Meet the OpenAI engineer leading the biggest transformation in ChatGPT to date

But in his new role as head of OpenAI’s core product, Sottiaux will be tasked with thinking about what the average person wants from AI, not just the needs of his fellow engineers.

Super app or super hype?

In practice, I expect the OpenAI super app to be a digital assistant with advanced memory capabilities. It’ll likely be able to make dinner reservations, for example, but will also remind you later to avoid menu items that contain allergens, or that upset your stomach the last time. The platform can also help automate business tasks, such as submitting expense reports before they are due.

Under the hood, Sotio says the super app will be largely powered by Codex, which is already seeing strong growth with non-technical users. To complete a task, an agent might write script code, run an API call, or browse the web, but the user won’t see any of it. They’ll just ask for things in natural language — or at least, that’s how things are supposed to work.

Building a super app mostly involves converting Codex into a general-purpose proxy, then integrating that system into ChatGPT, Sotio says. As OpenAI shut down other initiatives, Sotio says the project has gained additional resources, even though the core team is still relatively small. He declined to reveal how many people are working on the super app now, but his Codex team consisted of only about 40 people two months ago.

This is not OpenAI’s first attempt to turn ChatGPT into a proxy. Last year, the company launched Operator, a tool within ChatGPT that attempts to navigate the web on the user’s behalf. It eventually switched to ChatGPT Agent, but neither product ever saw significant adoption. These attempts were “very early,” Sotio says, as the models running them weren’t reliable enough, so OpenAI had to severely limit what it could do. Now, he claims, the technology exists.

Another problem with previous OpenAI agents was that consumers didn’t really know what to do with them. While software engineers have proven adept at using agents to automate a wide range of tasks, teaching people how to use ChatGPT in new ways will likely be a big part of Sottiaux’s challenge.

“We have to bring the user with us. At first, maybe this is a small thing we can do for you, and then, increasingly, we build confidence that ChatGPT can do bigger and bigger things,” Sotio says. “You might then start teaching your colleagues, friends, and family about these new capabilities that you’ve found in ChatGPT. And then also the model in ChatGPT itself has a role to play there, almost as a mentor.”

Sotio didn’t say when the super app would be available, instead saying “soon.” But he points out that “much of what will be made available to everyone in ChatGPT is already available in the Codex app,” and OpenAI has already said it plans to integrate Codex into ChatGPT in the coming weeks. OpenAI generally prefers to do a series of small releases so it can get feedback as it goes, partly because the AI ​​space moves so quickly that “you can’t really afford to do a big job and get it wrong,” Sotio adds.

Not like others

Hundreds of millions of people in China and other countries have used super apps to do almost everything online for years. OpenAI proposes a different vision, partly because it has no other choice.

WeChat and Alipay became ubiquitous by building the basic financial and information infrastructure on which modern China now operates. On the other hand, countries like the US already have Gmail, Instagram, credit cards, and Venmo accounts. As a result, an OpenAI super app will likely find ways to plug into those pre-existing systems.