Wesam Manassra is an MIT-trained full-stack engineer at OpenAI, one of the world’s leaders in artificial intelligence at a time when AI is a topic of intense debate in boardrooms and governments around the world. Both Uber and Microsoft have a line on his CV as well. On top of that, he was part of the founding team of two startups, one which was acquired by Foursquare. All this to say that in a career that spans little more than a decade, Manassra has gained a huge amount of insight into what businesses large and small must do to innovate and build products that can change the world.
Manassra spoke with a group of students from MBZUAI in January about his experiences in tech, insights into entrepreneurship and the future of artificial intelligence. The event was held in collaboration with startAD and was sponsored by the MBZUAI Incubation and Entrepreneurship Center, which aims to help “spearhead the development of a high-tech start-up ecosystem across the UAE and beyond and empower aspiring innovators to turn their ideas into thriving commercial realities.”
Wesam Manassra
It likely comes as no surprise that a solid technical foundation and the capacity to consistently work long hours are the basic characteristics necessary for those who are interested in making their way in the highly competitive world of tech. But Manassra said that there are also skills that are often overlooked while students are training at university that are “extremely important” and can take an individual’s career to the next level.
“In industry, there is a lot of communication that is necessary across teams, and it’s important that you can communicate complex ideas to a bunch of stakeholders who may have different priorities,” Manassra said. “You also have to be able to listen to your colleagues' feedback and understand where they are coming from with their recommendations.”
Adaptability and the capacity to collaborate effectively with colleagues are also fundamental to succeeding on fast-moving and innovative teams as well, Manassra noted.
And playing a positive role in team culture is also critical.
“I cannot emphasize how important it is to have a really good team culture at any organization that is working to build innovative technologies,” he said. “You will often spend more time with your colleagues than you will with your family, and it’s really important that you have a good working relationship with them so that you can overcome conflicts.”
“In startups, emotions often run high because there is so much at stake.”
Manassra’s time at Uber provided an education about how a large company must maintain flexibility and agility to respond to continually changing market conditions. “Uber is interesting because while it is a global company, each market the company has entered has its own challenges that require it to be adaptable to local conditions and regulations. When Uber expanded into Europe, or the Middle East, or China, every one of those markets was vastly different.”
At Uber there is also a deep interest in a variety of analytics, for example, estimated time to arrival, or ETA. “When ETA was slow in a particular market, we would analyze the data and try to figure out why that was the case,” Manassra said. “There was an obsession to ensure that every customer has a very solid and predictable experience whenever they use Uber.”
And even though Uber is a large, global company today, every product at Uber ran like its own startup, which made for an easy transition when Manassra decided to leave the company and venture into the world of early stage startups. .
OpenAI is similar to Uber in this sense, he said, in that product teams are run like small startups within the larger business. “Everything runs like a mini startup at OpenAI. And startups that are successful are close to their customers and base their insights on information that comes from customers,” Manassra explained.
The product team Manassra works on, DALLE, an AI system that creates images from natural language prompts, “constantly talks to creatives and artists about the features they are interested in and also about their concerns as they may relate to copyright infringement or other topics.”
Indeed, quickly testing and iterating the product while learning from customers is a fundamental part to building a successful business: “I can’t think of any companies that regretted talking with customers too much,” Manassra said.
When he thinks ahead to tomorrow’s applications that will be driven by large language models, Manassra believes that there will be many uses in education — for example, to personalize students’ educational journeys. The potential for creatives is substantial as well, he said, in that AI-driven applications could help creatives brainstorm new ideas, quickly iterate on drafts and provide suggestions on new directions in which to take their work.
There are also large data systems that will try to make sense of the ever-growing human activity on the internet and systems that will help us gain insights about this data through analytics or data visualization. And new tools will be developed that will help us with forecasting and for tasks like rebalancing supply.
“I think the next development will be the so called application data intelligence, which is when we take all these building blocks, whether it’s big data systems, predictive AI or generative AI and package it in a way that can be applied to a specific domain or problem area,” Manassra said. “This is the field where many companies are concentrating their development efforts.”