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

20:54Alex Heath:I was thrilled to see the model picker. I mean, this had been reported for months leading up to the release that you all were going to unify the models into one system where the user doesn't have to switch between them. I definitely felt that cognitive load as a ChatGPT user before with switching to the models. And you all have put out some numbers about how little people were actually using the reasoning models in the 4-series because of that model picker. But now that, you know, you've had this blowback to not keeping 4.0 around, does that mean that the model picker concept is kind of DOA? Are we actually going to see it continue now?

21:31There'll be basically a way in your settings where you can enable like the whole list of models if you really want to. and so if you feel strongly if you're a power user and you like the concept of models and you feel like you understand them and you want to deal with that level of complexity, we'll let you do it and then if you don't, you don't have to our aspiration is exactly the same which is if you're an average person you should just be able to ask this thing anything and over time actually do anything with the product beyond just questions and you shouldn't have to think about what mode to opt into so we're going to keep the simplicity for the 90 % and then offer a way for the vocal minority of power users to get exactly what they want, which is the whole list.

22:13I think that's a pretty good way to balance things. Typically, I hate putting in a setting just because people can't agree on what they want. But in this case, it is polarized enough where you have people like you who are happy about what we did with 5 and then a bunch of people who are quite vocal. And this is a good way to balance both.

22:30Alex Heath:There's been a lot of headlines recently about how people are using ChatGPT and the potential negative side effects. The Wall Street Journal had one recently saying he had dangerous delusions. ChatGPT admitted that it made them worse. Chatbots can go into a delusional spiral. The New York Times, The Atlantic, ChatGPT gave instructions for murder, self-mutilation, and devil worship. And then there was that incident where you all were sharing through your share flow. People were sharing some of their conversations. I guess unknowingly, I mean, you all had it in the consent flow, but I guess it wasn't obvious to people that they were sharing fairly intimate conversations in a way that could be actually ranked and indexed by Google.

23:11Alex Heath:And you guys called that an experiment, rolled it back. I feel like we're all broadly starting to reckon with how people actually use this technology at scale. And I'm wondering what you have learned and how these headlines over the past couple of months have made you feel specifically as the one running the product. Look, I've been with ChatGipity since before it launched, so I feel like I've worked at three, four different companies, frankly, because you hit new levels of scale and everything changes in terms of how you have to behave and how you have to run your product and business. and I think there certainly is something profound about being on track for a billion weekly users.

23:53We just crossed$700 million, right? That really makes you think, okay, what are the cohorts? What are the different types of users we have and how can we make sure that the product serves all of them? We talked a lot about consumers versus power users. But you also have to assume that some people maybe aren't reading your UI as closely as some of the old cohorts did. And in the case of the feature that you mentioned, I just want to address it head on. We had the ability when you shared a flow. You had to opt into it to make your chats discoverable on Google. And I think you can certainly argue that everyone who opts into that knew exactly what they were doing.

24:29But you can also argue that many people just don't read and they might check that box by accident and their chat becomes indexed. It was a perfectly good idea. The problem we were trying to solve is that there's so much discovery on what other people are doing in AI that it would be really cool if we could make it easier to see all the different cool use cases that people have. But there's many different executions on that idea. I think in this case it was one that after further consideration we felt like was probably not the direction we wanted to go into. So with scale comes responsibility, including thinking about users who might do things by accident a little bit more carefully.

25:04And so that's one. The other thing, though, that I keep learning is how much you learn post-launch about the emergent capabilities of these models. I've never, ever worked on a product where the vast majority of its value is empirical in nature. Normally, when you build a technology product, you kind of know what it's going to do before you launch. You might not know if people are going to like it. That's always kind of the big elephant in the room when you ship features and you ship products. But you're rarely, really still learning about the capabilities of the thing. And with things like 5, I'm frankly blown away by what people are doing, seeing how good it is at making front-end code, a.k.a.

