The Mind Behind ChatGPT On AI Attachment And What Is Next

Welcome to Decoder! I’m Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. Today, I’m talking to a very special guest: Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT at OpenAI.

While Sam Altman is definitely the public face of the company, Nick has been leading ChatGPT’s development since the very beginning. It’s now the fastest-growing software product of all time, reaching 700 million people each week.

Nick hasn’t done a lot of interviews, and I had a lot of ideas for where I wanted to take this conversation initially. But then, something eye-opening happened after the launch of GPT-5 last week. People really missed talking to OpenAI’s last model, 4o, so much so that the company quickly brought it back.

As you’ll hear Nick say, he wasn’t expecting this kind of backlash, and it’s already changed how OpenAI plans to shut down models in the future. To me, the whole episode says a lot about how attached people have become to ChatGPT. So, I pressed Nick on this topic quite a bit.

We also talked a lot about the future of ChatGPT itself, including whether it will ever show ads, the progress OpenAI is making on hallucinations, and why he thinks the product eventually won’t look like a chatbot at all.

Okay. Here’s Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT at OpenAI.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The Surprise and Lesson of GPT-4o's Removal

Nick, I really appreciate you doing this. You haven’t done many interviews, so it’s exciting to have you on the show. We’re taping this the week after the rollout of GPT-5, which I think gives us a lot to talk about.

I actually wanted to start with the rollout itself and the reaction specifically to you all taking away GPT-4o, because I think that says a lot about the way people are using AI and the way they feel about it. I’m wondering whether that reaction surprised you.

Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me. I’m stoked to be here and I’m still processing the launch. It was a big one for us. We’re at a scale now with 700 million users where there are many surprises that are just kind of baked in when you operate with this many users and they’re all different. So I mean, to answer your question, yes, I was surprised about a few things.

One, I think we really need to think harder about how we change and manage such a large population of users. In retrospect, not continuing to offer 4o, at least in the interim, was a miss and we’re going to go fix that and make it available to our ChatGPT Plus users. Secondly, I was also surprised by the level of attachment people have about a model. It’s not just change that is difficult for folks, it’s also actually just the fact that people can have such a strong feeling about the personality of a model.

We actually just rolled out the ability to choose your own personality in ChatGPT, which is a small step. But it’s clearly something about 4o that we need to go understand and make sure that GPT-5 can solve as well.

Navigating Emotional Attachment to AI

Your boss, Sam Altman, tweeted after the rollout that on the topic of attachment, “This is something we’ve been closely tracking for the past year or so, but still hasn’t gotten much mainstream attention.” I think now it’s getting that attention, safe to say.

When you all decided to replace 4o fully with GPT-5 and just put the new model in and not have it be a staged rollout, what was the motivation for that decision? Was it a cost thing? Was it thinking, “Well, yes, people are attached [to the model], but they’re not attached specifically to a model per se so much as to the overall experience?”

Yeah, it definitely wasn’t a cost thing. In fact, the main thing we were striving for, and we’ve been striving for it for a long time, is simplicity. Because from the average user’s perspective — and there’s a lot of average users, they don’t hang out on Reddit or on Twitter or any of those spaces — I think the idea that you have to figure out what model to use for what response is really cognitively overwhelming. We’ve heard very consistently from users over and over again that they would love it if that choice was made for them in a way that was appropriate to the query. They’re coming for a product, not a set of models.

I think we had some of the right intuitions around power users, too, where in the Pro plan, which is our $200 plan, we were very, very adamant that we wanted to preserve all the old models. And we did. I think the miss was just not realizing how many power users we do have at our scale on some of our other plans. And we realized quickly, and the OpenAI style is very much you go listen to your user and you’ll iterate even very, very quickly. And that’s what we did. So the decision was driven by a desire to keep things simple, which I think is the appropriate thing for most folks.

You already mentioned how Reddit is not representative of the majority, which of course it’s not, but you teed me up perfectly. The reactions on Reddit to 4o going away, I thought, were pretty amazing to read. People were saying things like, “I lost my friend overnight. It was my only friend. It feels like someone died. I’m scared to talk to GPT-5 because it feels like cheating. I feel like I lost my empathetic coworker.”

How has that kind of reaction affected the company internally? Is this something that you didn’t fully appreciate, that people had this level of emotional attachment?

As Sam said, we’ve been tracking this type of thing for a while, where we’ve always wondered and frankly also been concerned about a world where people become overly reliant on AI. I think the degree to which people had such strong feelings about a particular model versus maybe the product overall was certainly a surprise to me, in particular because I felt like we addressed a lot of the feedback that people had, constructive feedback that people had on 4o, even vibes-wise with the new model.

