Tibo Sottiaux

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · OpenAI’s Head of ChatGPT: We’re entering a new era of AI (again) |…

• Will Agents Take Most Actions on the Internet?

  Tibo Sottiaux says the majority of actions on the internet will be taken by agents. Models are going to become cheaper and faster at rates that are quite incredible, and all modalities will finally integrate in a seamless way. People building products are almost there, but if they imagined everything roughly 10 times better than today within a year, they would build in a different way.

  A product that wants to succeed with agents has to be built for a certain level of scale. The team worked very closely with Notion, and when Notion built its MCP, the tool was suddenly available to agents that can do the work and use it. Notion saw a ton of traffic come in. The surge put a lot of strain on th

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• What Is It Like to Work at OpenAI?

  Tibo Sottiaux says working at OpenAI is bottoms-up energy from ex-founders, with trust to own choices and a quality bar high enough to hold launches back.

  Decisions API came together quickly after the team saw a strong model and used constraint sampling to ship a different shape of the Responses API. It is faster and quite delightful for some cases. A Slack channel started with four people hacking on a weekend. People then got excited, added visual inputs, and pitched in with no fixed structure until a product shipped. The bar for quality still stops work that needs more baking. Launches that were maybe going to ship the same day were held and spaced out, with more coming the next week and

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• What Keeps Human Brains Valuable?

  Tibo Sottiaux says where human brains stay valuable is a function of how the technology is built. OpenAI designs everything to put humans at the center and to build the tools as extensions of human will and taste, a super empowering thing. As long as that design continues, a person can take whatever they wanted to do and expand creativity and taste until the result feels awesome. In the moment the tool is artistic. There may not be coders anymore, and there are more builders than ever.

  Something deeply human remains in the building. Humans want to learn and see what other humans are building. The greater interest is in talking with a person rather than with Dot, and that interest will remai

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• How Do Notion and Figma Make Money Inside ChatGPT?

  Tibo Sottiaux says Notion and Figma make money when people use their plugins inside ChatGPT. Subscribers get a certain amount of usage, and when that usage happens with the plugin or inside the other product, including sign-in with ChatGPT, the companies share in the economics and get remunerated.

  A plugin gets discovered by being a good plugin. Retention numbers, how successful the plugin is, and its quality decide what starts getting recommended to users in conversations, and the system will keep getting tuned. A plugin can get recommended to a significant slice of users. A plugin that is not quite good stops being recommended. The check is whether the plugin is actually adding utility an

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• Are Codex and ChatGPT Going to Merge?

  Tibo Sottiaux says Codex and ChatGPT are going to merge. Chat and the work toggle are being merged, and the complexity between them is being reduced. Eventually all of the capabilities of Dots will ship straight into ChatGPT and lift the floor for 1.2 billion users. He is unsure how many users there will be at that later time. The aim is a product that feels really seamless, with no need to think about Codex versus ChatGPT.

  People love the capability in work. They also sometimes want chat because it is a little bit faster and more pleasant to use. The feedback was loud and clear, and the merge is the response.

  Dots has no model picker. There is just no configuration. You just talk to it. T

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• What Is Permanent Active Intelligence?

  Tibo Sottiaux says permanent active intelligence knows everything it needs to do and stays available through any client and any screen, so a person can break free from the technology. Dots is how that idea is positioned and shipping now: an incredibly smart agent that works 24-7, understands goals, understands preferences, and learns from feedback. The launch is not perfect. He will learn very much from making Dots available to pro users. Over time a person wants the system that learns what they want to achieve, without having to loop it exactly one set way in order to get results.

  Codex, ChatGPT Work, ChatGPT Consumer, and Dots are all in front of people right now. Whether the name stays D

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