in such an interesting place right now. And Ian has such a unique and insightful and fascinating take on the future of product design. And what the AI tools that we use every day will look like in the future. A huge thank you to Saleo and Joel Lowenstein for suggesting topics for this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny's product pass.com for a year free of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Ian Silber.
Ian, thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm even more excited. Something that I'm very excited to get your take on. I don't know if you've watched me doing this, but I've been doing this sentiment survey of the tech workforce over the past couple of years. I think it's the biggest survey of its kind, where survey people in tech about how they're feeling about their careers, their work, their roles, especially with the rise of AI this last year. And surprisingly, designers and user researchers are just the most unhappy on every dimension, every actual
dimension. They're the most overwhelmed, the most anxious, the least optimistic, the most worried, the most tired, also the least likely to recommend their role to people entering the workforce. I'm curious if you're seeing this yourself in the design community. And if you are, what do you think is going on? Ian Silberman: First of all, it's an incredible survey, and it's such great, I think, information to have as an industry. And I think it's something we need to unpack. I see a mix, for sure. I think I can speak most to design. And I talk to a lot of designers that are very optimistic and very excited. In my world, luckily, I see a lot of that,
but I can totally understand why people might be feeling very uncertain, right? Because there's so much discussion about, well, is the role changing? Should my expectations be different? And, well, do I need to do X, Y, and Z? Do I need to be shipping code every day? And someone who might be classically trained in a certain way of working now feeling like, oh my gosh, I need to really change everything. And to me right now, it feels like the uncertainty of that, I can totally understand, right? Because as an engineer, I think people have already gone
through that shift. We see that engineers are working totally differently. And one thing I do hear, and this came up a lot in my own team, when we did, we do similar surveys internally. One of the big things that came up was, we see that engineers have 10 or sometimes 100x their productivity. But our design team hasn't, right? Because the design process still takes time. It's still sometimes you have to try a bunch of things and throw them out, right? Versus maybe working with a coding agent, you ask it to do something that's pretty binary. Now, at this point, it usually gets it pretty well. But the design process is really still very
messy and fluid. And you think you have a great idea, and you try it, and it sucks. And then you try it again, and it sucks. And you give it to users or you get internal feedback, and it's wrong. And you start to go through that arduous and messy, but really fun process. And that hasn't really come. It's compressed in that you can get many more ideas out fast, but you still need that whole feedback loop. There's the alignment of getting many people, especially in a bigger company. That still has a lot of overhead. So the point is that I think we're unclear right now what is expected of a designer, and that lack of clarity,
I can totally see leading to some fears, or some unease, I guess. But on the other hand, I've seen that, our designers, what's great, I think, about OpenAI is we're such an experimental company. We are driven by research, and we treat our company as a research lab, and we totally embrace that. And that's a new thing that I really learned and really came to love about OpenAI, is that it started as a research lab. That DNA is deeply embedded in everything we do. And as designers, I think that when you come here, we look for people that don't have a background in AI, but are really curious about the tools and how it can work. And we found
that just by supporting that excitement to explore, people feel less pressure. It's not like you need to change the way you work, but it's more about encouraging exploration. And when we've done that, when I go and talk to both very senior designers and early career designers at our company, they're so excited, because they, I literally was just asking some people before this, because I wanted to get some different takes. And I think the feeling is that they have so much more ability to be creative, to express themselves, to try bad ideas and throw them out. You can just really move through lots of different ideas, and it becomes this incredible
way to create. And the things that I'm seeing for my team, the bar is raising. I think the thinking is getting stronger the more that they're using these tools. So I think for the people that are starting to embrace this, they're starting to feel really excited and realizing that they have just so much agency as designers, and so much more ability to have really high impact as a designer. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise,
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large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed-stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer, or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise-ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit WorkOS.com to get started, or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to WorkOS.com to make your app enterprise-ready today.
What I'd love to do in this conversation is help folks that are in that bucket of, look, this sucks and things aren't going well. Because, as you said, and this is exactly what we found in that survey, about half of people are having the best time of their career, having the most fun, the most optimistic about where things are going, and then the half are not, having a really hard time. And exactly what you said, the people that are having a great time report the strongest correlation is they feel amplified by AI. It's actually making them better. And that's the way you described engineers. They're seeing that now. They're like, holy shit, I can do so much more. And so, just to reinforce the points you're making, the attributes of people that are doing well feel amplified, very curious, have time to explore, feel like they can be more creative. Is there anything more along those lines, patterns of people that are doing really well and having a great time, that might be helpful for people to hear that are not having a good time?
What I see in the folks that I think are really embracing this, they are using it every step of the process to help them. And I think it helps. We have a community, of course, of designers that are all trying this together. So if there's any way to find that, that's something that we should think about more as a broader community, how we help each other. But I think that learning different ways of working, it might be, okay, I have this idea. Let me actually start by trying, what if I just threw this right into Codex or Claude or whatever tool you use? Throw it into an agent to help you think about it, to help you prototype it. Just try a different way of working. It doesn't necessarily mean that that has to be the exact right way, but I don't know. I think we found that people that are embracing this, that are adaptable, I think adaptability is another term that I think we all hear a lot now, but it's so true. It's knowing that this stuff changes very quickly. What didn't work yesterday might work today. Literally within six months, this entire industry has shifted.
I remember I was actually out on paternity leave towards the end of last year, and I was working on some side projects, and I was trying some coding agents, and it worked, but it just kept running into these hiccups. And then a month later, Codex drops and I try it again, and it's like, oh my gosh, it just works. That, I think, changes a lot of the design process because now, all of a sudden, if you do have an idea, you can plop it in there and just try it. And so, anyway, I think it's just really about not being scared.
I think another thing to think about is that we're so early. We're so in the early innings of this entire evolution. It feels like things have changed a lot, and it feels like maybe we're pretty far into this shift, but the good news for anybody who is trying to design or get into design, whether, again, you're early career or late career, or you've never even actually designed anything but you've been thinking about it, is we're all figuring this out as we go. Nobody has some perfect answer about how the design process should work. And whatever you think is working today will probably change again. So I think what's encouraging about this is that nobody should feel behind right now. I think that if you literally started today, you're going to have a leg up on pretty much most people. Just really thinking about how you can make great stuff. There's just so much opportunity to change the way we work or just to make great things. And what we think is really cutting edge today will look so archaic in a year, let alone a month.
That's something I've learned. I've been at OpenAI for three years, and I think about the stuff that we were working on when I first joined. I remember getting a demo of our early voice mode that we hadn't shipped, or computer use that barely worked. And now it literally has become part of the process of how we design. We use both of those tools to build software. So anyway, the point is it's changing very quickly. We're all extremely early in this process, and nobody really has that figured out. I love that. You've also, when we were chatting ahead of this, you actually told me you believe this is the best time in history to be a designer.
