Wu: Blindly following customer requests leads to AI product local maxima
Sherwin Wu · OpenAI’s head of platform engineering on the next 12-24 months of AI | Sherwin Wu · Feb 12, 2026 · at 47:10
Sherwin Wu, Head of Platform Engineering at OpenAI, discusses why traditional customer-led product development can fail when underlying AI model capabilities improve rapidly.
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“Because the field is changing so much at any point in time, you know, a lot of people are kind of in this local, local maximum. And if you just blindly listen to your customers, they'll, they'll be like, yeah, I want a better vector store. Like I want a better I want a better, you know, agent framework for this. And if you had just kind of only chased down that path, it actually would have led you to, you know, build something that again is the local maxima.”
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