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00:00Joining us right now is Ed Ludlow. He is at that conference and he's joined right now by the CEO of Open Openai, Brad Lightcap. Ed. Yeah, And the headline is the ability to use third party apps of interactivity. And the profound impact in the market was simply those namechecks saw their stocks move in a significant way. Delighted to speak once again with Brad Lightcap. That it's as simple as that. Is that really, you know, the ability to be within chat, JPT and access Spotify or Figma as two examples when you were discussing the idea of that an API access with with those partners, was it a tough negotiation to get them on board with the idea? No, I mean, we've seen enthusiasm for this from the beginning. You remember way back when we lost something called plug ins. Right. Back in the early days of chatbots, this was one of our first attempts to start to build an ecosystem around chatbots so that chatbot can start to engage with and interact with the applications that are important to you and your personal life. And it worked. And now we really have a much richer surface through MCP and other protocols to be able to bring applications into Techy beat and for really to allow you to engage with chatbots in the kind of work around work. Right. It's is the contextual aspect of I'm doing X or I need Y, I'm on a road trip and I want to know what playlist would go well with this in the context of my broader trip planning that allows you now to kind of use chat CBT to solve that higher level task and then also integrate apps contextually to solve those specific problems. We're in a place where chatbots has become more of an operating system. Whether that was your ambition or not, is that where you want to take it to be an OS and a developer driven platform? It's almost like an app store, you know, on paper based on what you announced this afternoon. Well, we've always thought of chatbots as like a super assistant. We never set out to build a chat bot. We always wanted to build something that was really true to you and what your preferences are, what your goals are that could actually help you achieve more. And so I think part of that is chatbot having an appreciation and understanding of the applications in your life that are important. And I think enabling that kind of connectivity and interoperability makes chats. You get richer, also enables a lot of pass through for people to be able to engage with apps they love it as well as new apps to pass through. Best is interesting. Were there concerns with some of those technology companies are partnering with that it would take traffic away from their own domains? No, I think mostly people are really focused on building into new interfaces. Right. This is just like mobile in some sense, where you have a new interface, you have a new form factor. People are going to want to use mobile form factors on the GO, and apps like Spotify in some ways exist almost because they really now mobile. And so we think actually there's an opportunity for builders to create entirely new applications that are even native to catch up. And of course, for services, you love to be able to benefit there too. Is there a revenue sharing agreement with those third parties whose apps are accessible through chat JPT? So we're going to figure out the economics of this over time. As you know, we're brand new here. Plug ins was the first version of this, and that was even an experiment. And so, like everything at opening, I would take this very experimental mindset to making sure we get it right. But the idea is we do we do want to build something that's useful for developers. And of course, there's going to be have to be some exchange in there of of economics and value, and we'll have to figure out to get that right. You have 800 million active weekly users you announced on stage. Actually, Greg Brockman told me that at 8:00 this morning and maybe we missed that, that it's a significant milestone all the time. I'm asked by all kinds of people. Do we have any sense of within that 800 million? How many are base level three users and how many a premium level paid subscribers? Yeah, we have a very healthy funnel of people that choose to pay for its activity. You know, it's it's surpassed where my expectations, frankly, were. And people have this kind of conception that consumers tend to not pay for software. And, you know, similar even to what I was saying before around how do you co-develop the product alongside the business model? Chachi But he's a great example of that, where the subscription model I think has been really a testament to how valuable it is for more users than I think we expected to, to be willing to pay for it. So we don't, I think, disclose the exact number, but it's a it's a healthy amount and more every day. Opening I in the beginning went after the consumer for users aggressively. You are now very focused on the enterprise business. What is the strategy for that and how do you prioritize your enterprise business? Yeah, I'm glad you asked about that. So really today's announcements actually I think target what are an important set of use cases for the enterprise things we've been hearing enterprises ask us about now for some time. So specifically, one is it we now have an ability for enterprises to build agents in a much more visual, much more intuitive way. You've heard us say 2025 has been the year of agents. We think that's. True Codex has been a great example for us of that. Our coating agent now available through through an API. Also, the lead time to make software is a lot shorter. It's gotten a lot shorter. I think you saw today we demoed live demo at I think three or four different things that we've built in real time. We expect that to continue to be the trend. Things like Agent Builder allow enterprises to be able to build a genetic experiences, powerful, identical experiences on the go, you know, iteratively and connect it into the tools and and sources of information that matter for the business. The data point that jumped out at me is your API is handling more than 6 billion tokens per minute and that helps explain why the AMD deal you know which is focused on inference. You are involved in all of these domains of the company. I've already asked, Greg, but I've got to ask you, how are you going to finance yet another infrastructure project? Like is there going to be some debt here specifically for the AMD capacity? And how do you move quickly to get it online? Yeah, well, the high level thing is we are tremendously compute constrained. It feels like we're in this kind of recurring theme of being compute constrained. And I think the reason for that is the answer to the question you ask, which is demand, right? We see there are multiples of demand that are latent and untapped from what we we have today. And even today, obviously, by any standard, demand in revenue growth has been torrid in its in its pace. And so really we have to invest ahead of that. And I think that's going to be the rate limiter for us to be able to go capture demand, whether it's consumer or enterprise, and for us to be able to build new models, parallel lives, more experiences, more product experiences, and then enable users specifically to be able to use those products more actively in their daily life at work and at home. So, you know, even things like, sorry, the app we just launched, we wish we could invite more people on to it now, but we just need more compute. So the AMD deal, we're excited about being, you know, directionally a way for us to do that. I've got to ask about the report that open air closed secondary or the ability for employees to sell shares at a $500 billion valuation. I already asked you this question, but what is the metric? We're supposed to judge your success by the $500 billion valuation, the 6 billion tokens per minute to you, Brad, what is it? For me, it's it's actually kind of a metric that we we talked about is is tokens. It's you mentioned 6 billion tokens per minute on our API. That is the purest for me. The kind of essence of, of utility is that consumption metric. And, and so we've actively tracked that metric to see how people's consumption of AI has grown over time. And you see this happen in amazing ways. So things like Codex, for example, we've seen grow ten X since August purely on consumption of tokens around coding, and you start to see that same pattern emerge across multiple lanes of use and across multiple areas of work. And that's the metric I look at because if that number is going up, it means people are using us for more things and that's the ultimate goal.

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2025 Is the Year of AI Agents: OpenAI COO

Brad Lightcap, OpenAI COO, says the partnership with AMD will help OpenAI build agents in a more visual way and create useful tools for developers. He speaks with Ed Ludlow on “The Close” from San Francisco. (Source: Bloomberg)

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