Yeah. I truly believe this. I can't even imagine. When I was getting into design, okay, history lesson, I was in my teenage years, right? To learn things, I was learning to design and code, and you could view source on an HTML webpage and kind of see how things were built. And that was kind of how you had to learn. You had Dreamweaver, and there were these tools that actually were really cool. But to compare those to today, if I were just getting into design, the fact that you can learn so quickly, you can have an idea to a working version of it in a matter of minutes, it's just, you can be so expressive. I think anybody can be a designer.
And I think that as more and more software is made, more and more products are made, the human element of design is going to start to become more and more important. It's always been the case that companies with great design can, of course, stand out. So I think that's going to be more and more important. I think that products that fully understand their users and that make something delightful, when anybody can make anything, that's going to become one of the most important dimensions of a product, and that's how people are going to evaluate it. And so I think designers stand, that is our core job.
And then on top of that, I think that designers are just much more empowered. I was talking to some friends that are thinking about starting a company and talking about the ratio of design to engineer and how at a startup maybe that's totally different. It may have been like you're going to have one designer and 15 engineers or something like that. I've seen that sort of ratio. But they were talking about, well, maybe we'll have two designers and one engineer, one really good engineer who can make sure that we're really building something that's rock solid from an engineering standpoint. But then we want two really creative people that are going to be thinking about how we build this product. And so, thinking about that, I think that there's just a huge opportunity for designers. I think that internally we see that more and more. We're like, designers, we are totally, completely empowered to take an idea, to take an early research concept and try to figure out how
to engineer and how at a startup, maybe that's totally different. It might, may have been, you're going to have one designer and, I don't know, 15 engineers or something like that, that maybe a startup, I've seen that ratio. But there were talking about, well, maybe we'll have two designers and one engineer, one really good engineer who can make sure that we're really building something that's rock solid from an engineering standpoint, but then we want two really creative people that are going to be thinking about how we build this product. And so thinking about that, I think that there's just a huge opportunity for
designers. I think that internally we see that more and more. We're designers. We are totally, completely empowered to take an idea, to take an early research concept, and try to figure out how we can actually package that up into something that people want to use or that solves some unmet need for our customers. And that is a designer's job. And so I think that maybe more and more people start to think of themselves as designers. But either way, I think it's the best. I really do think it's the best time to be a designer. So along those lines, when Mark Andreessen was on the podcast, he had this hilarious way of
describing the state of the product org right now. He's like, basically there's this three-way standoff: PMs, engineers, designers. They all think the other roles are going to go away and they're the ones that are going to win in the end. And so there's this Spiderman meme where they're all pointing at each other. And I'm curious, because I can see a case for each role becoming the dominant role. And I completely agree with you that with all of the tools being shipped, there's a thousand X explosion in products being shipped. There's just endless streams of things to pay attention to. You'd think design would be such an opportunity to
differentiate and stand out. I haven't seen that yet in an acceleration of design hires, an explosion, as you said, like two designers to an engineer. Do you think that's coming? Why do you think that hasn't happened yet? Do you think it's, as you said, just early and people will realize, oh wow, we need a lot more designers? What do you think is going on? We might start to see that happen more. Or, if anything, what we might start to see is engineers wanting to become a little bit more design-focused. I also think that designers are getting more productive. It's not necessarily the same direct output of engineers 10 X-ing, but we are
seeing that designers are able to do a lot more. But no, I think that is something we're always thinking about and evolving. The other thing I wanted to talk about too is the difference between PM and design and are they all blurring together? And my point of view is that they definitely are. And there's always been overlap, as far as I've seen it. I've seen designers that are really good product manager-type, archetype, but can design. And I've seen designers that are really good polish engineer-type. So I think I've always found that these single-siloed role definitions don't really make sense. It's just that at big companies, you have to have a ladder to
put people on so you can generally organize. But in reality, when you look at a team, you see that there are people that have various strengths and people that play different roles. And so I've always seen that. I think those lines have always been blurry, but they're becoming blurrier for sure. But the other thing is I do still think that, and maybe this is thinking about it from a slightly larger company perspective, but I think you do still need people that have certain responsibilities, because if you have one person that's expected to design, to rally a team around something, to align a whole company,
to do all the work that a PM does, for example, and also be designing it and also be engineering it, you might find it hard to find one person that's good at all of those different skills. And so I still find a lot of value, for example, in having an excellent PM that can help rally multiple teams together, that can help sharpen the perspective or the problem space that a team is focused on, that can help with resourcing, all of those things. And so I do think there will still be value in these roles and in people focused on different parts of building a project or a product. That doesn't mean that maybe there's more fluidity, that
people can move between them, but having somebody who is generally responsible for these different things, or an engineer who's really making sure that the output is totally sound and is actually laddering up to something that is going to work for the broader system. I completely agree. So just to make sure I understand what you're saying, let's just talk about all the roles blurring. There's, like, maybe we'll all just be builders and we do everything. And what you're saying is, no, that's not going to happen. The Venn diagram, picturing Venn diagrams of product, design, engineering converging, but you're saying they're going to
continue to stay their own roles. There's going to be a PM, design, engineer, but each can do more of the other roles. I think that's right. I do think that, and again, this is not a blanket statement, because I think if you're at a startup, that's very different. If I were starting a company right now, I would hire the best generalist people I could possibly think of, someone who I think could fluidly move between that. But maybe again, that's always been true. But at a bigger company, I do think that I've seen designers that are maybe incredible at designing, but could really use a product manager who can help them hone both their thinking and how they work
and the operations of it all. So the point is, I do just think that there are different, it's almost like taking the people out of it. I think that there are different hats that you need to wear to build great software. And I think that those continue to be important functions. So this begs the question: do you think AI will ever be an extremely good product designer? And it's interesting to ask you this question because on the one hand, you're like, oh yeah, ChatGPT is going to become incredible at everything. On the other hand, it's hard for a head of design to say, oh no, design is going to be done by AI.