25:51really nice-looking applications. It's really getting my mind spinning on all the cool things we can build. You may have one point of view when you're building inside your own walls in a lab, but you quickly get updated as you bring things to more people because you can really see what they're all doing. For that reason, yes, there's a ton of learnings on what are different user bases and how they might have different preferences from each other, but there's also just so much magic that I'm seeing in the internet and all the cool things that people are doing with the new model. I have to focus on those things too because they might unlock the next set of roadmap.

26:28Alex Heath:Yeah, and I'm interested in the cool things. and I want to talk about them, I think just before we get there, I think there's a feeling that people have that this is kind of a Pandora's box moment and you all may not be able to rein in all of the negative ways that people are using this technology, especially at the scale you're operating at. Reminds me a lot of social media, covering social media in the mid-2010s. There were these kinds of conversations and society has moved on, but at the same time, And there is a lot of negative side effects of some of this technology and those headlines I was reading.

27:03Alex Heath:I would like you to just respond to those as the head of the products because, yeah, I'd like to just hear you reflect on that a little more if you can. Look, the first thing I'll say very clearly is that we have work to do. We've begun the work, right? We've talked to, you know, over 90 experts in over 30 countries. We've already iterated on the model behavior when it comes to various different mental health scenarios. We've rolled out changes when you're using the product too much. But the work does not stop there. So we're very excited to make a set of fast follows to GPT-5, which is a great baseline.

27:35It's actually much less like a phantic. It improves on many of the dimensions that we were worried about. But we're excited to keep iterating on that baseline, and there's no question on that. You can compare it to social media in terms of how the discourse changed. but honestly for me there's something that feels different because I do feel like our incentives are aligned with doing the right thing in the product. We may not have gotten there yet. We may have more work to do but fundamentally we really care about helping you achieve your goal whether or not that's to get healthy, whether or not that's to build a business, whether or not that's to be creative, whether or not that's to write a better email and that includes your long-term goals too for folks who kind of just want to be the best version of themselves like maybe they're coming to Chachamity for a bunch of tricky situations, we really do want to help them and in no case is our incentive not to give good life advice for example there's nothing like with social media to me at least where I feel like the business is pushing us in one way and then the right thing to do is this other thing.

28:49So really, yes, we have work to do, but I think that we have the prerequisites for actually doing the right thing, and that's the thing I would look at.

28:59Alex Heath:I'm glad you've been talking about the business model. It's something I've been really interested in asking you about. How many users of ChatGPT are free versus paid? It's my understanding that less than 10 % of the user base is paid. The vast majority is free, is that right? The vast majority is free. I think the last stat we published is 20 million subscribers, I want to believe. So hundreds of millions of free users, tens of millions of paid users. You make money through subscriptions. ChatGPT is a product that roughly 4xed its user base in the last year. So there is money there for sure. At the same time, what I see and what people I talk to in the industry see is that you're going to have to do more beyond subscriptions to support the business in the long run as you hit billions of users.

29:47Alex Heath:And so that brings me to the natural question of ads. And are ads ever going to come to ChatGPT? And if so, how are you thinking about that? First of all, I do question the premise of whether or not subscriptions will stall out. I used to think this. The reason we went with subscriptions originally was not because we felt like it was the best way to monetize or anything like that. We just needed a way of turning away demand back when we couldn't keep the site up. So that's the origin story. Over time, we found that it's an incredible business model because it's just so deeply aligned with our users.

30:23But I've been consistently shocked about the fact that even our most recent cohorts, they monetize as well or better as the earlier ones, which normally when a product matures, you see lower and lower monetization rates. So I actually am incredibly optimistic about subscriptions. We've just gotten started in the business space. We passed 5 million paying business users, up from 3 million only a couple of months earlier. That's a whole other untyped territory where I really think that Chachibutu is not just this amazing consumer product, but also a product that an entire generation is bringing to work.

30:58And if we enable the safe, compliant, collaborative, work-optimized use of that product, there's a whole other business to be built there that I think is very, very exciting. So I actually don't view the fact that the vast majority of our users are free as necessarily a liability. I really think it's a funnel that we can build off of to build differentiated offerings for people who are willing to pay. And there's been many other iconic consumer subscriptions, you know, Netflix. I don't know their exact subscriber base, but I think it's much, much higher than Chat Chippy TV.

