Can an AI agent run a creator's brand deals? Sam Yam and Drew Rowny on OpenAI's dots

0:00Magesh: One of the brands actually told me I'm one of the most professional creators they dealt with. I want to maintain the same professionalism even when I'm handing it off to AI.

0:08Drew: You should tell your dot exactly that. You know, you should say someone told me this.

0:13Magesh: This space is fast moving. We have Claude Duet. We have Muse. We have Grok Bot.

0:17Sam: What makes us unique here at OpenAI is fundamentally going to be our models.

0:21Magesh: Explorers. A few days ago, I was inside OpenAI's office in San Francisco with a few other creators. We were there to try their dots, their AI agent that keeps working after you close the app. While I was there, I pulled aside the two people building the dots for creators and I asked them what I really wanted to know. Can a dot run my brand deals, and how do they plan on staying ahead of Claude Duet, Muse, Grok Bot and Instinct AI? This isn't a studio podcast with the planned questions. This is live from inside OpenAI in the middle of the event, with the people who are actually building it. You are hearing it exactly the way it happened. Here we go.

1:02Magesh: Hello explorers. We have Sam Yam. He's one of the co-founders of Patreon, and he is now leading the dots for creators program inside OpenAI. My first main question is, creators struggle with the brand deals. That's one of the most important things. We need funding for creating any video at all. Like, we can start the channels, but to keep going we need funding. We'd like to hear about your opinions on how dots could help the creator maintain the sponsorship funnels, deals, how dots can act as our liaison or agent, so we can keep this channel thing going.

1:36Sam: One thing, I think, hopefully with all the tools that OpenAI or ChatGPT is providing, is that we expand accessibility to do things. And I think a perfect example of this with brand deals is you oftentimes sign on with a management agency and they'll take a cut of it. But a lot of the negotiation, or the outbounds, or even managing the inbounds, we'd love to encourage people to try out with their dot system, because it's proactive. It's always on. It's always trying to work for you. See what happens if you give it access to look through your inbound deals, to potentially research outbound deals for you, to help you do research when you're negotiating what a good rate would be to run this brand deal. It could even be the case that when you land a brand deal, to research other similar, competitive or aligned brands where you can even do more deals that follow up from it. And the hope is that you have a dot that's always working for you and actually growing out your business in that way.

2:29Magesh: This space is fast moving. We have Claude Duet, we have Muse, we have Grok Bot. So what are your challenges looking forward?

2:37Sam: Yeah, I think the way that we think about whether it's the advantage, or what makes us unique here at OpenAI, is fundamentally going to be our models. For me personally, I think I would love to be able to bring in more multiplayer and interactive experiences, where you can have your dot not just working for you but interacting with the relationships and community that you care about, to sort of manage situations.

3:17Magesh: Also, the next one is actually not a question. It's more of an ask. How the White House has this White House correspondence, right? Where there's this dissemination of information.

3:27Sam: Or like, okay.

3:28Magesh: So creators, when we make a video, especially a long-form video, it's usually two weeks out or one week out. By the time we publish the video, things are moving so fast in the space, the video is already outdated. So we need some sort of a community.

3:40Sam: Compress the timeline on this.

3:41Magesh: Yeah, compress the timeline. And also we need the most updated information from you guys when you release a new product or features. Can we have some sort of a community where we get the latest updates as creators?

3:52Sam: We are trying to organize specifically a creator community, where we can sort of, in two ways, provide access to our internal teammates building out products, so we can build alongside the broader creator community, and have all your dots come in too, so that you can bring in your feedback. We can make sure we triage that and route it to the important people, and that we can make sure the information that you have is as up-to-date, recent, maybe even early access in some cases, so that you feel you're able to share with your broader audience the latest that's going on. Yeah, absolutely. That's a great insight.

