What I saw at OpenAI Dev Day

I attended Dev Day this week, along with 450 other AI developers. The OpenAI Events team kindly let me bring along my full photography kit.

Here's what I saw.

The Venue

Fort Mason is my favorite conference venue in San Francisco due to a mix of location and nostalgia. But it's not an easy venue to host an event at – neither forts nor piers are built with acoustics or aesthetics in mind. OpenAI's events team did an incredible job crafting a beautiful, intimate experience at this difficult space.

A steady stream of driverless Waymos delivered developers to Dev Day.

A lot of small details that made the pier feel cozy

The Keynote

Oliver Godement, Head of Product for the OpenAI Platform, led the keynote. You can find the play-by-play on Simon Willison's DevDay Live Blog, or dive deep into the product announcements on OpenAI's DevDay page:

The Demos

During the keynote, Romain Huet did several live coding demos to show off the new Realtime API and o1's impressive codegen capabilities. One used o1 to write all the code to create a control interface for a drone, including the networking!

Romain's Realtime API demo showed off an agent that autonomously called "Ilan's Strawberries" and had a conversation with a human to place an order for 400 people.

It was a Disney-esque touch to have the strawberries waiting for us as we exited the auditorium: the feeling that the stage show had become reality.

The Fireside Chat

Sam Altman and CPO Kevin Wall ended the day with a fireside chat.

A couple notable bits:

o1 will have system prompts and tool calling by the end of the year.

Sam, when talking on how quickly we adapt to new technology:

"The Turing Test whooshed past us, and no one really cared."

The Community Talks

My friend Kevin Whinnery recently joined the OpenAI's Developer Experience team and MCed the community track.

Tilde Thurium (Launch Darkly) after their popular talk on Social Justice & Prompt Engineering.

The Devs

DevDay 2024 had about 450 developers in attendance. It was a scaled down, more intimate version than last year's Dev Day.

Jarod Reyes (SignalFire VC). Lizzie Siegle (Cloudflare). Brian Partidge (Twilio). Jon Godfried (Major League Hacking).

Me demoing Cursor. (thanks Jarod for the photo)

Tilde Thurium (Launch Darkly). Jarod Reyes (SignalFire VC)

Martin Price and Pranav Deshpande (OpenAI)

Fin

Many thanks to the OpenAI Events team who made Dev Day happen.

And special thank you to Kevin Whinnery, Romain Huet, and Cory Decareaux for the invitation to come and photograph this event. It was a privilege to capture these moments.

For more of my photography.