31:33Alex Heath:Nick, you know Netflix also has ads. They do now. Well, and look, since you really tried to get me to comment on that, I have become humble enough not to make crazy, extreme, long-term statements on a question like that. Because maybe there is a certain market where people aren't willing to pay us, yet we want to offer the best, latest, and greatest. Maybe that would be a place to consider other indirect forms of monetization. if we ever did that, I'd want to be very, very careful and deliberate because I really think that the thing that makes JAT-GPT magical is the fact that you get the best answer for you and there's no other stakeholder in the middle.

32:12It personalizes to your needs and tastes, etc., but we're not trying to upsell you on something like that or to boost some pay-to-play provider or product. Maybe there are ways of doing ads that preserve that and that preserve the incentive structure, but I think that would be a novel concept and we'd have to be very deliberate. So I am humble enough not to rule it out categorically, but we'd have to be very thoughtful and tasteful about it. The other thing I'll say is that we will build other products and those other products can have different dimensions to them. And maybe ChatGPT isn't an ad-sy product because it's just so deeply accountable to your goals, but it doesn't mean that we wouldn't build other things in the future too.

32:51So I think it's good to preserve optionality, but I also really do want to emphasize how incredible the subscription model is, how fast it's growing, and how on top a lot of the opportunities are.

33:02Alex Heath:Is commerce a more near-term opportunity? You've recently added more shopping to ChatGPT where it'll show products. And I imagine the natural next step of that is you all start to take a cut of transactions that people make with ChatGPT. Is that right? Yeah. So when you think about possible business models for ChatGPT, there's really, I think, three that you can't imagine. There's subscriptions, which we do. There's ads, which we just talked about. It has a lot of cons, but maybe it can be done tastefully. And there's actually something that is neither ads nor subscriptions, which is if people buy things in your product, you very independently serve the recommendation.

33:41Wirecutter famously does this, right? Expert-selected products. But then if you buy them through a product like chat, you take a cut. And that is something we are exploring with our merchant partners. I don't know if it's the right model. I don't even know if it's the right user experience yet, but I'm really excited about it because it might be a way of preserving the magic of ChatGPT while figuring out a way to make merchants really successful and build a sustainable business. But our emphasis on that entire work, we're calling it commerce in ChatGPT, is on making sure it's valuable to users first.

34:12That's always how we go. So I really want to make sure that it actually feels compelling to discover products and buy them through chat. I think discovery is already happening especially for things that are not traditionally served by e-commerce well. You wouldn't go online to buy a car, but you would talk to ChatGPT about it. Or you wouldn't go online to buy a home, but you talk to ChatGPT about it. So I really think there's a ton of opportunity there from the behavior we're seeing. But I've told the team we should focus on making sure it's really compelling to users first before we try to turn this into a business.

34:45But I do think, just to address your question, that taking a referral cut could be interesting. And it's something we are actively exploring with some of the merchants we're talking to.

34:55Alex Heath:Is a red line for you on that, not letting affiliate revenue influence the recommendations that ChatGPT makes? I think that's where... That would be very important to preserve all the demos that we have in this space internally. They made this extremely clear. Actually, my biggest worry is, again, you've talked about different users, is that users might not get that, even if that is how it works, right? Which is why you got to be thoughtful on the user experience, even if your principle is very, very clear. But yeah, I think the magic of ChatGPT is very much that it independently, like chooses your products without any interference.

35:27And that would be an important thing to preserve.

35:30Alex Heath:We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.

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37:34We're back.

37:39Alex Heath:Let's talk about just the state of ChatGPT itself. It's the fastest growing consumer product of all time. Like I mentioned earlier, its user base is nearly 4X'd in the last year at a pretty huge scale. And I think a lot of people on the outside are wondering, where is this growth coming from? Can you share why it's growing, how it's growing, biggest markets, demographics, any of that? The first hire I made after ChatGPT was a data scientist because I was so confused. I would be talking to every user, and they would tell me a different story as to why they were loving chat. And it was just deeply confusing to me, and I had to get to the bottom of it.