I'm curious to get your take. And it sounds crazy, but engineers never thought it would be able to write code the way it is now. So just thoughts on how good AI will get. Maybe one way to put it is I think it already is an incredible product designer. It really is actually already great. The cool thing about it, though, is it's accessible to every single person. And it's a tool that anybody can use. I do think it's really good. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best visual designer or best at information hierarchy, or typography, or even
user experience and interaction design. It's not necessarily the best at any of those. It's impossible to predict where things are going. And like I said earlier, how much has changed in three years? Of course, they are going to continue to get better. But the way we think about it, and I really do believe this, is we're building tools to enable people to be more creative, to do more, to build more. And so it is already a great designer, but it's at your fingertips to figure out how to use it and how to get the best out of it. What do you think human brains will continue to be most valuable at as AI gets better at product
design specifically? What are the remaining areas for us to be useful? hierarchy or, or typography, or even user experience and interaction design. It's not necessarily the best at any of those. It's impossible to predict where things are going. And I said earlier, how much has changed in three years, of course, that are going to continue to get better. But the way we think about it, and I really do believe this, is we're building tools to enable people to be more creative, to do more, to build more. And so it is already a great designer, but it's at your fingertips to figure out how to use it and how to get the best out of it.
What do you think human brains will continue to be most valuable as AI gets better at product design specifically? What are the remaining areas for us to be useful?
I mean, truly understanding what people need. The human feedback loop of watching people use something and understanding that, inventing something new. I think, and then of course there's just the pure human take, right? Oh, somebody made this, somebody had a point of view about this. I just think that will stand out more and more. And I think that's an important thing for a designer to really hone, is just what is my point of view? Who am I building this for and why? And I don't know, I think as AI becomes more and more better and better for sure, there will be an opportunity to always stand out and push. How can you push that even further?
Yeah. That touches on a conversation I had with the PM of Codex. I asked him just why is AI not good at design? It's actually gotten better since that conversation, which was just a month or two ago. And he had a number of reasons for it. One is just part of great product design is doing something new. And so if it's trained on all the most interesting websites today, it's just like, okay, but that's not interesting anymore. And the other point he made is AI researchers aren't innately great at design. And so they may not understand exactly what it takes to train a model to be really good at this. Thoughts? What do you think? What do you think it'll take to get AI to be much, much better at product design?
I mean, the new thing is interesting, right? Because I think that everything we're doing is trying to design something that hasn't existed before, right? If you look at great, great products that have come out in the last 10, 20 years or whatever, right? It's like all of a sudden, take the iPhone, we're designing for multi-touch, and that opened up this whole new interaction paradigm. And there's no training data for that, right? You're really trying to understand this new thing, right? And then you had something like Instagram that was really embracing the fact that everybody had mobile phones, and then Snapchat, I think, is another good example of great design in that it was maybe what people thought was strange interaction design, but it completely flipped on its head the way people might want to communicate with each other. And to me, that is great design. It's truly understanding that people have this problem or there's this unmet need, and I'm going to build it in this unique way. So yeah, I do think that there's that fresh new way. And then now with AI, it's like we're designing, how do you talk to something, how do you talk to AI with your voice, or how do you use an agent to carry out tasks for you? It's like, yeah, there isn't a lot of precedent for this. And so I think humans are able to do a really good job evaluating what good is, or at least trying a bunch of things and learning along the way with people. And so I don't know, but again, all this stuff changes really quickly. It's hard to say, but I think there's a lot of reasons why having that human in the loop is going to be so important.
And following that thread of the human in the loop, when you're hiring designers these days, what's trending up in what you look for, what you think is more and more important in the designers that will be successful today, especially at opening, and what's trending down with anything.
Jonathan Cousins This might be a luxury of having a slightly larger team, but if you're at our scale, but even at a startup or a smaller company, I think this would still be true. I really believe in hiring a well-rounded team that has many different strengths. So I think it's important to have your handful of, or the right ratio of, generalists that can do everything. But we also hire incredible visual designers, or we have a really amazing brand team that helps us with the expression of our brand, both out and in the product, or great prototypers. And so I think that rounding that out, or great product thinkers that are a little bit more strategic, or people that are really obsessed over the very cutting edge of where these things are going. And I haven't found that one designer necessarily checks every single one of those boxes. I think people just naturally are drawn to certain things. And I think embracing that when you build a team, if you have the luxury of doing that, is really valuable.
Okay, so that's my broad statement. But then as far as what we look for, we definitely, I always tell candidates, we do not expect you to have a background in AI. Because again, this is evolving so quickly, but we definitely expect high curiosity about it, and high aptitude to jump in and learn how you're going to use this in your process, how it works. And not just how you're using your process, but how, especially for us, you're going to create tools to enable more people to use it. And so it's more about the curiosity, I think, is something that we really push on or look for.
And then definitely prototyping. Prototyping is something I've always valued in my career, but I just think that it's become more and more accessible. And so that's something that I think really does stand out usually when we talk to candidates. And then I do think that, yeah, just having a point of view on where these things are going, or any of the tools that people have worked on, and really thinking that strategic thinking. I guess last one on this is systems thinking is becoming more and more important. And especially as you're in our world, it's interesting because we're trying to build the super intelligence that has all these different capabilities. And we need to think more about the underlying primitives that we can build that can build on top of each other, right? This is something that I think Notion did really well early on, was we're going to build these building blocks, right? And then everything is composable. I think that's becoming really important too, as you think about, well, we don't want to build all these one-off siloed experiences. We want to be able to build and ship systems that can build on top of each other so that when someone goes and uses our product, it feels like one cohesive, simple thing. And the model can reason about how it can pull all these things together. So that idea of really understanding the system and thinking about that is becoming even more important, especially because it's kind of complex, all the things that it could possibly do.
This is the fifth podcast in a row I've done where systems thinking has come up as a skill that people are more and more looking for. And it's so funny. I need a bingo card for systems thinking, but it makes so much sense. And I think it especially makes sense from the designer perspective. If we come back to just why my take on why designers are frustrated and stressed right now is just there's less time to do design, the traditional design process. Things are just moving. Engineers are shipping 5,000 PRs a day. And the model can reason about how it can pull all these things together.
So that idea of really understanding the system and thinking about that is becoming even more important, especially because it's complex, of all the things that it could possibly do. This is the fifth podcast in a row I've done where systems thinking has come up as a skill that people are more and more looking for. And it's so funny. I need a bingo card for systems thinking, but it makes so much sense. And I think it especially makes sense from the designer perspective. If we come back to my take on why designers are frustrated and stressed right now, it's just there's less time to do design, the traditional design process.
Things are just moving; engineers are shipping 5,000 PRs a day. And so, to your point, this idea of building blocks and design system language and just a platform for people to build on feels incredibly important. It's very hard, but I, yeah, it's funny. We've had these conversations where I'm like, just do less. My encouragement has been, do less there. Don't design if you don't have to; maybe there's already an existing system or component or something that we can build on top of, or maybe we don't even need this feature. We actually just need to extend an existing feature. I think that's an important thing.