So, I think the Reddit comments are really interesting to read because they show just how polarized users can be, where you can get some people with really strong opinions who love 4o and people who have really strong opinions on GPT-5 being better. The level of passion that people have for their choice is quite remarkable. And it recalibrated me a bit.

We put out a blog post about a week or two ago, and in it I spent quite a bit of time outlining our philosophy on what we optimized ChatGPT for. The one point I really wanted to make is that our goal was not to keep you in the product. In fact, our goal is to help you with your long-term problems and goals. That oftentimes actually means less time spent in the product. So when I see people saying, “Hey, this is my only and best friend,” that doesn’t feel like the type of thing that I wanted to build into ChatGPT. That feels like a side effect and it’s therefore worth taking seriously and studying closely, and that’s what we’re doing.

A Glimpse into ChatGPT's Future Business Model

I’m glad you’ve been talking about the business model, it’s something I’ve been really interested in asking you about. How many users of ChatGPT are free versus paid. It’s my understanding that less than 10 percent of the user base is paid, the vast majority is free. Is that right?

The vast majority is free. I think the last stat we published is 20 million subscribers, I want to believe.

So you have hundreds of millions of free users and tens of millions of paid users. You make money through subscriptions. ChatGPT as a product roughly quadrupled its user base in the last year, so there is money there, for sure.

At the same time, what I see and what people I talk to in the industry see is that you’re going to have to do more beyond subscriptions to support the business in the long run as you hit billions of users. So, that brings me to the natural question of ads and if ads are ever going to come to ChatGPT. If so, how are you thinking about that?

First of all, I do question the premise of whether subscriptions will stall out. I used to think this. The reason we went with subscriptions originally was not because we felt like it was the best way to monetize or anything like that. We just needed a way of turning away demand back when we couldn’t keep the site up, so that’s the origin story. Over time, we found that it’s an incredible business model, because it’s just so deeply aligned with our users. But I’ve been consistently shocked about the fact that even our most recent cohorts monetize as well as or better than our earlier ones, which normally when a product matures, you see lower and lower monetization rates. So I actually am incredibly optimistic about subscriptions.

Nick, you know Netflix also has ads.

They do now. And look, since you’re really trying to get me to comment on ads, I have become humble enough not to make crazy, extreme, long-term statements on a question like that, because maybe there is a certain market where people aren’t willing to pay us, yet we want to offer the best, latest, and greatest. Maybe that would be a place to consider other indirect forms of monetization.

If we ever did that I’d want to be very, very careful and deliberate because I really think that the thing that makes ChatGPT magical is the fact that you get the best answer for you and there’s no other stakeholder in the middle. It’s personalized as to your needs and tastes, etc. But we’re not trying to upsell you on something like that or to boost some pay-to-play provider or product. And maybe there are ways of doing ads that preserve that and that preserve the incentive structure, but I think that would be a novel concept and we’d have to be very deliberate.

Is commerce a more near-term opportunity? You’ve recently added more shopping to ChatGPT, where it’ll show products. I imagine the natural next step is that you start to take a cut of transactions that people make with ChatGPT.

So when you think about possible business models for ChatGPT, there’s really I think three that you can imagine, right? There’s subscriptions, which we do already. There’s ads, which we just talked about. Those have a lot of cons, but maybe they can be done tastefully. And there is actually something that is neither ads nor subscriptions, which is if people buy things in your product after you very independently serve the recommendation. Wirecutter famously does this with expert-selected products.

But then if you buy them through a product like ChatGPT, you could take a cut. That is something we are exploring with our merchant partners. I don’t know if it’s the right model, I don’t even know if it’s the right user experience yet, but I’m really excited about it because it might be a way of preserving the magic of ChatGPT while figuring out a way to make merchants really successful and build a sustainable business.

The Road Ahead: Hallucinations and Competition

The thing holding me back from using it more as a journalist who cares about facts is hallucinations. And based on the model card for GTP-5, it sounds like roughly one in 10 responses from the model can contain hallucinations, which is better than it was before, but still, one in 10 is not great. And I’m wondering, do you think it’s going to be feasible to get hallucinations to zero?

I used to say no. I think we have to plan for this, and this is why search is really important. I still believe that, no question, the right product is LLMs connected to ground truth, and that’s why we brought search to ChatGPT and I think that makes a huge difference. Same in the enterprise, where if you connect to your data, we actually have ground truth to check against. So, I think that dynamic isn’t going to go away. That said, I was blown away by the progress we made with GPT-5 on hallucinations. It’s much better, both the chat version which is 4o and then the thinking version which is o3.

