TechCrunch:I know you’re a member of the technical staff. Is it right to say that you’re the product lead for Codex and Work?
Sottiaux:I lead all of core products—that is API, agent infrastructure, enterprise, all of ChatGPT, which includes ChatGPT Work, but also ChatGPT classic, and then everything that is Codex as well.
Q: Am I right in thinking you report to Greg Brockman?
Sottiaux:Yeah, Greg. I like to say that everyone reports to Greg at the end of the day.
Q: Why is ChatGPT Work so important to OpenAI?
Sottiaux:We wanted to bring the power of coding agents to everyone, and so this is an exercise in taking something that was made for technical people, and then packaging it in a way that is like safe and delightful to use, but also you can use on the go on mobile, on web, and making it available to as broad of a population as possible. This is why we launched it as part of the Plus plan as well, which is only $20 a month, and the amount of value you get out of it is quite incredible. So it’s like that’s like what we were pursuing. It’s like “make this technology available to the broadest population possible.”
Q: Analysts say that there’s an important economic motivation here, that OpenAI needs to own the application relationship with the user.
Sottiaux:The more value and the more utility that we generate for users, the more they will be willing to also pay for some part of that utility, and that’s how we’ve always seen ChatGPT as well. It’s like I’m bringing so much utility to you as a user that you just sort of sit there and you’re like, “of course I want to pay $20 bucks a month for this,” because you know the value that you get is so much more.
Q: How important could this technology be, in terms of winning over public opinion towards AI?
Sottiaux:The way that I view it is, we have a role in bringing everyone along with this technology, and so there’s this: how do you do diffusion? Codex was built for a forgiving technical audience, where we were making some of these capabilities available very early on, and now we are at a level of maturity of this technology where we feel it is the right step to diffuse it to a much broader audience, and then teach everyone … this is much more than getting help on writing or getting help on some personal advice. In this new factor, ChatGPT can actually do entire very complicated tasks for you all autonomously in a way that is delightful and safe. The mission of OpenAI is to bring everyone along.
TC:How you think about that transition and when the moment is right to let the model take the lead versus putting buttons or a user interface in front of people?
Sottiaux:The essence of what we’re trying to do is building extremely capable models, and then figuring out the most simple and delightful way to bring them into your life so that you get tremendous utility from it. And in order to do that, you need to get out of the way, almost, of the model, and you need to just let it express itself and be able to harness all of the utility that it can provide to you. … [A] minimal product surface, just delightful simplicity, a way to engage with humans that is very natural.