And part of that is thinking outside of the bounds of what you're working on. Right. And thinking across everything, I think, is becoming much more important, and the speed for sure, I think, is a reason why that's so important right now. Just to follow that thread, because that feels like a pretty big change in the design world. There used to be this, we had a podcast with, she was head of design club code, Jenny, when, and she talked about this. And I think it blew a lot of people's minds: there's been this traditional design process, prototype, mock tests, use research, iterate. Okay, cool. Ready for engineering, build it, iterate, ship it.
And now there's just no time for that. And so the role, in her eyes, has moved to big-picture planning and just steering people in a good direction. Does that resonate? How much has that changed in the world of a designer? I think that a hundred percent we do work that way. It depends. I think for us, it depends on what stage you're at in the process or maybe how far along the product is. There are certain features for chat, GBT where we really obsess and we really spend a lot of time. We try a million things, and we throw out, we try a hundred things and we throw out 99, and we finally ship one.
The composers are changing every single day, and we try many things we throw out, and you can take that for many different things within chat, GBT. And then there are other things, like codecs, where, I don't know, a super app is a good example where we definitely are just trying stuff really quick. I think that we really embrace building in public, which is a different way of working. But I think that when you get comfortable with it, it is actually really gratifying or satisfying because you can try stuff and get instant feedback, both internally and externally. But yeah, it is moving really fast, and I think it just depends, right?
Like I said, certain things, we really sweat the details and we try, and we do tests, we AB tests, we'll do user research. And we iterate and evolve a lot. And then other things, we take big swings and then we learn quickly. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know, I think you have to, I think the biggest thing is embracing that the technology might change in a month, and maybe a certain interaction or setting or whatever that you needed doesn't need to exist. Or now a new one does need to exist, or a new capability is there, or the latency profile has changed such that you can rethink this or whatever.
All these capabilities are changing, or the intelligence has changed, and so you have to be really quick on your feet and maybe not be so precious about it until it's at the point where, okay, this is hardened. We don't think that this is necessarily going to change tomorrow because of the technology. So let's make this the best it can possibly be. We're thinking a lot about how we should evolve, really think about chatGPT becoming deeply embedded in your personal experience, personal life, and how should the app feel? That's something that we're not going to necessarily design and ship overnight and just put it out there.
We're really thinking about that, and we're trying a bunch of different ideas or putting it up on a whiteboard, or we're doing some design in Figma. We're prototyping it. We're probably going to dog food a bunch of different ideas long before we ever ship something. But that's a bigger project. Right.
And then there are other things where we're like idea to ship in four hours. This all makes sense. Essentially, what I'm hearing is you pick your battles and you focus the design effort on the things that will be durable and not change. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And it's hard to know what that is. Yeah. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Mercury. Radically different banking loved by over 300,000 entrepreneurs. And now with command. I've been a customer of Mercury's for over six years. I have never once thought about leaving.
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I just asked, how much have I made from X over the past year? 10 seconds later, I have an answer. It is so freaking cool. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA, members FDIC. So I asked a bunch of people that know you well what to talk to you about. And Joel Lowenstein, who happens to be the head of design at Anthropic, is a good friend of yours, which I love.
And he said what he imagines the hardest part of your job is balancing the needs of the existing billion monthly active users of ChatGPT with the need to innovate and push and iterate and invent. And so I'm just curious how you think about that. How do you find that balance, knowing you have to cater to both sides? That's a great question. And it's a really fun part of the way we work. I think that we have vastly different audiences, really, really different. I've never worked in this kind of spread. At Instagram, I spent eight years working on Instagram. We had a billion users or billions of users, maybe.
I don't actually know what they're at now, but it was a lot of people. But the product was pretty simple and it was a couple ways that you could use it. We did think about creators and larger accounts that had special needs. But this is vastly different, where you have someone who's using this to help them come up with the recipe to eat tonight or brainstorm their next haircut or something like that. And then there's somebody who's transforming the way they're doing farming, helping to automate their farm in Japan or something. Right. And it's just the broadest spectrum ever.
Generally, what we've seen is that we believe in this idea of this capability overhang where the product, the vast majority of the people, are getting a sliver of the true value that they could out of the bottle. That's not necessarily a bad thing. They're still getting tons of value. We did think about creators and larger accounts that had special needs. But this is vastly different, where you have someone who's using this to help them come up with the recipe to eat tonight or brainstorm their next haircut or something like that. And then there's somebody who's transforming the way they're doing farming, helping to automate their farm in Japan or something. Right.
And it's just the broadest spectrum ever. Generally, what we've seen is that we believe in this idea of this capability overhang, where the product, the vast majority of the people, are getting a sliver of the true value that they could out of the bottle. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Many are still getting tons of value. But we found that we make sure to focus on creating an extremely simple, streamlined experience for many, many people. And then we put all of the cutting-edge stuff, we also make sure to give that and make sure that's really accessible for the people that care.
The challenge, of course, is not necessarily over-indexing and putting something that people might not understand in front of a billion users. But generally, what we've seen is we can experiment early with the people that really care. And that's where we have our desktop app and we have codex. And now ChatGPT work is stepping into a much broader audience, which we're really excited about. And eventually, what we want, what we know, and we think about this a lot in design, is it will truly become for the billions of users when they don't have to think about a switch or a mode or anything like that.
And so we know that eventually it has to get distilled into that main experience. But it is a really fun thing to balance. And we have to think about people that are using this for free every day to people that are paying us hundreds of dollars and lots of different needs. It's just a matter of balancing. And as a designer, it does add a lot of complexity, for sure, to think through. You really have to have empathy for every different type of user. But it makes it fun, for sure. That is such a mind-blowing point you're making about the spectrum of usage of ChatGPT and codex. I didn't think about it that way.
Has there been a product that has such a wide spectrum, from just what's this rash on my finger to building a sales force? Yeah, and it makes it really hard because a lot of it's so funny. One of the big challenges we're always thinking about is this blank box problem, right? And people talk about this all the time. It's like, is chat really the final frontier? It's like, here, it's a terminal, it's a glorified terminal. That is some critique that I think these chatbots get. And then it's like, okay, so how do you design something that can shape-shift into anything?
It's like maybe someone is coming here for image generation for fun or they're trying to generate a PowerPoint. So having this adaptable interface is a really interesting design challenge. And it's uncharted territory because it can really shape-shift into many different tools. And it's this incredible, so many different things, and trying to figure out how to present that. And then thinking about, we think a lot about a novice user, someone who's brand new to this experience, that we want to help them understand how this can add value to their lives or to their professional work or whatever capacity they're using this in.
