Voice, Verticals & Venture featuring OpenAI's Brian Fioca: Fine Tuning, Startup Differentiation, and Gemini 2.5 First Impressions

This week on Fresh From the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared are joined by a special guest: Brian Fioca, a former PSL team member now working as a Solutions Architect at OpenAI! Brian shares his insights from the trenches, helping startups leverage OpenAI's APIs for "intelligence as a service."

The conversation kicks off with Brian addressing the evergreen startup question: where are the real opportunities when building on a powerful platform like OpenAI, and how to think about the "fear of being Sherlocked"? We explore how startups are becoming the "front edge of research" by providing real-world evaluations. Brian highlights massive opportunities in areas like real-time voice – think call centers and beyond – and the emerging best practices and tooling. He then dives deep into the newly released Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) service, explaining how it enables highly specialized, "on-the-job training" for models in vertical domains like finance and healthcare, often with surprisingly small datasets.

The discussion broadens to startup differentiation: how can founders stand out when the underlying tech is becoming more accessible? We touch on the value of domain expertise, building "tools for tools," and navigating the competitive landscape, even against incumbents.

Finally, the team shares their first impressions of Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro (the May 6th checkpoint). Kevin found it surprisingly strong for planning and very communicative, while Jared praised its agentic coding abilities and PDF extraction, particularly its tendency to pause and ask for clarification. However, Jared also recounts a frustrating "checkpointing chaos" where a model update broke his prototype, highlighting the challenges of building on rapidly evolving experimental endpoints. We wrap by discussing our evolving approaches to model evaluation – looking beyond raw smarts to communication style and the "surprise factor."

Tune in for an insider's perspective on building with OpenAI, a look at the cutting edge of voice and RFT, and a candid take on the latest model releases!