OpenAI is currently retooling ChatGPT with a singular aim: evolving the chatbot from a simple interface into a personalised AI agent capable of managing tasks across every aspect of your personal and professional life. Internally and externally, the firm refers to this ambitious new product as a “super app.”
This all-in-one platform represents one of the most significant strategic wagers OpenAI has ever placed, and a single engineering leader now holds substantial sway over its success: Thibault Sottiaux. Last month, Sottiaux was appointed head of core products, a role overseeing both ChatGPT and Codex, as well as the integration of these systems into the future super app.
To realise this vision, OpenAI has already discontinued several standalone products, including its video generation tool Sora and an AI platform designed for scientists. Many executives who led those teams have since departed the company, while Sottiaux’s influence has continued to expand. He now reports directly to Greg Brockman, who is currently responsible for all of OpenAI’s product teams while Fidji Simo, the company’s CEO of AGI deployment, is on medical leave.
Sottiaux played a pivotal role in building Codex, which has become one of OpenAI’s fastest-growing revenue streams. However, leading Codex meant serving developers and collaborating with AI researchers. Now, he is tasked with a different challenge: revamping a consumer product with nearly a billion weekly active users.
“It’s incredibly exciting and mildly terrifying at the same time,” Sottiaux said in an interview earlier this week.
While OpenAI has begun discussing its plans for a super app publicly, the specifics of the final product remain unclear. The term is typically used to describe platforms in Asia like WeChat, which bundle messaging, payments, and shopping into a single interface. Yet, OpenAI appears to be planning something far more ambitious.
Sottiaux states the goal is to build the “world’s best personal agent that deeply understands what humans care about.” Over the next year, he says ChatGPT will become “delightfully proactive,” delivering the right information at the precise moment it is needed.
OpenAI hopes that transforming ChatGPT into a super app will revitalise the company’s growth as it races toward an IPO and attempts to counter intense competition from Google and Anthropic. The company’s bet is that creating one personalised assistant for everything will re-establish it as the unequivocal leader in consumer, enterprise, and the overall AI race.
Engineering Roots
Sottiaux grew up in Belgium and studied applied mathematics before joining Google’s London offices in 2015. There, he worked on Google Maps before moving to Google DeepMind. There, he helped build the infrastructure and tools researchers used to develop projects like AlphaGo, which made history in 2016 when it became the first AI to defeat a human Go champion.
When ChatGPT launched in 2022, Sottiaux felt inspired to move to San Francisco to work for OpenAI. “This is something that we had been sitting on at DeepMind for almost two years, and we were just not doing it,” he explains.
Sottiaux officially joined OpenAI in 2024 and initially focused on developing tools for the company’s own researchers, mirroring his work at DeepMind. Within a few months, he started building what would eventually become Codex. As the AI coding tool exploded in popularity, Sottiaux became a minor celebrity in the developer community, personally responding to bug reports on X, and occasionally granting engineers’ pleas to reset their weekly token limits.
However, in his new role as head of OpenAI’s core product, Sottiaux will be tasked with considering what the average person wants from AI—not just the needs of his fellow engineers.
Super App or Super Hype?
In practice, I expect OpenAI’s super app to function as a digital assistant with advanced memory capabilities. It will likely be capable of making dinner reservations, but also reminding you later to avoid menu items containing allergens or foods that upset your stomach. The platform could also help automate work tasks, such as filing expense reports before they are due.
Under the hood, Sottiaux says the super app will largely be powered by Codex, which is already seeing strong growth among non-technical users. To complete a task, the agent may write software code, run an API call, or surf the web, but the user will not see any of this. They will simply ask for things in natural language—or at least, that is how it is supposed to work.
Sottiaux states that 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 notes the project gained additional resources, though the core team remains relatively small. He declined to state exactly how many people are working on the super app now, but his Codex team consisted of only around 40 people two months ago.
This is not 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 were not 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 did not 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 major 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 would not 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 does not 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.
OpenAI is making moves in this direction. Earlier this week, it announced an expanded partnership with Visa for agentic payments, and it previously built services that connect ChatGPT and Codex to your email inbox, Slack, and calendar.
OpenAI is ultimately betting that it can create a universal consumer interface so powerful and helpful that people no longer need to think about or interact with the websites, apps, and APIs underneath it. But that could leave it vulnerable to competitors who control the services and infrastructure it relies on. Sottiaux, though, is convinced that we are headed toward a future where everyone has one agent that helps them navigate their entire life.
“OpenAI is known to take big, bold bets ahead of others, and this is us doing it again,” he says.
Key takeaways
- Thibault Sottiaux has been appointed head of core products to lead the integration of Codex and ChatGPT into a unified “super app” designed to act as a proactive personal agent.
- The new platform aims to replace fragmented digital tools by handling tasks like reservations, expense reports, and personal reminders through a single, memory-enabled interface.
- Unlike Asian super apps that built their own financial infrastructure, OpenAI must integrate with existing US services like Visa, email providers, and calendars to function effectively.
- OpenAI plans to release the super app in small increments to gather feedback, avoiding the risk of a major failed launch in a rapidly evolving AI landscape.
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