38:18And over time, I got a sense of what the use cases were. There was writing, and there was technical stuff like coding, and there was chit-chat, and there was searchy stuff like informational queries, et cetera. And I think largely those use cases are still here. They're here to stay. So if you look at what people are doing, it's not completely different than a year ago or before we had all this growth. I do think that a few things have changed. Obviously, we have done a bunch of work in the product. That work you can break down into pure model improvements, like the behavior, the personality, its capabilities, its likelihood of refusing a request, Then sort of like hybrid product and research capabilities like search has been a really big one, search and chat GPT.

39:04Personalization has been a really exciting improvement as well. And then your classic quote-unquote growth work, which we do surprisingly little of, but, you know, things like not having to log into chat GPT to use it were a tremendous success. And it was, again, super aligned with users. It's not a growth hack. It's just actually making the product much more accessible to people who want to use it. So it's been like kind of a third, a third, a third between those three different categories of things, right? You know, pure model improvements, sort of research product hybrid improvements like search.

39:35And then, you know, your classic, you're removing friction and helping people onboard and stuff like that. But that work aside, I love talking about that work as a product person. And, you know, I like to think it's been really impactful. I also think there's been a change in people in terms of like how they relate to this technology, where I've always kind of felt like the main bottleneck to adoption to ChatGPT is kind of A, knowing what it can do, and then B, kind of understanding yourself well enough to know what you can delegate. And on the first one, it's just, I think, a natural effect of watching the people around you starting to use it.

40:12Like there's so much discovery that happens off product. Like if you ever go on TikTok, there's these videos where like people are sharing their use cases. And there's like tens of thousands of comments. And every use case in there, it's kind of like when you go in the Instapot community online where all these recipes are there. Like people are sharing their prompts. And I think that just takes time to develop and for people to watch what other people are doing. So I think this sort of like empty box problem, we're starting to see some traction against it just by all the out-of-product discovery that's happening.

40:43The other thing, this is a bit more philosophical, but I really do believe it, which is, you know, I think that delegation is a very unnatural thing for most people. I sit here in Silicon Valley, you know, I'm a manager of people, and I had to learn how to delegate. But for most people around the world, 10 % of the people of the world is using this product weekly, right? And, like, for most of them, I don't think the idea of, like, I have a task and I'm going to assign it to someone is supernatural. And it takes actually time to really understand yourself and reflect after you've begun to use the product.

41:13to crack that. That has nothing to do with product. That has nothing to do with marketing or social or anything. That just has to do with, I think, people having a little bit of time to process and try this out and learn. And I think that's a huge part of the growth as well.

41:28Alex Heath:With the way that it's growing, is the user base pretty distributed in terms of where they are in the world? Are there certain countries where it's super concentrated or not? And I'm curious, If you didn't make any more huge changes to Chachipiti as a product for, say, the next six months, I know that won't happen, but say that did happen, do you think the growth would just continue at the rate it's at? Do you guys sense a ceiling of the growth rate that you're on right now? On the first one, Chachipiti is truly a worldwide phenomenon. We look at all the specific markets, and there's some that we're really excited about, like India, where I think there's just so much potential.

42:09but, you know, really it is hard to find a country where Chachipiti isn't growing. And then, of course, monetization rates look different in different countries. And that's like pretty obvious given our business model, right, where you'll see certain European countries or certain Asian countries really pull ahead on, you know, the number of paying users that we have. Without getting too specific, because I think a lot of the stats we haven't shared, you'll see healthy growth in the vast majority of countries with developing markets being some of the most untapped opportunity. And then, of course, higher monetization rates, the higher the GDP is.

42:42I think that even the growth we've had is a compounding effect of a number of changes we've made in the product. So I think to keep up the insane growth, you have to keep iterating. It's no secret that you've got a number of very determined companies with their target on our back, right? many of them have a major advantage on distribution over OpenAI, which means that they can effectively copy our product and put it in front of a bunch of eyeballs. And I plan my life, our roadmap, as if that's going to be successful. Time will tell if it is successful or not.

