OpenAI's Plans For Its New ChatGPT Superapp
OpenAI's Codex and ChatGPT app lead Andrew Ambrosino talks to Big Technology about the product and its roadmap.
OpenAI finally released the first version of its long-promised Superapp this week, combining ChatGPT, coding, and internet browsing into a single application, while adding a new ChatGPT Work mode akin to Anthropic’s Claude Cowork.
Soon after the product debuted, I spoke with Andrew Ambrosino, OpenAI’s lead for the Codex and ChatGPT app, about how the company is thinking about its unified product, and where it goes from here. Here are my notes from the call:
This is the long-promised ‘superapp’
“This is the start of the superapp,” Ambrosino told me. “Anything that you can do on a computer, you can now do with this app.”
An array of use cases
Unlike standard ChatGPT, which can answer queries and create images for you, the new ChatGPT can take over your computer and browser and get things done for you. The limit, it seems, is whatever you can imagine doing with a computer.
“We have people editing videos on it,” Ambrosino said. “People creating Word docs, spreadsheets, slide decks, people writing production-grade code for post-training stacks, we have people here using this app to create sites to track launches, which we did for this launch.”
Code at the core, but a toggle
There’s a toggle between the more code-intensive version of the app, which is OpenAI’s Codex product, and its less-technical version, ChatGPT Work. Code is foundational to both experiences, Ambrosino told me, but the Codex version is more useful for digging into the code itself. “The toggle does not affect what this product can do,” he said. “It affects the experience that you have around it.”
I asked Ambrosino why not have the product itself determine your intent and guide you through the appropriate experience? “There are a lot of use cases where we can’t necessarily tell what you want,” he said.
An intention to not over-refuse
One of the more frustrating aspects of using AI tools is how often they will refuse to take an action. Ask some AI agents to go book something with your credit card, for instance, and they will outright say no. OpenAI is trying to free its ChatGPT Work product from such constraints, while still including permission requests to make sure it doesn’t go rogue.
“A lot of these general knowledge work modes nerf things that coding can just do,” said Ambrosino. “That’s something we’re trying to avoid here.”
Careful use of memory
One of OpenAI’s advantages is that it has years of chat logs with users that can inform the decisions it makes when it takes action on the web. If you’ve used ChatGPT to research barbers in your area, for instance, that could help it book an appointment for you based on your preferences. But, after some internal debate, OpenAI won’t rely heavily on what it knows about you for this new experience. However, if you proactively ask it to rely on what it knows about you, Ambrosino said, it will then tap into its memory.
The plan to compete with Anthropic
Anthropic arrived at this vision earlier, with products like Claude Code and Cowork bundled into the Claude app. Asked how OpenAI will compete, Ambrosino replied: “Going first has its weaknesses sometimes,” adding: “We have seen how this stuff should work, and now we can go execute on it.”
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What Else I’m Reading, Etc.
The ChatGPT Superapp doesn’t yet hit the mark [Spyglass]
OpenAI’s latest model is 54% token efficient for agentic coding than previous iterations [CNBC]
An Ivy League professor claims almost his entire class used AI to chat [Inside Higher Ed]
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