From an Engineer at OpenAI: How to build OpenAI’s next 100M user product

I’m an engineer at OpenAI on the Bard team, working on an app that’s gaining traction with 100M+ users. We’ve figured out many things that are hard to anticipate until you’re on the inside – but that will soon be crucial as you build the next wave of OpenAI apps.<br><br>In this post, I want to share the knowledge that’s hard to know from the outside, so you can go build OpenAI’s next 100M user product. Here are the key takeaways:<br><br>1. **OpenAI’s next 100M user product is a consumer messaging app – not an enterprise productivity tool**. The OpenAI user base is shifting from power users to average consumers. We’ve now built APIs that support 1B+ queries/day. Today, we have 50M+ users – in 6 months we’ll have 1B+ users. We’re effectively building consumer messaging apps now.<br>2. **OpenAI’s APIs have improved dramatically – but basic functionality is still hard to use**. OpenAI’s APIs are amazing, but still have random errors, require custom work, and have frustrating latency. You’ll need to make your app resilient to failure, flexible for customization, and forgiving of latency. To build an OpenAI app, you must also build an OpenAI “retry and handle failure” service.<br>3. **OpenAI’s APIs have become really expensive**. OpenAI’s APIs have gone from cheap to really expensive. If you’re building an app that’s truly free to use, be prepared for the cost to escalate quickly as you scale. We’ve already seen cases where app developers have shut down their app because they couldn’t pay for the OpenAI API usage.<br>4. **Generative AI will become a commodity – so it’s not enough to just offer generative AI**. Generative AI is getting commoditized. While you can still build an app that’s just generative AI, you’ll eventually need to offer more to win. Think about building around other OpenAI APIs, or combining OpenAI with other exciting new tech.<br>5. **ChatGPT is the best content moderator on the planet – but OpenAI effectively won’t police your app**. If you want to build a social app with OpenAI, you’ll need to moderate your own content. OpenAI has amazing content moderation capabilities, but won’t help much unless you hit a critical mass. If you build a successful app, expect to deal with users that will try to get around OpenAI’s moderation rules – decide ahead of time how you’ll handle such situations.<br><br>By knowing these things, you can build a better app, and avoid some major pitfalls. I’d love to hear what you think, and I’m happy to answer questions!<br><br>**TL;DR: OpenAI engineer on what’s hard to know from the outside, but that will be crucial as you build OpenAI’s next 100M user product.**