And then we also want to get out of the way of people that use this every single day and they use this as a real workhorse tool. And so designing for that spectrum is something we have to think about a lot. But yeah, it's all a world of spectrums, I guess. There's a comment that Kevin Wheel, your former chief product officer, made on the podcast that has really stuck with me, which is to your point, people always diss this idea of it's just a chat box. Why hasn't it ever changed from that, even though it has, but still it's this chat box chatbot. And he made this really good point that what is an interface that is very good at spanning a wide spectrum of intelligence?
It's actually just talking. If you think about humans, we talk to people of low IQ to very high IQ. We can all just talk to each other. And it's actually a really good interface for packaging something that is increasingly smarter and smarter and smarter. Yeah. And I think what's been a really fun design space for us is, there's two things we think about. One is, how can we help you express your intent better? We don't want you to have to think about being a perfect prompt engineer, but how do we even, one, teach you that, oh, this is something that the model can help me with? And then how do we make sure that we best understand what you want?
And so we recently shipped some features where if you ask an open-ended question, it can follow up with some follow-up questions that you can just tap through and answer versus having to type everything out. Or another good example is, once you actually ask it to do something, the chat transcript doesn't need to be purely text. And so we've seen these now evolve so far from what it was when ChatGPT just launched. It's no longer just a pure chatbot. It actually has many features within that.
So a good example is what we call writing blocks. You ask it to write you a letter or an email, and it now contains that email in a block that you can directly manipulate, and you can type with it and you can brainstorm and you can edit little bits and parts of it. You can copy just that. And that has made that interaction much better. And we're seeing the same thing with image generation and creating special tools for that kind of mode.
And I think that's where the UI is going to start to really continue to evolve, is how do we make, if you come at this and you're a designer, maybe chat should actually really look different or have different affordances, or you're a data scientist, or you're using this to run your home, your personal life. Maybe it should really work or look differently. So understanding the context and giving you different affordances based on that is something that we're thinking a lot about.
In terms of the vision and future of where all this goes, I know this is always evolving, but is there a sense of what the future of ChatGPT codex is? I know there's this idea of a super app. You talked about voice, this personal assistant idea. What's a way you think about where this goes long term? I think that it will start to become more and more adaptive to all of the context of your life. I think proactivity is a big untapped part of the experience that we're really excited to think about.
We're starting to see this with ChatGPT work now, where it actually has pretty good suggestions based on your calendar or your Slack or these different inputs and external context. I think that's going to become more and more important or shift the way you use it. I think voice, as we just have a step change in the model, just feels much more natural. And again, I can only imagine how that's going to feel in two, three years. This will just get better and better. I think people, I do love interacting with ChatGPT, especially voice, in just, I want to really quickly say something.
And then I think its ability to go not just from asking questions, but actually doing things for you, that's all going to change. And hopefully all of this gets simpler as we do it too, right? When we think of the super app, I think eventually we really think of the idea of, especially for our broad consumer base, we do think that there should be this one universal input that you can ask, that knows when it needs to answer really quickly or it should be chatty or whether it should go off and do work for you. And so that's a big excitement that we can get to, is how can we continue to simplify the experience such that you shouldn't have to think about how this works.
And then I think its ability to go not just from asking questions, but actually doing things for you, is all going to change. And hopefully all of this gets simpler as we do it too, right? When we think of the super app, I think eventually we really think of the idea of, especially for our broad consumer base, there should be this one universal input that you can ask that knows when it needs to answer really quickly, or it should be chatty, or whether it should go off and do work for you. And so that's a big excitement that we can get to, is how can we continue to simplify the experience such that you shouldn't have to think about how this works.
You shouldn't have to think about what model you're on or what speed you're using. That goes back to balancing the different personas and user needs, right? Of course, we want to expose that for the right people. But then we want to make sure that we can get a default experience that works great for most people.
But yeah, I think it's going to be really proactive. I do think that we're going to get much richer inputs, voice, and richer visual outputs that are more interactive. I think that you'll start to build more durable workflows with chatty that you can use over and over. Right now, a lot of times, it feels like you're coming and starting from scratch each time. And we want to really make this the tool that you can use to help you with whatever task you have.
This all sounds wonderful. I can't, just zooming out a little bit, and then I want to talk a little bit to designers again, but you're in this epic role right now. I imagine there's a lot of surprises as you entered OpenAI and took on this role. What's something you wish you'd known? What's something you wish you could whisper into Ian of day one to give you some advice? Ian Smith: So many things. I think the first one is recognizing that we're really early. I actually was pretty intimidated coming to OpenAI, if I'm being honest. I remember, okay, interviewing, oh no, I got to, GPT-4 had recently come out, and GPT, I was like, what is all this stuff?
Ian Smith: I was using it, and I was using the stuff, but I didn't feel like I had a true understanding of it. And to be honest, I still have so much to learn. So that idea of, you are early, we're figuring this out, I think I would want to hear.
Ian Smith: And the other thing that I found, and for me this is more of a personal thing, it's less about AI or anything, but I stepped into a really different role. Most of my career, I've managed. I definitely managed before, but never at a scale that's growing so fast, and then at a company that is so different, the role was just, every day was something new. And for a long time, I felt like I'm bad at this, or I don't know what I'm doing.
Ian Smith: And then I went and talked to friends that had led really large design teams or were in a similar transition as me, and they all felt exactly the same, or the problems that I had were not unique. And so this is, I guess, more personal advice, that I think at any stage of your career, there's that feeling of imposter syndrome and, what am I doing? I don't know how to do this. Finding people that you can talk to that are going through similar things, you'll find that there are usually a lot of shared challenges and struggles. And having that, whether it's a mentor or just a buddy that is impartial and out of it, was really helpful to me. And finding that community, I think, has been helpful. So yeah, that, and then understanding that this is all so new and evolving really quickly.
That is extremely helpful to hear. Elena Furnow had this really great post. I don't know if you know her. She's head of growth at Lovable right now. She had this great post called Stop the AI Confidence Theater, where she just said all these people keep posting all these things they've done with AI and all the ways it's changed their life, and they're killing it, figured it all out. And really, very few of these things are actually that great and working. It's just like, stop pretending like you figured it all out.
I think it's much better to be humble about it and be like, wow, yeah, I don't know. This is changing quickly, and I'm just going to embrace it and see where it goes. Yeah. And that connects to what you said was a core component of people that are doing well right now: people that are curious and just poking around and trying these things, and trying them again, because maybe it didn't work before. It works now. A hundred percent. Yeah. It's like being, every model, every new feature, it's like the people that are poking around at those edges, I found, are just having such a blast doing it.
And this connects to something else Kevin Wheel, former CPO at OpenAI, said on the podcast, which has always stuck with me, which is: the model we have today is the worst the model will ever be. Exactly. That goes back to when a new model comes out, what, every week?
