Chatbots are not the final interface: OpenAI’s Head of Design on what’s next | Ian Silber

Ian Silber: Engineers have 10 or sometimes like 100x their productivity uh but our design team hasn't right because the design process still takes time. It's still sometimes you have to try a bunch of things and throw them out right versus maybe working with a coding agent you ask it to do something it's pretty binary now at this point it usually sort of gets it pretty well. Um, and but the design process is really still very messy and fluid and you think you have a great idea and you try it and it sucks and then you try it again and it sucks and then you you give it to you know users or internal you get internal feedback and it's wrong and you still have to go through that arduous and kind of messy but really fun process.

Ian Silber: Maybe one way to put it is I think it already is an incredible um product designer. [laughter] Um it it really is actually already great. The cool thing about it though is it's accessible to every single person. Um, and it's a tool that anybody can use. I do think it's really good. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's like the best visual designer or best at, you know, uh, information hierarchy or or typography or even, you know, user experience and interaction design. It's not necessarily like the best at any of those.

Ian Silber: Truly understanding what people need. um you know I mean the human uh feedback loop of watching people use something and and understanding that um the you know inventing something new um I think uh and then of course there's just the pure like human kind of take right like oh somebody made this somebody had a point of view about this um I just think that I do think that will stand out more and more and I think that that's like an important thing for a designer to like really hone is like what is my point of view? What who am I building this for and why?

Ian Silber: There are certain features for chatbt where we really obsess and we really spend a lot of time. We try a million things and we throw out you know uh we try 100 things we throw out 99. We finally ship one. um you know uh the like uh the or like the composer is like changing every single day and we try many things we throw them out but or like and you could take that for many different things within chbt um and then there are other things like codecs where um you know I don't know I mean the super app is a good example where we definitely are just like trying stuff really quick I think that we really embrace building in public [laughter] which is a different way of working.