43:20Alex Heath:I'm amazed that it hasn't been more successful yet. I'm amazed that all these efforts by Elon, Zuckerberg, et cetera, have not curbed JITPT's growth. Look, there's something really special, I think, about our product, what we've stood for, which is cutting edge. I think a lot of people just feel like if they're using ChatGPT, they're using the smartest thing that they can get. And that's a really important thing to preserve, even as the technical benchmarks become a little bit less meaningful. I think just great product features. I think memory and personalization are really exciting. Search is working really well, especially compared to where that was like a year or a year and a half ago.

43:57So I think people really do like our product, and it is harder than you might think to copy, even if the logical way to plan your roadmap is that people will be successful. And then the other thing that I think sometimes companies will underestimate is that intent is important, where if you're opening a product with the intent of doom scrolling a little bit, and suddenly you see a very utilitarian chat GPT clone, that might not actually hit the mark in terms of what that user is in the mood for, even if it gets the eyeball. So you'll see a lot of curiosity clicks, but you might not see a deep form of engagement.

44:29But again, I don't think we can rest on being ahead. I try to project a sort of day one mentality to the team. That's pretty easy to do when you're only three years old. As we talked about, there's a ton of new emerging problems to solve for our users, which are quite nuanced to get right. So I think our work is nowhere near done, despite the growth looking very exciting.

44:52Alex Heath:Listener, he was talking about meta there, just so there's no confusion. This is an open-ended statement. Sure. Could apply to many. The thing holding me back from using it more as a journalist who cares about facts is hallucinations. And based on the model card for GTP5, it sounds like roughly one in ten responses from the model can contain hallucinations, which is better than it was before. But still, one in ten is not great. and I'm wondering, do you think it's going to be feasible to get hallucinations to zero? I used to say, no, I think we have to plan for this and this is why search is really important.

45:31I still believe that the right product is LLMs connected to ground truth and that's why we brought search into ChatGPT and I think that makes a huge difference. Same in the enterprise where connect to your data, we actually have ground truth to check against. So I think that dynamic isn't going to go away. That said, I was blown away by the progress we made with GPT-5 on hallucinations. It's much better, both the chat version versus 4.0 and then the thinking version versus 0.3. And I do think we have some researchers here who believe that we should be very optimistic. The thing, though, with reliability is that there's a strong discontinuity between very reliable and 100 % reliable in terms of the way that you conceive of the product.

46:16And until I think we are provably more reliable than a human expert on all demands, not just some demands, I think we're going to continue to advise you to double-check your answer. And I think people are going to continue to leverage ChatGPT as a second opinion versus necessarily their primary source of fact.

46:33Alex Heath:Do you think you're not telling people to double-check in a year more time than that? I'd like to get there. Again, it's mostly because I want to run towards the use cases where that matters. It would really be so cool if you could use your chat GPT for the highest stakes of things. I think you can imagine a better way for so many different things, whether or not that's medical advice or legal advice or all these different kind of sensitive categories that have a lot of barriers to entry. So I would like to get there. I have learned not to make one-year statements. I can only make eventual statements and one-quarter statements because there's this time in between where we tend to be wrong on what exactly happens.

47:12So I'm confident we will eventually solve hallucinations, and I'm confident we're not going to do it in the next quarter. That said, GPT-5 is a huge improvement on this dimension.

47:21Alex Heath:Is it true that your roadmap is only six months out? Yes, with some caveats. I like to say this because I really want people to understand the empiricism and the weirdness of building on top of an ever-changing technology baseline, which no other type of company needs to do. But the truth is, for a huge chunk of our capabilities, that is true. And then for our enterprise roadmap, that is not true because we know that if you're a Fortune 500 company and you want to know when is, you know, insert compliance capability coming, we need to be able to tell you a definitive answer. So it really depends on what we're talking about.

47:53But for the stuff that we're talking about here, like, you know, when is GPT-6 coming, which you please don't ask me, but, you know, that kind of thing, we would rarely have a, you know, high-confidence target that is further than six months out just because everything changes constantly.