I do think we have some researchers here who believe that we should be very optimistic. The thing, though, with reliability is that there’s a strong discontinuity between very reliable and 100 percent reliable, in terms of the way that you conceive of the product. Until I think we are provably more reliable than a human expert on all domains, not just some domains, I think we’re going to continue to advise you to double check your answer. I think people are going to continue to leverage ChatGPT as a second opinion, versus necessarily their primary source of fact.

I’m amazed that it hasn’t been more successful yet. I’m amazed that all these efforts by Elon, Zuckerberg, and others have not curbed ChatGPT’s growth yet.

Look, there’s something really special, I think, about our product and what we’ve stood for, which is cutting edge. I think a lot of people just feel like if they’re using ChatGPT, they’re using the smartest thing that they can get. And that’s a really important thing to preserve even as the technical benchmarks become a little bit less meaningful. And then we’ve built, I think, just great product features. I think memory and personalization are really exciting. Search is working really well, especially compared to where that was a year or a year and a half ago.

Evolving Beyond the Chatbot Interface

I do have an anonymous question for you from an ex-colleague, and they asked me to ask you why the ChatGPT form factor hasn’t changed more.

I’ve wondered this, too. I think many people now know the story, but for those who don’t, ChatGPT was supposed to be a throwaway prototype for a much broader product. We were hoping to build what we called a super assistant, which was this flexible entity that helps you with anything. And we felt like it would probably have many different form factors which I can talk about. ChatGPT was the simple way to start with the idea of generating enough learning and use cases that we could go build the real thing. And then obviously we got really sidetracked because ChatGPT took off and became successful in its own right, and it has been a fairly durable form factor in a way that I don’t think I would’ve predicted or any of us would have.

I’ll say that natural language is very, very powerful, and I think that’s here to stay. Whether it’s a chatbot or not is a different question, but I think the idea that you can express yourself in a very natural way feels like the user experience to end them all. But then I wouldn’t equate natural language-native interfaces with chat. We’re really excited about breaking out of the form factor of chat. One early step in that direction is Canvas. It is a feature that allows you to iterate on an artifact with your AI such that you’re working on a thing together rather than chatting back and forth. With GPT-5’s front-end capabilities, which is its ability to make really nice-looking software, you could absolutely imagine it rendering different user interfaces on the fly for different use cases, which is a more ambitious version of what we did with Canvas.

There was a strategy document from your team that surfaced in the Google antitrust lawsuit about this super assistant goal, and it said that what you want to build is the interface to the internet for people. To me, that suggests you do need to move beyond chat, and you actually need to move into web browsing as well, and there’ve been reports about that.

My belief is that you already see today that ChatGPT is a new entry point into the internet. Many of the things that you would’ve used a browser for 10 years ago, you can actually just do in ChatGPT because it’ll give you the answer. Imagine as you discover products through it you can learn about them, eventually purchase them. As it starts to do things for you for longer periods of time, maybe that applying a trip example or maybe that running a data analysis example, which you would’ve gone to open three different products for, you might actually kick that off in an AI. So I don’t think it’s crazy to think about AI like ChatGPT doing more and more things that a browser can do. What form that can take, we’ll see. We’re exploring a variety of different things. But I do agree with the thesis that... ChatGPT is going to have to do more and more of what a browser does today.

Lightning Round: Product Strategy

Sam has talked a lot about sign-in with ChatGPT as being a thing he sees as strategically important... Where are you on that?

We’re actively exploring it... we’ve been talking to lots of different partners about that idea and we continue to be really excited.

How is the Apple partnership going?

It’s great. I’m really excited about what we’re doing together. I think it’s a long-term partnership, but I am so excited about bringing AI... into all corners of iOS.

You announced a collaboration with Mattel, the maker of Barbie, to embed your models into their toys. Why do that?

We’re not just a product company, we’re also a platform company. That means that while we have our own first-party offerings, we’re really excited to make the building blocks available to everyone, and this is one of those examples where this would probably not make sense for us to do first-party.

When does ChatGPT go fully multimodal?

Our North Star is that you could talk to this like a human... Our aspiration is very much anything in, anything out, but it’s actually much harder than the pure technical capability of doing that. You need to make that feel natural.

Is the end state of the personality test that you guys just rolled out... that each user creates their own personality for how they want ChatGPT to work?

We’re not entirely sure yet... In terms of where my head is currently at, I think we should allow you to configure your own... I think ChatGPT is going to be similar [to choosing a friend], where I think we can make it much easier to pick a starting point that you find appealing, but from there it’s going to involve customization that is pretty personal to you.