AI’s third era: the rise of persistent AI coworkers | Tara Seshan (OpenAI’s product lead)
In a Nutshell
Tara Seshan describes AI's third era: persistent AI coworkers that act as teammates, handling work at higher abstraction levels while humans provide steering and direction. The key to building in this fast-moving market is staying 2-3 months ahead of model capabilities—neither building for current limits nor a year out—and operating through rapid empirical testing rather than theoretical planning. The competitive advantage shifts to human ambition, opinionation, and expression, as the gap between what AI enables and what people actually attempt is the biggest constraint on progress.
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The first era of AI products was chat. The second era involves products working with agents. The third era, which may come soon, is working with a persistent co-worker who is able to get things done with you.
There is an overhang between what AI is capable of and what we are actually doing with it. It is hard to understand what will emerge in the future. You fail if you build for where the models are now. You fail if you build for where you think the models will be in a year. Both outcomes are equally wrong. The only way to build is 2 to 3 months ahead.
Being prolific and empirical is way more important than being academic or theoretical. Rather than writing out some long reasoning doc, the approach is to get to something that can be tried out and tested with users as fast as possible. It feels like not only are we able to be more ambitious, we almost need to be more ambitious, which is not natural for a lot of people.
Elevating others' ambitions or reminding them of what is possible is a huge part of the product management role.
Tara Seshan has been at OpenAI for just about a year. In most places this would be a very short amount of time, but in AI time it is like a lifetime.
Many things about working at OpenAI felt familiar because she had worked at other high growth, high talent, high intensity, hyperscaling mode places before. The part that actually felt most surprising is that OpenAI is not founder-led in the traditional sense. Everyone inside the company, especially in their area, is in essence kind of a founder to some extent.
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