48:07Alex Heath:When is it coming, Nick? No, it's okay. I know you won't tell me. I do have an anonymous question for you from an ex-colleague. And he asked me to ask you, why hasn't the ChatGPT form factor changed more? You know, I wondered this too. Many people now know the story. But for those who don't, ChatGPT was supposed to be a throwaway prototype for a much broader product. We were hoping to build what we called a super assistant, which was this kind of flexible entity that helps you with anything. And we felt like it would probably have many different form factors, which I can talk about. And ChatGPT was like the simple way to start with the idea of generating enough learning and use cases that we could go build the real thing.

48:52And then obviously we got really sidetracked because ChatGPT took off and became successful in its own right. And it has been a fairly durable form factor in a way that I don't think I would have predicted or any of us would have. and I'll say that natural language is very, very powerful and I think that's here to stay. Whether or not it's a chatbot or not is a different question but I think the idea that you can express yourself in a very natural way feels like the user experience to end them all because that's just how we as humans are drilled and as long as you're building technology for humans which is certainly very important for us I think you're going to want to let people communicate with software in a way that feels very natural to them.

49:29But then, you know, I wouldn't equate natural language native interfaces with chat. We're really excited about breaking out of the form factor of chat. One early stab at that direction was Canvas. It was a feature that, or is a feature that allows you to iterate on an artifact with your AI, such that you're like working on a thing together rather than chatting back and forth. With GPT-5's front-end capabilities, which is its ability to make really nice-looking software, you could absolutely imagine it rendering different user interfaces on the fly for different use cases, which is kind of a more ambitious version of what we did with Canvas.

50:07Like you could imagine if you are running a data analysis that you get a spreadsheet. You could imagine that when you are planning a trip that you make a little web app so you and your friends can go plan together. You could imagine a lot of different form factors becoming emergent. And what I will say about chat is that it was the right interface for where that technology was at. Because there was chatbots before ChatGPT, but they weren't particularly good. And then they suddenly got good, and it felt pretty magical. And I think this idea of custom software on demand is going to have the same feeling, either now or very, very soon.

50:41I just feel it in my bones. So I think this idea that you can get more UI-heavy stuff still driven by natural language is going to be very cool. So to make a long story short, I am also baffled by the fact that we're still using chatbots. But we're very ambitious about what we want to do with the product. And I think the technology will allow for it.

51:02Alex Heath:There was a strategy document from your team that surfaced in the Google Antitrust lawsuit about this super assistant goal. and it said that what you want to build is the interface to the internet for people. And to me, that suggests you do need to move beyond chat and you actually need to move into web browsing as well. And there have been reports about that and I'm curious now, you were actually on the stand even at that Google trial saying you guys might be interested in buying Chrome if Google had to spin it off. Are you building your own web browser? Does OpenAI need to operate its own web browser adjacent to ChatGPT?

51:39That statement was taken horribly out of context. So I do want to say that—

51:44Alex Heath:You're saying you'd like to personally buy Chrome. Is that what you're saying? My full answer was that if Chrome went on the market and became available, that I imagine many parties would consider it, and we would as well. So it was a much weaker statement than was widely reported on the Internet. On a product level, my belief is that you already see today that ChedGPT kind of is a new entry point into the Internet. many of the things that you would have used a browser for 10 years ago. You can actually just do in chat GPT because it will give you the answer. Imagine as you discover products through it, you can discover, learn about them, eventually purchase them.

52:22As it starts to do things for you for longer periods of time, maybe applying a trip example or maybe running a data analysis example, which you would have gone to and opened three different products for, you might actually kick that off in AI. So I don't think it's crazy to think about AI doing more and more things that a browser can do. What form that can take, we'll see. We're exploring a variety of different things. I do agree with the thesis that, and I did write that document, so those words come from me, that ChatGPT is going to have to do more and more of what a browser does today.

