Inside OpenAI's super app plan
Why Codex is becoming the foundation for everything. Also: Fidji Simo's internal memo about taking a leave of absence.
Today I’ve got a deep dive into OpenAI’s strategy with Codex and its coming super app. Fidji Simo also just announced internally that she’s taking a temporary leave of absence due to health reasons, along with some other org changes. Her full note to employees is at the bottom.
As I was pulling up to OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters last week, I got the alert that Sora had been canned. I was there to interview the leadership team behind Codex.
OpenAI is in the midst of a major shift, and Codex is at its center. “Side bets” like Sora are being spun down to shift resources to the realization that coding agents are becoming useful for much more than coding.
Thibault Sottiaux, the head of Codex, told me that, over the next six months, he thinks the way AI has transformed the engineering process will extend to all of knowledge work. “I get more coding done than ever before, yet I don’t actually write a single line of code anymore. That experience will translate to many, many other fields.”
Anthropic has tapped into this trend early with Claude Cowork, its Claude-Code-for-normies interface that abstracts away the need to understand coding at all. OpenAI’s answer to this phenomenon is to turn Codex into the foundation of a unified desktop super app that integrates with ChatGPT and its Atlas web browser.
Codex’s product lead, Alexander Embiricos, said the eventual plan is to bring the Codex agent to ChatGPT’s 900 million-user base without forcing people to learn anything new. “We’re really thinking about how we get this to ChatGPT in such a way that you’re not thinking about modes,” he told me. “No modes for us. That is the goal.”
