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’m expecting OpenAI’s super app to be a digital assistant with advanced memory capabilities. It will likely be capable of, say, making dinner reservations, but also reminding you later to avoid menu items that contain allergens, or that upset your stomach last time. The platform could also help automate work tasks, such as filing expense reports before they’re due.
Under the hood, Sottiaux says the super app will largely be powered by Codex, which is already seeing strong growth with nontechnical users. To complete a task, the agent may write software code, run an API call, or surf 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 it’s supposed to work.
Sottiaux says building the super app mostly involves converting Codex into a general-purpose agent, and then merging that system into ChatGPT. As OpenAI shuttered other initiatives, Sottiaux says the project gained additional resources, though the core team remains relatively small. He declined to say how many people are working on the super app now, but his Codex team consisted of only around 40 people two months ago.
This isn’t OpenAI’s first attempt at turning ChatGPT into an agent. Last year, the company launched Operator, a tool within ChatGPT that tried to navigate the web on a user’s behalf. It eventually morphed into ChatGPT Agent, but neither product ever saw significant adoption. Sottiaux says those attempts were “too early”—the models powering them weren’t reliable enough, so OpenAI had to heavily restrict what they could do. Now, he claims, the technology is there.
Another problem with OpenAI’s earlier 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 the challenge Sottiaux is facing.
“We have to bring the user along. Initially, maybe it’s a small thing that we can do for you, and then increasingly, build confidence that ChatGPT can do bigger and bigger things,” says Sottiaux. “Maybe then you start teaching your peers, your friends, and your family these new capabilities that you found in ChatGPT. Then also the model in ChatGPT itself has a role to play there, almost as a mentor.”
Sottiaux wouldn’t say when the super app is coming, beyond “soon.” But he notes that “a lot of what is going to be made available for everyone in ChatGPT is already available in the Codex app,” and OpenAI has already said that it plans to merge Codex into ChatGPT in the coming weeks. Sottiaux adds that OpenAI generally prefers doing a series of small releases so it can get feedback as it goes, in part because the AI space moves so fast that “you can’t really afford to do a big splash and be wrong.”
Not Like the Others
Hundreds of millions of people in China and other countries have used super apps to do almost everything online for years. OpenAI is proposing a different vision, in part because it doesn’t really have any other choice.
WeChat and Alipay became ubiquitous by building the essential financial and information infrastructure that modern China now runs on. Countries like the US, on the other hand, already have Gmail and Instagram accounts, credit cards, and Venmo. As a result, OpenAI’s super app will likely have to find ways to plug into those preexisting systems.