Every day. I don't know. Every day. If you count all the labs and everything, it's changing so quickly, and everyone gets better. And I don't know, I always try to remind myself. It must be like building or designing in the early days of computers, when componentry was evolving really quickly, and there were these drastic step changes. You would hit these limitations, and all of a sudden those limitations were gone. I think it's the same, right? These things just change, and what was totally broken yesterday now actually just works.
So maybe to start to close out the conversation, say a designer is listening to this and they're in that bucket of overwhelmed, anxious, struggling, stressed, feeling uncertain about their future. What's one suggestion you have for them to help them move out of that state and into a better place? Yeah. Just recognizing that it's a totally rational feeling, and it's a great time to just try to explore and see, what if I tried rethinking the tooling? Or what if I just embraced, oh, maybe I should prototype more? Let me try using these tools.
But again, recognizing that maybe it helps to hear that I think we're all still so early, and it's still changing, and just embracing that. Just have fun with it and see where it goes. And I think maybe another thing I would say is really try to focus on the output, the outcome, right? At the end of the day, we're not here to build tool-like processes. We're not here to build token max or something like that. We're here to make great software that people love, or great products, or whatever it is you do. But that's the thing that really matters.
And if you focus on that, I think that you'll hopefully find that these tools can help you do that, but you still have a huge role in that as the person that's steering and directing it. But again, recognizing that maybe it helps to hear that. I think that we're all still so early, and it's still changing, and just embracing that. Just have fun with it and see where it goes. And I think maybe another thing I would say is really try to focus on the output, the outcome, right? At the end of the day, we're not here to build tool processes.
We're not here to build token max or something like that. We're here to make great software that people love, or great products, or whatever it is you do. But that's the thing that really matters. And if you focus on that, I think that you'll hopefully find that these tools can help you do that, but you still have a huge role in that as the person that's steering and directing it. So along those lines, I'm going to take us to a couple of recurring corners of the podcast. The first corner is AI corner. The question is just, what's one way that you have found AI to be really useful in your job that maybe might inspire someone to use, say, JGBT or codex? Yeah.
I was a designer-designer. Nowadays I spend less time in the pixels, but I really do use it to help me think through broader ideas. Or maybe I'll have an idea at night or something, and then I'll just quickly type it in and have it prototype something. And it'll give me an idea that I can go and talk to the team about and help visualize something. And so that's a part of the design process. It's early ideas, or we're riffing through something, and I found that Chat JGBT, whether it's Chat JGBT work or codex, can really help me visualize that. That's been something that's been really fun.
And then there's more of the operation side. I have it now checking and making sure that important Slack messages that I need to follow up with are summarized and giving me context before important meetings, or for recruiting, or for every part of my process. I use this to augment the work that I do. It makes sense on the prototyping piece. Just to give someone a tip on how to do this, are you opening up on your phone and firing off just a codex thread? What's the mechanic of doing this?
Chat JGBT work has been incredible because it now runs fully in the cloud, right? And so the idea is you can just be anywhere and talk to Chat and have it really spend the time and come back with a really great artifact. So I've found that it's been really fun to just be like, hey, we're working on whatever this thing is, whether it's helping me think through it or, yeah, sometimes I will just have some ideas that I would love to see quickly visualized before I even take it further.
And it will just help me play with it and try it and stuff. And so that's been really fun. The fact that it's so accessible, right? I might not even be near a computer, or I can just have that flexibility. I think it's really fun. Awesome. Okay. I'm going to take us to another corner, fail corner. Yeah.
So the reason I do this, a lot of people, awesome people like yourself, come on the podcast, and all people hear is all the amazing things they've done, all the ways they've been really successful. And they don't hear all the times things didn't work out. And I feel like that's very important for people to hear. It's not always up and to the right in success. What's a story of a time you failed in your career, and what did you learn from that?
I mean, there are so many times. I think that even at OpenAI, I've found that I've had to learn every step of the way, right? When I first joined, I remember not really even fully understanding how I wanted to build a design team and not understanding how to hire or whatever. I sort of felt like I was failing every day, but just quickly trying to adjust and learn. I think that, I don't know, that's maybe kind of a cop-out answer, but really just feeling like every day I'm learning on the go.
We'd quickly move on. I worked on IGTV, which was a huge flop, and then we shipped Reels. That's a good example, because we baked in some wrong assumptions and we held onto a few constraints, but then we learned from that quickly. And we were like, okay, actually let's change that. And then we sort of redid it, and then it became a really successful product. And I've seen many cases of that, and that's helped. I think that's helped harden me to the critique and feedback of things because sometimes you get it wrong. Sometimes you try something, and sometimes it is just about having to put it out in the world and work through it and get the feedback and iterate.
And I think that that's more important, not what you shipped one time, but how you react and how you fix forward and how you continue to iterate and listen to your users. That's a very common theme in this corner. People's careers are mostly failure along the way. Yeah, definitely. And so I think that's helpful for people to hear. Yeah. Okay. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else you wanted to share that we haven't covered?
If I could distill it, it's like, I hope that this is just a really fun time to build stuff, build stuff. And I hope that we, as designers, can be really adaptive and focus on making really fun, making really great stuff. And I think that designers are just, I think great companies are seeking designers and seeking great design. And I've found that to be really true. There probably are going to be a bunch of companies that will be left behind because they haven't shifted. But I think that there's plenty of room for amazing, great design. And that's going to be more true than ever. I completely agree. I'm very bullish on design. Yes.
Well, Ian, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? Okay. Yes. All right. Here we go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? It's funny, I'm not a big book recommender. I think when people ask me, I do get asked about books for design, and I haven't found that many that really have stuck with me, purely design. Although I will say I do love The Design of Everyday Things. I think that's such a classic. That's the one. That's the one. It's not a unique recommendation, but it is just kind of a classic of thinking about how we think, how I think about design.
Yeah. You have to read it if you're in tech or not. Yeah. Awesome. Anything else there, or should we keep moving? We can keep moving. Yeah. Let's do it. Favorite recent movie or TV show that you have really enjoyed. Okay, so I have one that actually is not a movie or TV show, but it's a, I'm in New York. I just saw a Broadway show called Maybe Happy Ending. Yes. I've seen it. Love it so much. Oh, you saw it. Okay.
Yeah. It was so unique, right? And of course it kind of hit home a little bit because it's about these super intelligent humanoid robots, but the production was incredible. But it is just a classic of thinking about how you, how we think, how I think about design. Yeah. You have to read it if you're in tech or not. Yeah. Awesome. Anything else there, or should we keep moving? We can keep moving. Yeah. Let's do it. Favorite recent movie or TV show that you have really enjoyed.
