Blaine Billingsley: OpenAI designer on the collaboration problem AI hasn't solved yet, and why the best way to have influence is to be influenced

It's interesting, your multidisciplinary background and following your curiosity and hunches.

There seems to be these trends in you should definitely study the liberal arts and explore a lot of things, and then it's like Peter Thiel paying people to drop out because college is not worth it, and you should just study coding.

And then, whoops, actually coding is not very valuable because AI solves that.

I'm curious what your current perspective is, looking back on your origins studying comparative religion, music.

Some people would say, like, "Hey, these are disciplines that are not very lucrative, not worth pursuing," and yet, here we are in a place where seeing the connections between different ideas is so valuable.

What's the value of multidisciplinary thinking today?

That question came up basically throughout my whole life.

While I was in college, even my professors are like, "What are you doing, dude? Why are you studying this? Don't be like me," you know? [chuckles] And I never really thought about it, for better or worse.

I really liked school, and I really liked learning, and so foolishly, I followed whatever I was interested in.

I would only take classes that I was excited to go to.

It's easy for me to say with the privilege of hindsight and having a career now, but I do think focusing on getting really good at something, like a skill, in my case, it was music, and then later design, is just good for your brain.

It teaches you how to develop excellence in a craft, and I think everybody should do that.

I also think that studying other human beings in any capacity, whether it's art history or whether it's religion like I did or history or whatever, almost everything we do involves people, and so trying to understand people and how they are different and how they're the same all over the world, it's always been a well that I have pulled from in my career, and I can't really imagine not having studied that.

There's no alternative reality in my mind where I did finance or I did some more technical degree because those are things that you can kind of learn.

In my point of view, I, I can learn how to write code or I can learn how to use design tools on my own or from one person.

The experience of getting to talk about how humans are is actually hard to get that forum, and it's a really invaluable experience to spend four years philosophizing about human nature with other people who are also interested in it.

Throughout your career, have you felt like you look at things differently than your peers?

Some of them, for sure.

[chuckles] I won't maybe be so bold as to say I've got a totally unique perspective, but I do think I was drawn to mentors who resonated with some of the values that I had already.

Like, I remember early on when I worked on Gmail, I was still really pretty junior, and I didn't really know how to present work or how to pitch work at a big company, and I remember the head of product there just said, "Tell me a simple human story.

I don't need to hear all the stats.

I don't need to hear the business impact.

I just want you to tell me a really simple story about how a person has a problem and we're gonna make it better." And I think I was drawn to that team and that work, and I stayed there for a long time because that's already naturally how I like to think about product and about designing software, where there's a lot of other people that have really successful approaches that are very, very different.

I do think it's a different way to do it.

I don't think there's, like, any better or worse way.