Karina Nguyen
AI Researcher at OpenAI (formerly Anthropic)
Karina Nguyen is an AI researcher at OpenAI where she helped build Canvas, Tasks, and the o1 chain-of-thought model. Prior to OpenAI, she was at Anthropic where she led post-training and evaluation for Claude 3 models and built the 100K context window document upload feature. She was also an engineer at the New York Times and a designer at Dropbox and Square.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Karina Nguyen provides a rare inside look at building AI products at OpenAI, where she helped create Canvas, Tasks, and the o1 model. She explains why she switched from engineering to research after realizing models would become great at coding, and argues that creative thinking and aesthetic taste will be the most durable human skills as AI continues to improve at execution tasks.
Leadership Principles
- → Creative thinking will be the most valuable skill as AI gets better at execution — generate many ideas and filter through them
- → Switch to where the frontier is moving — she moved from engineering to research after realizing models would become great at coding
- → It is really hard to teach models aesthetics and visual design — human taste remains essential
Notable Quotes
"When I first came to Anthropic I was like, 'Oh my God, I really love front-end engineering.' And then I realized Claude is getting better at front-end, better at coding. I think Claude can develop new apps. That's why I switched to research."
— On why she moved from engineering to AI research after seeing model capabilities improve
"Creative thinking — you want to generate a bunch of ideas and filter through them. It's actually really, really hard to teach the model how to be aesthetic or really good visual design or how to be extremely creative in the way they write."
— On the skills that will be most valuable as AI improves at execution
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