Okay. So I have one that actually is not a movie or TV show, but it's a, I-I'm in New York. I just saw a Broadway show called Maybe Happy Ending. Yes. I've seen it. Love it so much. Oh, you saw it. Okay. Yeah.
It was so unique. Right. And of course, it hit home a little bit because it's about these super intelligent humanoid robots and, but the production was incredible. The set design, everything about it, I thought was so unique, which was, I thought, yeah. Yeah. It was incredible, and it's just a wild ride. And knowing nothing about it, I thought it was incredible. Excellent tastes, sir. I love both those so much. And The Invite just came out.
It's in theaters right now. Yeah. Next question, favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love. I-I feel like a typical Silicon Valley person recommending this one or something, but I did finally switch to an EV after having many cars for a long time. And I got a Rivian, and I don't know, I do respect the design a lot of how they've really made it just all of the, I think if, probably Tesla similar, but there's a lot of assumptions that how operating a car should work have gone away. You just walk up to it and unlock it.
You don't have to turn the car on and off. And it's cool to see that evolving. Of course I love, Waymos are probably, if I could own a Waymo right now, that is the most magical experience in the world. And I'm waiting on bated breath for that to be broadly accessible for everybody.
Do you have a favorite life model that you find yourself coming back to in work or in life? Not necessarily, other than trying to sum up how I felt about all of this is: have fun with it and just try stuff. And I think don't feel like, I've never felt like you have to fit into a specific box, and know that it's perfectly all right to be very fluid about the way you work or the way you think about things, and be flexible and adaptable. But yeah, it's not quite a life motto, more of a vibe of just trying to have fun with it and build great stuff.
I-I-I should shift this question to what's just the vibe that's been helpful to you, because I love that. It's very Sam Altman in terms of just, you can just build stuff. Exactly. Yeah.
Okay. Last question. Something I love about your career history, if you look at your LinkedIn, you were a designer at Groupon.
I love that you were at Groupon, and now you're heading design for essentially superintelligence. What's something you learned at Groupon that is maybe helpful these days, building superintelligent AI?
I love that. Groupon was a really fun company. Andrew Mason was a really incredible CEO, and he brought such character to the product. It was a brand-led product. And we had, there was a comedy team. There was a writer team, but they were all comedians, basically.
And the product really did not take itself seriously, at least in its early, early couple years. It didn't take itself seriously, and I think the brand really stuck out. Right. You weren't signing up for Groupon because, of course the daily deal was great.
You were getting 50% off something, but people loved that email because it was really well written and it was funny and it had character. And I thought that early on the company did a really good job with brand and embracing that side of things. And I think the other thing, if I were to carry that forward, is I found that every company that I've worked for has such unique DNA, and the way you have to work maybe changes a little bit based on that. Right.
Because Groupon was run one way. Then I went to Instagram, which was very design- and creativity-focused, and Kevin Systrom was really an incredible designer. And he sort of saw himself or worked in that way with us, which was really cool. And it just created a different way of working. And then you have Sam Altman, who's a completely different way of operating.
And then at OpenAI, being in a research lab. And so learning that companies have these really different DNAs and understanding how to embrace them and leverage that, or help empower that, or lean into that, has been something that I've learned a lot from moving around and getting the opportunity to work at very, very different companies. And also, just to add to that, it's important to realize you're not going to change that. You're not going to come in and change that culture, because that's very hard, especially if it's very founder-oriented.
I think it's about finding, like, oh wow, at OpenAI, sure, at Instagram we definitely moved slower. And I would say that we changed the product less. And that actually worked really well for most stages of Instagram.
But I don't think that that would work in the current stage of where we're at with OpenAI. And that way of working, of course I bring a lot to that. And I think at Instagram, we had this model: do the simple thing first. And we always used that.
We really embraced that. I've tried to carry that through to the way I think about building product at OpenAI. But that's not the only way I think of working. Sometimes it's not necessarily the right way to think about it. Sometimes we actually do throw some things out that we're still experimenting with. And so I found that having to be flexible and not necessarily trying to change it, but trying to help round it out, maybe. Ian, what an incredible place you have in the world right now, just being on the inside of such cool technology, such cutting-edge stuff that's happening.
And I feel very fortunate that you found time to chat with us and share what you're seeing, where things are heading. Two final questions. Where do you want to point people, if you want to plug anything, and how can listeners be useful to you? Ian Smith, where do I want to point people? I mean, I think that please use, have fun with the stuff we're making with ChatGPT and Codex, and fire away feedback and thoughts. I'm on Twitter. I love to talk with designers about all stages, or not just designers, engineers, PMs, whatever. That's probably where I'm most reachable and accessible.
Ian Smith, and how can you, yeah, I think to be useful, again, I love when people do show off the way they were working and how that's shifting. And that's a great way for us to learn how we can build better products, both internally at OpenAI, but just as a design community, maybe showcasing a little bit more of our process because it is becoming a little more opaque. Like, well, how is it working? And I think sharing that is such a gift to the community. So doing more of that. Ian Smith, also point people to your website, which I have here now. And I think my face is probably changing colors because the site has all these crazy colors.
Ian Smith That's probably where I'm most reachable and accessible. Ian Smith And, yeah, I think to be useful again, I love when people show off the way they were working and how that's shifting. Ian Smith And that's a great way for us to learn how we can, we can build better products, both internally at OpenAI and as a design community, maybe showcasing a little bit more of our process because it is becoming a little bit more opaque. Ian Smith Well, how is it working? Ian Smith And just, I think sharing that is such a gift to the community. Ian Smith So doing more of that. Ian Smith Also, point people to your website, which I have here now.
Ian Smith And I think my face is probably changing colors because the site has all these crazy colors. Ian Smith So if you go to IanSilber.com, you can see this insane website. Ian Smith And there's a personal website. Ian Smith Yeah, that's a deep dive into all of my past work. Ian Smith And the trick is you'll have to discover the Easter egg where there's a game in. Ian Smith That's right. Ian Smith See if you can set the high score. Ian Smith Yeah, the high scores are out of control. Ian Smith I don't know what's happening. Ian Smith Someone's found a cheat code. Ian Smith Ian, thank you so much for being here. Ian Smith Thank you so much for doing this.
Ian Smith Well, this was awesome. Ian Smith Super fun. Ian Smith Same. Ian Smith Bye everyone. Ian Smith Thank you so much for listening. Ian Smith See you in the next episode. Favorite recent movie or TV show that you have really enjoyed. Okay. So I have one that actually is not a movie or TV show, but it's a, I I'm in New York. I just saw a Broadway show, um, called maybe happy ending. Yes. I've seen it. Love it so much. Oh, you saw it. Okay. Yeah. It was so unique. Right. Um, and of course it kind of hit home a little bit because it's about these like super intelligent humanoid, uh, robots and like, you know, um, but, um, but the, the production was incredible.
