Ty Geri always tells ChatGPT: "Please impress me."
"You shouldn't have to," said Geri, a product manager at OpenAI. "The models should try to impress you regardless."
Geri joined OpenAI last year after working at Google on AI search products, like its AI overviews. The 28-year-old from San Francisco is on the front lines of AI and shared with Business Insider how he uses it most effectively at work.
That includes asking it to be impressive — though he wasn't sure it helped much. "It could definitely just be in my head at this point," he said.
His other strategy: long rants. "When I'm thinking something through, I put on dictation, and I ramble," he said. He described ChatGPT as his "partner," one that can sort through his thoughts and find what's "sticking."
Geri will enter one of OpenAI's meeting rooms, turn on his work phone, and start talking to it. "Some people probably think I'm doing something important, but I'm just talking to ChatGPT Work," he said.
He shares the strategy with another OpenAI alum: Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of the lab who later worked at Tesla and recently joined Anthropic. Karpathy wrote in July that he liked 10-minute voice sessions with an LLM that were a "total mess, anything goes, full stream of consciousness."
Still, Geri said he hoped users eventually wouldn't need to have prompting strategies at all. There were areas that OpenAI needed to get better at — "Our writing quality, I think we need to improve," he said — but things should just work.
Product manager gigs are common across tech, offering high salaries without requiring engineering experience. Still, the role is rapidly evolving in the age of AI, as PMs gain access to new skills through vibe-coding tools.
The primary job of a product manager hasn't changed, Geri said: to "care the most about the product." What has changed, then, is the PM's ability to "take action," he said.
"Once upon a time, a PM would strictly have to work with a data scientist," he said. "Now, it's so much more fluid and dynamic."
While the products are "empowering," Geri said, they also "take away a lot of excuses that we used to have." PMs could once say that they didn't understand a certain stage of the engineering process, or that they didn't get all the technicalities. No more. His advice to other PMs: "Don't restrict what you can understand or can do anymore. You really can do anything."
At OpenAI, PMs are often shipping code, he said. Jobs don't end and start in specific, discrete places. People may have "spikes," sure, but they all share a common goal and means of achieving it.
"Our job is to care about the user and bring the best experience to the user," he said. "We should do whatever it takes to make that happen."