Fedus: John Schulman steered OpenAI toward a general chatbot over narrow tools
Liam Fedus · AI for Atoms: How Periodic Labs is Revolutionizing Materials Engineering with Co-Founder Liam Fedus · Apr 3, 2026 · at 4:34
Liam Fedus, co-founder of Periodic Labs and former OpenAI researcher, discusses internal product debates at OpenAI prior to the release of ChatGPT.
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“And we're all spitballing ideas, like writing bot coding bot. You know, very natural at the time. Some of our least interesting ideas were a meeting bot, so it would just sit in a Google Meet, take notes, and then send out, like, to-dos after. But John Schulman was very opinionated. He's like, we think we should keep it very general. Let's do a chat bot. And that became a large part of the effort for those few months.”
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