Summary
In less than a decade, OpenAI evolved from a pure research lab into the fastest-growing product in history, scaling from 100 million to 700 million weekly users. This transformation required building an engineering function and culture from scratch, blurring the boundaries between research, product, and infrastructure. Sulman Choudhry, Head of ChatGPT Engineering, shares the organizational design choices, hiring shifts, and cultural bets that enabled unprecedented shipping velocity. He’ll cover what happens when domains collide, how to balance senior talent with AI-native interns, and the real-time architecture changes behind major launches like ChatGPT Images. This is a candid look at the patterns, anti-patterns, and opportunity zones that emerge when you scale AI products at breakneck speed.
Speakers
Sulman leads ChatGPT Engineering at OpenAI, driving the development and scaling of one of the world’s most impactful AI products. He pushes the boundaries of innovation by turning cutting‑edge research into practical, accessible tools that transform how people interact with technology. Previously at Meta, Sulman founded and scaled Instagram Reels, IGTV, and Instagram Labs, and helped lead the early development of Instagram Stories.
He also brought MetaAI to Instagram and Messenger, integrating generative AI into experiences used by billions. Earlier in his career, Sulman was on the founding team that built and launched UberEATS from the ground up, helping turn it into a global food delivery platform. With a track record of marrying technical vision, product strategy, and large‑scale execution, Sulman focuses on building products that meaningfully change how people live, work, and connect.
Samir is the Technical Lead for ChatGPT at OpenAI, where he is currently leads the Personalization and Memory efforts to scale adaptive, useful, and human-centered product experiences to over 700 million users. He works broadly across the OpenAI stack—including mobile, web, services, systems, inference, and product research infrastructure.
Previously, Samir spent nine years at Snap, working across Ads, AR, Content, and Growth. He led some of the company’s most critical technical initiatives, including founding and scaling the machine learning platform that powered nearly all Ads, Content, and AR workloads, handling tens of billions of requests and trillions of inferences daily.
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