52:58Alex Heath:Well, with the few minutes we have left, I have some kind of lightning round product strategy questions I'd love to hear your thoughts on. So try to keep your answers as concise as you can. Sam has talked a lot about sign-in with ChatGPT as being a thing he sees as strategically important, the ability to bring your ChatGPT account and personalization with you on the web and have it be a sign-in option like Google or Apple. Where are you all at on that? Actually exploring it. This is the type of thing, you know, I've learned the hard way that with ecosystem stuff, like where you're building, having other people build, you've got to take your time to get it right because you only get so many shots.

53:32So we've been talking to lots of different partners about that idea, and we continue to be really excited.

53:36Alex Heath:Is it true that you're not going to develop glasses or a phone with Johnny Ive? Can't make any comments on our hardware roadmap. Very excited about it, though. It's been inspiring. How is the Apple partnership going? It's great. I'm really excited about what we're doing together. I think it's a long-term partnership. I'm so excited about bringing AI, hopefully our models, but just generally AI. into all corners of iOS. So you see it getting deeper, the partnership with Apple? Very much not the expert, but from a pure product perspective, I see so many different opportunities to do that. You guys announced a collaboration with Mattel, the maker of Barbie, to embed your models into their toys.

54:19Alex Heath:Why do that? We're not just a product company. We're also a platform company, which means that while we have our own first-party offerings, we're really excited to make the building blocks available to everyone. and this is one of those examples where this would probably not make sense for us to do first party. It's unlikely that we're getting into the toy manufacturing business despite all the things we do somehow manage to get into. But it's a wonderful example of something you can do with our APIs in a business that someone else can go build on a product that someone else can go build. That's exciting.

54:52Alex Heath:When does ChatGPT go fully multimodal? So right now it can do some modalities but video export, video in, audio in, audio out, all of it. Are Northstar is that you can talk to this like a human, which means just like you and I are interrupting each other, there's a bunch of little cues. You just nodded. I don't know if people are going to be able to see the video or not, but I get a bunch of feedback from that. I think so much of our roadmap just comes down to making it easier for you to express yourself to the AI and then making it easier for the AI to express itself back because that's really how you get all the benefit of the intelligence in these models.

55:30So our aspiration is very much anything in, anything out. But it's actually much harder than the pure technical capability of doing that. You need to make that feel natural. You might have used latest voice mode. I think it's gotten pretty good and very natural, but I still feel like it hasn't quite passed the Turing test, so to speak, because I can tell I'm talking to an AI. There's a lot of subtleties of human interaction that we're just in and cracking. So I think there's the technical roadmap, which we continue to be very excited about. But then there's also the sort of overlay on top in terms of how you make that feel really natural.

56:00Alex Heath:Is the end state of the personality test that you guys just rolled out with the four new personalities, is it dozens and dozens or unlimited personalities to choose from? Or is it that each user creates their own personality for how they want ChachiPT to work? We're not entirely sure yet. We're really excited to learn from the three, four that we just released to figure out, does everyone fall into one of these categories or is there actually a long tail of needs? In terms of where my head is currently at, I think we should allow you to configure your own. We already have things like custom instructions.

56:31We have these four personalities as an additional starting point. So I really imagine you picking one initialization point, so to speak, that, you know, is kind of speaks to you. And then from there, you personalize, like either via your interactions with the product or by explicitly going in and configuring. I think it's kind of like choosing a friend where, you know, today, you know, you pick people, you know, to be your friend based on whether or not you vibe with their personality. but then you actually co-evolve together over time. And I think ChatGPT is going to be similar where I think we can make it much easier to pick a starting point that you find appealing.

57:04But from there, it's going to have to be customization that is pretty personal to you.

57:08Alex Heath:All right, Nick, we'll have to leave it there. We'll have you back on. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Appreciate it.

57:18Alex Heath:Thanks again to Nick Turley for joining the show. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or what else you'd like us to cover, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at the verge.com. We also have a tick tock and an Instagram. Check those out at decoder pod. If you like decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe to the verge, which gets you access to all of our stories and newsletters, including the one I author called command line. Decoder is a production of the verge and is part of the Vox media podcast network.

57:48Alex Heath:Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick stat. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. The Dakota music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next time.

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