OpenAI's Consumer Product Miss
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Garry Tan shares a story about how OpenAI almost didn't release ChatGPT as a consumer product.
"The wild thing is, even with OpenAI - they did everything right. GPT-3 was very impressive, 3.5 was even more, 4 was incredible, but they were going to just put it behind an API. Explicitly for many years, OpenAI was supposed to be a research lab, not a product company.
It took relatively herculean efforts by product people inside OpenAI to even release ChatGPT, which turned out to be the greatest consumer launch maybe in the history of consumer launches."
Garry Tan
President & CEO, Y Combinator
Hi, I'm Garry Tan. I live in San Francisco.
Find me on X at https://x.com/garrytan
I am President and CEO of Y Combinator. I was a partner there from 2011 to 2015.
I started a venture capital fund called Initialized Capital. It has just over $3.2B under management, usually funding folks very early (seed and Series A) often when it is just a few people just starting out.