4:23Magesh: And thank you for having the creators. Yeah, to give some context, we are about 20, 25 of us inside OpenAI. Today we got a first look at some of the features that OpenAI had launched. That was Sam. Next, I sat down with Drew. He led the product at Patreon, and before that he worked at YouTube. I asked him the same brand deal question, and then how I'm supposed to teach a dot the way I work.

4:44Magesh: Hey everyone. So, we have Drew here inside OpenAI. We saw what dots can do. What you explained and what I've tried is having to build a small sponsorship funnel of sorts, because as creators we struggle with sponsorships. We focus on mainly the content. The money part is always secondary, and trying to delegate that to a human has always been a challenge. It's going to be a small team. We need to understand the rights. We need a lawyer. We need somebody to handle the email. So it's like a team of two to three people. And I'm trying to understand if dots can take over this completely for me, so that I can stay updated. What are your thoughts on how dots can help creators along this line?

5:21Drew: I mean, this is part of why I joined OpenAI. I think the thing that most people miss is that helping creators with AI does not necessarily mean content with AI. There's the creative act, the creative product, you know, the content that you're making. And then, as you were saying, there's just so much outside of that that's necessary, from packaging it up to marketing and growing your audience, and finding the right people who care about what you're interested in, and playing the algorithms on each of the big platforms. And then beyond that, even just managing the business, so doing your sponsorship deals and making sure you're getting paid for them after you actually do them, and then learning from them and understanding the fit with certain sponsor types. And I think our insight is, the outside of this kind of diagram that I've drawn with my hands is probably where AI can help first. Can give your team members leverage, help them handle more, find the right opportunities. If you have someone who doesn't have a legal background on your team but is processing all of these, and get some advice on how this contract is structured, and understand it, and think about different options.

6:28Magesh: So, how are you bringing in creators into this feedback loop? I mean, we have some ideas in mind, like how we pitch the brand, the negotiation, how we handle the payments. There's so much of this inside knowledge that ChatGPT may not be aware of, how we handle these things. So, how are you planning on making dots aware of all this? How do I tell dot, like, hey, this is how I handle the brand deal?

6:53Drew: Yeah. I mean, it is...

6:54Magesh: Because we had this era of, like, prompting, exactly.

6:57Drew: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where you share your prompt, and that would be like one of... Overall, I hope that the models have gotten so good. It requires less of this feeling like you have to say the special incantation for it to understand it. And one of the things we really trained these models on is really understanding the user's intent. As we launched dots, we actually brought in a bunch of creators to use it early. And now we're having these kind of small, intimate conversations, because I want to see, is it working? Where are we in this journey? Because it is an ongoing journey. And so conversations like this, seeing your workflow, understanding afterwards, did it actually do what you expected, helps kind of benchmark how we're doing along the lines of making this general-purpose model very effective for this really important set of use cases.

7:35Magesh: Awesome. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to this, because one of the brands actually told me I'm one of the most professional creators they dealt with. I want to maintain the same professionalism even when I'm handing it off to AI. I don't want brands to feel like I'm talking to an agent or...

7:50Drew: You should tell your dot exactly that. You know, you should say someone told me this, it's very important that I maintain that, what can you do to help? And let's see if it understands your intent and can actually, you know, do some concrete actions based on...

8:05Magesh: Yeah, exactly. So that is why I've never did letting it go and letting AI handle. I'm getting more hopeful now, after seeing how it assimilated all the information that I've provided in the last few minutes, the way it responded, the way it looked into my emails, and it already pulled up one of the brand deals that is just starting to happen. So, makes me optimistic. Cool. Yeah, let's stay in touch. Thank you for your time.

8:28Drew: I'm really curious to hear your feedback over time. It's been great meeting you. Looking forward to hearing how it goes.

8:32Magesh: Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much. That's the episode, explorers. If you want to see the whole day, the office, the gift box, and my honest take on dots, the full vlog is linked in the description. And tell me in the comments, would you hand your brand deals to an AI? I'll see you in the next one.

Source: YouTube auto-captions, edited for readability (filler words removed, names corrected, speakers labeled).