OpenAI’s Head of Design: This is the best time in history to be a designer | Ian Silber

Ian Silber: Engineers have 10 or sometimes like 100x their productivity but our design team hasn't because the design process still takes time. It's still sometimes you have to try a bunch of things and throw them out. Still very messy and fluid. We had a podcast with head of design cloud code Jenny when she talked about there's been this traditional design process prototype mock test research iterate and now there's just no time for that.

Ian Silber: We found that like just by sort of supporting that excitement to explore that people feel less pressure. It's not like you need to change the way you work but it's more about encouraging exploration. And when we've done that... they're so excited because they have so much more ability to be creative, to express themselves, to try bad ideas and throw them out. You can just like really move through lots of different ideas and it becomes this incredible way to create and the things that I'm seeing from my team the bar is raising the the thinking is getting stronger the more that they're using these tools.

Ian Silber: Everything we're doing is trying to design something that hasn't existed before, right? If you look at great products that have come out in the last 10 20 years or whatever, right? It's like all of a sudden, you know, take the iPhone, we're designing for multi-touch. And that opened up like this whole new interaction paradigm. And there's no training data for that, right? You have to you're kind of really trying to understand this new thing, right? And then you had something like Instagram that was like really embracing the fact that everybody had mobile phones. And then Snapchat, I think, is another good example of great design and that it was kind of a maybe people thought strange sort of interaction design, but it completely flipped on its head the way people might want to communicate with each other. And to me that is like great design. It's like truly understanding the people that like people have this problem or there's this unmet need and I'm going to build it in this unique way.

Ian Silber: Systems thinking is becoming more and more important and especially as you're in our world we're trying to build the super intelligence that has all these different capabilities and we need to think more about the underlying primitives that we can build that can kind of build on top of each other, right? This is something that I think like Notion did really well early on was like we're going to build these building blocks, right? And then like everything kind of is composable. I think that's becoming really important too as you think about like well we don't want to build all these sort of one-off siloed experiences. We want to be able to build and ship systems that can build on top of each other so that when someone goes and uses our product it feels like one cohesive simple thing and the model can reason about how it can pull all these things together. So that idea of really understanding the system and thinking about that is becoming even more important especially because it's kind of complex of all the things that it could possibly do.

Ian Silber: Systems thinking is becoming more and more important... we're trying to build the super intelligence that has all these different capabilities and we need to think more about the underlying primitives that we can build that can kind of build on top of each other... we don't want to build all these sort of one-off siloed experiences. We want to be able to build and ship systems that can build on top of each other so that when someone goes and uses our product it feels like one cohesive simple thing and the model can reason about how it can pull all these things together.

Ian Silber: We have vastly different audiences, really really different... you have someone who's using this to help them come up with the recipe to eat tonight. Or brainstorm their next haircut. And then there's somebody who's like transforming the way they're doing farming... we believe in this idea of this sort of capability overhang where the vast majority of the people are getting a sliver of the true value that they could out of the product... we make sure to focus on creating a extremely simple, streamlined experience for many people. And then we put all of the cutting edge stuff and make sure that's really accessible for the people that care.

Ian Silber: Generally what we've seen is that we believe in this idea of this sort of capability overhang where the vast majority of the people are getting a sliver of the true value that they could out of the product. That's not necessarily a bad thing. They're still getting tons of value. But we found that like we make sure to focus on creating an extremely simple, streamlined experience for many many people. And then we put like all of the cutting edge stuff. We also make sure to give that and make sure that's like really accessible for the people that care. The challenge of course is like not necessarily overindexing and sort of putting something that people might not understand in front of a billion users. So, but generally what we've seen is we can experiment early with the people that really care... And eventually what we think about this a lot in design is like things will truly become for billions of users when they don't have to like think about a switch or a mode or anything like that. And so we know that eventually it has to kind of get distilled into that main experience.