The Information's TITV
00:30:47 · Andrew Ambrosino, Akash Pasricha, Ashraf Alkarmi
[00:30:47] S5: Thank you for having me. [00:30:48] S0: Okay. So you gotta tell us. I mean, member of the technical staff, what is your purview of work inside this giant member of the technical staff? [00:30:56] S5: Yes. We've all got kinda the same title here. So I I lead our workspace org, which is ChatGPT work. It is the Codex app and tools for development, and it is ChatGPT space as well. So that kind of group of how you use our application, our products, our models at work is, is what I mostly focus on. [00:31:16] S0: So when I look... When I when I open ChatGPT Codex, I've got, work, I've got sites, I've got docs. I mean, that's that's all under your purview. [00:31:23] S5: Yes. It is. [00:31:24] S0: Okay. [00:31:24] S5: Yes. It is. [00:31:24] S0: So, let's talk about how you're building Codex in a second, and... But I wanna start with the news, which is that you guys made an acquisition. We did. The Pierre Computer Company. [00:31:35] S4: Tell me a [00:31:35] S0: little bit about what it is that Pierre does and why you decided to buy it. [00:31:41] S5: I... We've known Pierre for a long time. We've worked with Pierre. We were, the Codex app was one of the first to use some of Pierre's new technology on the front end. One of the most talented groups of people I've ever known in tech. And so they work on both code storage and libraries for a code review. They're big in open source, community, and we're bringing them in to help us out with some code storage, some, you know, end to end SDLC of of building software and what that means, and I couldn't be more excited.
00:31:41 · Andrew Ambrosino, Akash Pasricha
[00:31:41] S5: I... We've known Pierre for a long time. We've worked with Pierre. We were, the Codex app was one of the first to use some of Pierre's new technology on the front end. One of the most talented groups of people I've ever known in tech. And so they work on both code storage and libraries for a code review. They're big in open source, community, and we're bringing them in to help us out with some code storage, some, you know, end to end SDLC of of building software and what that means, and I couldn't be more excited. [00:32:13] S0: And, I mean, help me understand, when you think about the technical challenges that Pierre shalves Yeah. For you, what were those challenges?
00:32:13 · Akash Pasricha, Andrew Ambrosino
[00:32:13] S0: And, I mean, help me understand, when you think about the technical challenges that Pierre shalves Yeah. For you, what were those challenges? [00:32:24] S5: Yeah. I think, you know, with with these agents, more code is being written than ever at speeds that we're not used to. And some fundamental assumptions about how you build these stacks for code storage do have to change, and code review as well. And, I think we've seen we've seen some needs internally both with Panda, which is our in house source control. And... Source control means means what? Code storage. Okay. Very similar. And, you know, what we're bringing on with Pierre, that in this agentic era, I mean, everybody's kind of rethinking a lot of these base these base pieces of the stack that we all build on. Right? Even things that weren't software before are sort of becoming software. Like our finance team uses a lot of sites, for example, where in in a previous era, they might use Excel for something. And so that site has code that is running that site that they are using and sharing around, and people are doing this many, many times a day or an hour. Right? And so the way that we, store code performantly and scalably is more important than it than it really has ever been. [00:33:28] S0: So when people think of Codestorage, I mean, is this like a a a competitor to GitHub? Are you still using GitHub? Just help us understand that a little bit.
00:33:28 · Akash Pasricha, Andrew Ambrosino
[00:33:28] S0: So when people think of Codestorage, I mean, is this like a a a competitor to GitHub? Are you still using GitHub? Just help us understand that a little bit. [00:33:38] S5: Yeah. GitHub is biggest name in Codestorage. We've been a customer for a long time. We still are a customer. We have our open source repos on GitHub. We interact with the community there, Codex being one of those. GitHub is a great partner. Right. I think what we see internally is just, you know, needs that we wanna kinda play with, experiment with, and and see what we can do here. [00:34:02] S0: Right. So the peer acquisition, again, the the conversation around technical challenges, there's so much that's difficult here in what you're building. I wonder if you can talk about some of the other technical challenges that you're seeing, not because things are going wrong, just things that are really difficult to solve right now. I mean, the conversation that I've had with Dan Shipper many times on my show is what what... What's difficult for the models to do right now. And so I I I... In your capacity, it's kind of interesting. You're building this program that the front end is changing. The back end is changing. Tell me about what... What's hard about it right now.
00:34:41 · Andrew Ambrosino
[00:34:41] S5: Yeah. Yeah. The job has changed a lot. Right? And and I think as we've looked at the... You know, we started the... About a year ago, we started building the Codex app, the original version of this, and the models were very, very different at the time. And so we've kinda seen some of these cycles of how software gets developed and how the models are are, you know, bad at something until they're not. And I think, you know, if you if you look at things like plan mode and goal mode and these kind of, you know, featurettes that we've launched, for software developers, some of them are really meant to be temporary. Some of them are meant to say, hey. You know, in April, the model is good at a lot of this stuff, but it it doesn't keep itself going for a long time. Right? So we introduced goal mode, and goal mode is kind of a more deterministic, more structured feature that says, hey. You know, we're gonna we're gonna prompt the model to keep running until it hits this goal. Right? With newer models, you know, with Astra Right. Goal mode's almost not needed anymore. Right? Because it can keep going. But it's kind of always these arcs of of of things where we're like, hey. We're gonna introduce this, like, little helper here in the software. And at some point, we'll be able to retire it because the model will be able to do that kind of natively. Right? I think where we where we still see the the model's struggle overall across the industry is just, like, what does it mean to maintain a product, in a large product and to take in feedback from everybody and to make decisions about what features to prioritize and and what not to and how to design them. And even though the models are writing most of our code, still, you know, this this this aspect of things is is kind of the challenging part.
00:36:19 · Akash Pasricha, Andrew Ambrosino
[00:36:19] S0: This So is kind of interesting. So so in in your capacity, part of developing the product is sometimes maybe compensating for an area where the model might be trying to make a leap, but it... Maybe it's, you know, it's it's not quite there yet, and so you have to sort of work your way around and introduce something temporary to sort of compensate for that. That's that's kind of an interesting way of doing product development. [00:36:44] S5: It is. It is. And we... The most important thing that we do is get out of the way of the models. Right. And make sure that we are developing software that puts everything that the model can do in the hands of as many people as possible in a way that's as clear as possible. Sometimes this means adding affordances for how to use the model. Right? Adding suggestions, adding proactivity, things like this. Right? Sometimes it means, you know, stripping things out when the model isn't needed anymore. There's this kind of classic thing that, like, model over model. The skills need to change. Right? Because you, you know, you make skills for one and it doesn't work for the other. But, yeah, it's a huge part of the job.