Sherwin Wu, Head of Engineering for OpenAI's Developer Platform, discusses how developer focus has evolved as model capabilities move toward agentic workflows and tool usage.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sherman Wu: AI industry will shift toward specialized models
“It's, like, becoming increasingly clear that there will be room for a bunch of specialized models. There will likely be a proliferation of other types of models.”
Assertion Supported
Sherman Wu: ChatGPT has reached 800 million weekly active users
“The first party app is a really great way to get, you know it was like eight hundred million wows or whatever now.”
Disclosure
Sherman Wu: OpenAI previously believed a single model would replace fine-tuning
“I remember like, even with an open AI, the thinking was that there would be like one model that rules them all. And it's like, why would you, I mean, like this kind of goes to the fine tuning API product. It's like, why would you even have a fine tuning produc…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sherman Wu: OpenAI prices its API services using a cost-plus model
“Internally, one thing we do is, is we always make sure that we actually price our usage-based pricing from a, like, cost-plus perspective. Like, we're actually just, like, trying to make sure that we're being responsible from a margin perspective.”
Insight
Sherman Wu: Usage-based pricing naturally approximates outcome-based pricing in AI
“On outcome-based pricing it sounds very appealing, like, if it can work, but one thing that we've started realizing is it actually ends up correlating quite a bit with usage-based pricing, especially with test time compute. Like, if the thing is just, like, th…”
What-if
Sherman Wu: Replicating OpenAI's flagship model inference performance is extremely hard
“Even if we just like, you know, open source, like if we just literally open sourced GPT-V or something, it would be really, really hard to inference it at the level that we are able to get it to do.”