Sherwin Wu
Head of Engineering, OpenAI Platform. On 4 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
engineeroperatorexecutive@sherwinwu ↗LinkedIn ↗
Sherwin Wu is the Head of Engineering for OpenAI's developer platform and API products. He previously worked as a software engineer at Quora, Opendoor, and Palantir.
4shows
3appearances
55statements
16resolved
14supported
0contradicted
88%fully supported
Everything Sherwin Wu said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Wu: GPT-5 Pro solves previously unsolved problems but takes ten minutes
“These like unsolved problems that none of the other models could handle, you throw out a GPT-V Pro, and it just like one shots it is pretty crazy, but the trade-off here is you're waiting for 10 minutes.”
Wu: GPT-5 solves coding problems no other AI model can solve
“Especially for like coding use cases, especially at the, you know, at the, when it thinks for a while, it'll usually solve problems that no other models can solve.”
Wu: GPT-5 enables single-generation code completions in the Codex CLI
“The second thing, honestly, is, is GPT-V. Like, I just think GPT-V really allows the product to shine. It's, you know, at the end of the day, this is kind of a, this is a product that really is dependent on the model, underlying model. And when you have to, yo…”
Wu: OpenAI is currently operating in a GPU crunch
“We are in a GPU crunch, so we'll see how, you know, how long that goes.”
Wu: OpenAI engineering managers write all their code using Codex
“And so I know for myself and some of the other EMs,
Engineering managers at OpenAI.
all of our code is written by Codex at this point.”
Wu: Coding agent failures are usually caused by missing context or underspecification
“A lot of the time when the coding agent is not doing what you want, it's usually a problem with context and just, like, information that you've given it. It's just either underspecified or there's just not enough information around how to do something availabl…”
Wu: Tech-adjacent non-engineers drive the most enthusiasm for enterprise AI adoption
“The pattern I've seen is it tends to be these like software engineering adjacent, like basically technical people, but are not software engineers. I think those are the ones who get tend to get most excited around this. It's like, you know, maybe the, it's lik…”
Wu: Enterprise audio AI is hugely underrated compared to text coding tools
“Audio, especially in the enterprise and in a business setting, I think is a hugely underrated domain still. Like, everyone talks about coding. It's all text. But we're talking in audio. A lot of the world's business is done via audio. A lot of services and ope…”
Sherwin Wu: AI business process automation is massively underrated in Silicon Valley
“And so I'm just extremely bullish on this general category of, like, And I think it's underrated because it's so different from what we think about in Silicon Valley, people tend to not think about it. But how can we apply AI and some of the tools and framewor…”
Wu: OpenAI was first to launch stateful responses API
“Obviously we were the first one to launch responses API, but like a couple of other people have kind of adopted, I think Grok has it in their API. I think I saw LMSYS just did something”
OpenAI integrates with OpenRouter for multi-provider evals
“We have a really cool setup with Open Router, where we're working with them, and then you can bring your Open Router setup. And then with that, you can actually, you know, you write your evals using our data sets tool, or use our data set tool to create a bunc…”
AI industry has completed only 10% of necessary agent evaluation progress
“I actually think agent evals is still a work in progress. So I think we've, like, made maybe 10% of the progress that we need here.”
Prompt engineering has grown more entrenched despite predictions of its demise
“I feel like two years ago, people were like, oh, at some point, prop, like, prompting's gonna be dead. Like, you know, and it's like, you know... And if anything, it is, like, become more and more entrenched. And I think that, you know, there's this interestin…”
Apple Siri routes requests based on the user's ChatGPT subscription tier
“If you sign into your ChatGPT account the Siri integration will actually use your subscription status to decide what type of model to use when it passes things over to ChatGPT. And so if you're you know just a free user you get, you know, the free model. But i…”
Wu: Cheaper inference does not cut developer spending due to surging demand
“What we realized is as we make it cheaper, you know, the demand for that goes up even more, and you end up, you know, still spending quite a bit”
OpenAI Codex successfully one-shots entire features 30% to 40% of the time
“What a lot of the interns would do is just, like, full YOLO mode, like, trust it to, like, write the whole feature. And it, like, it doesn't work. It, like, doesn't work sometimes. But, like, I don't know, like, 30, 40% of the time it just, like, one-shots it.”
Wu: ChatGPT is roughly the fifth largest website in the world
“ChatGPT obviously is really, really, really big now.
[233] Sherwin Wu: It's I think like the fifth largest website in the world.”
Wu: The majority of the startup ecosystem builds on OpenAI's API
“The biggest product that we have is obviously our developer platform, which is our API.
[271] Sherwin Wu: You know, many developers, you know, the majority of the startup ecosystem builds on top of this, as well as a lot of digital natives, Fortune 500 enterpr…”
Wu: Enterprise AI Evals Must Be Built Bottom-Up by Operators
“And evals also, oftentimes, need to come up bottom up. Right? Because all of these things are kind of in people's heads, in the actual operator's heads. Like, it's actually very hard to have a top-down mandate of, like, you got, like, this is how the evals sho…”
Wu: Product users often prefer instant substandard AI answers over 10-minute waits
“As a product builder, there's a latency, there's a real latency trade-off that you have to deal with where, you know, your user might not be happy waiting 10 minutes for, like, the best answer in the world. It might be more okay with the substandard answer and…”
Wu: Reinforcement fine-tuning is an order of magnitude more powerful than SFT
“Reinforcement fine tuning introduces like RL or reinforcement learning to this loop. Way more complex, way more finicky, but an order of magnitude more powerful.”
Wu: GPT-4 already existed internally at OpenAI by September 2022
“The first one was right when I joined the company in September, 20, 22. We, it was pre-TiGPT. But at the time, GPT-IV already existed internally.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Sherwin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 a16zLEDGER | Head of Engineering, OpenAI Platform | 0 | 0 | 50% 2/4 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Head of Engineering, OpenAI Platform | 1 | 24 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
 BG2LEDGER | Head of Engineering, OpenAI Platform | 1 | 19 | 100% 6/6 | full record on BG2 Pod → |
 LATENT SPACELEDGER | Head of Engineering, OpenAI Platform | 1 | 12 | 100% 5/5 | full record on Latent Space → |