The set, uh, design, uh, everything about it, I thought was like so unique. Um, which was, um, I thought, yeah.
Yeah. It was incredible and it's just kind of a wild ride. And I wouldn't have knowing nothing about it. I thought it was incredible. Excellent tastes, sir. I love both those so much. Uh, and the invite just came out. It's in theaters right now. Yeah. Next question, favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love. I, I feel kind of like a typical Silicon Valley person recommending this one or something, but, um, I did finally switch to an EV after having, um, many cars for a long time. And I got a Rivian and, um, I don't know, they just, I do respect the design a lot of just
kind of how they've really made it just all of the, like, I think if, you know, probably Tesla similar, but like, there's a lot of assumptions that how get operating a car should work or have gone away. You just walk up to it and unlocked, you know, it's like, you just like, you don't have to like turn on and off the car. And it's cool to see like that evolving. Of course I love, you know, at Waymo's are probably if I could like own a Waymo right now, that, uh, that is the most magical experience in the world. Um, and, uh, I, um, I'm waiting on bated breath for that to, to be broadly accessible for everybody.
Do you have a favorite life model that you find yourself coming back to in work or in life? Not necessarily, other than I think it like kind of trying to sum up, like how I felt about all of this is like, have fun with it and like, just try stuff. Um, and you know, I think don't feel like I've never felt like you have to fit into a specific box, um, and know that it's perfectly all right to be very fluid about the way you work or the way you think about things and, um, in and out be flexible and adaptable. But yeah, it's not quite a life motto, more of a vibe of just trying to like have fun with it and and build great stuff.
I, I, I should shift this question to what's just like the vibe that's been helpful to you. Cause I love that it's very, uh, Sam Altman in terms of just, you can just build stuff. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Last question. Something I love about your career history. If you look at your LinkedIn, you were a designer group on, I love that you were a group on and now you're heading design for essentially super intelligence. Uh, what's something you learned a group on that is, is being, is maybe helpful these days, building super intelligent AI. I love that group on was a really fun company. Um, Andrew Mason was like a really incredible CEO and just that he brought such character,
uh, to the product, you know, it was like kind of a brand led product. Um, and, um, you know, like we, we had, there was like a, a comedy team. Uh, there was like a writer team, uh, uh, uh, but they were like all comedians basically. And the product really did not take itself seriously, at least in its early, early couple years. It was like, it was, it didn't take itself seriously. And I think that the brand really stuck out. Right. You weren't signing up for group on because Ness, I mean, of course the daily deal was great. You were getting like 50% off something, but people loved that email because it was
like really well written and it was funny and it was, and it had character. And I thought that like the early on the company did a really good job with, with brand and sort of embracing, uh, that side of things. Um, and I think the other thing, if I were to carry that forward is I found that every company that I've worked for has such unique DNA and the way you have to work kind of maybe changes a little bit based on that. Right. Because so I, you know, group on was run one way, you know, then I went to Instagram, which was like this very design and creativity focused and Kevin's, you know, Kevin Systrom was, you know, really like an incredible designer.
Uh, and he, he sort of saw himself or like worked in that way with us, which was really cool. And it just created a different way of working. And then you have like Sam Altman, who's like a completely different way of operating. And he's like, uh, you know, I think, you know, and then an opening, I'd be in a research lab. And so learning that companies have these really different DNAs and understanding how to sort of embrace them and kind of leverage that to your, uh, like, or help kind of like empower that or like, I guess, lean into that, um, uh, has been something that I've learned a lot, um, from moving
around and getting the opportunity to work at very, very different companies. And also just to add to that, it's also important to realize you're not going to change that. You're not gonna like come in and change that culture. Cause that's just, that's very hard, especially if it's very founder oriented. I think it's about finding like, oh, wow. Like at open AI, you know, yeah, sure. Like we spent more time at Instagram, we definitely moved slower. And I would say that we, um, we changed the product less. And that actually worked really well for most stages, uh, of, of Instagram. Uh, but I don't think that that would work in, in the current stage of where we're at with
open AI and that way of working, of course, I bring a lot to that. And I think like, you know, uh, uh, um, at Instagram, we had this model, like do the simple thing first and we always use that. We really embrace that. I've tried to carry that through to the way I think about building product at, uh, open AI. Um, but that's not the only way I think of working, you know, sometimes it's actually not necessarily the right way to think about it. Sometimes we actually do throw some things out that we're still experimenting with. And so just being really, I found that having to be flexible and yeah, not necessarily trying
to change it, but trying to kind of like help round it out maybe. Ian, what a, what an incredible, uh, place you have in the world right now. Just being on the inside of such cool technology, such cutting edge stuff that's happening. Uh, and I feel very fortunate that you found time to chat with us and share what you're seeing, where things are heading. Two final questions. Where do you want to point people? If you want to plug anything and how can listeners be useful to you? Ian Smith Where do I want to point people? I mean, I think that, um, please, you know, I guess use, you know, have fun with, with the stuff
we're making with chatgbt and codecs and fire away feedback and thoughts. I'm on Twitter. Uh, I love to talk with designers, uh, about all sort of stages, um, or not just designers, engineers, PMs, whatever. Um, that's probably where I'm most, uh, sort of reachable and accessible. Ian Smith And you know, how can you, yeah, I think to be useful again, it's like, I love when, when people do show off the way they were kind of working and how that's kind of shifting. Ian Smith And that's like a great way for us to learn how we can, we can build better products, both like internally at open AI, but just as a, as a design community, like maybe showcasing a
little bit more of our process because it is becoming a little bit more opaque. Like, well, how is it working? Ian Smith And just, um, I think sharing that is, is like such a gift to the community. So doing more of that. Ian Smith Also point people to your website, which I have here now. Ian Smith And I think my face is probably changing colors because the site has all these crazy colors. Ian Smith So if you go to IanSilber.com, you could see this, uh, insane website, Ian Smith And there's a personal website. Ian Smith Yeah, that's a deep dive into all of my past work. Ian Smith And the trick is you, yeah, you'll have to discover the Easter egg where there's a game in,
Ian Smith That's right. Ian Smith See if you can set the high score. Ian Smith Yeah, the high scores are out of control. Ian Smith I don't know what's happening. Ian Smith Someone's found a cheat code. Ian Smith Ian, thank you so much for being here. Ian Smith Thank you so much for doing this. Ian Smith Well, I mean, this was awesome. Ian Smith Super fun. Ian Smith Same. Ian Smith Bye everyone. Ian Smith Thank you so much for listening.
Ian Smith See you in the next episode.