OpenAI Engineer Leads ChatGPT's Super App Transformation

OpenAI is in the middle of a sweeping overhaul of ChatGPT. The company wants to turn the chatbot's simple interface into a personalized AI agent that can handle tasks in every part of your personal and professional life. OpenAI has started calling this new product, both privately and publicly, a "super app."

This all-in-one platform is one of the biggest bets OpenAI has ever made. One engineering leader now holds enormous influence over whether it pays off: Thibault Sottiaux. Last month, OpenAI appointed Sottiaux as head of core products, putting him in charge of both ChatGPT and Codex, as well as merging them into the future super app.

To make the super app a reality, OpenAI has already shut down several standalone products, including its video app Sora and an AI platform for scientists. Many of the executives who led those teams have since left the company. Sottiaux's influence inside OpenAI has continued to grow. 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 helped build Codex, which has become one of OpenAI's fastest-growing revenue streams. Leading Codex meant serving developers and working with AI researchers. Now he faces a new 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.

A Super App for Everything

OpenAI has started talking publicly and often about its plans to build a super app, but it is still unclear what exactly the final product will do. The term "super app" usually describes platforms in Asia like WeChat, which bundle messaging, payments, and shopping into a single interface. OpenAI is planning something seemingly far more ambitious.

Sottiaux says 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," bringing people the right information at exactly the right time.

OpenAI hopes that turning ChatGPT into a super app will revitalize the company's growth as it races toward an IPO and tries to ward off intense competition from Google and Anthropic. OpenAI is betting that creating one personalized assistant for everything will make it the clear leader in consumer, enterprise, and the overall AI race once again.

From DeepMind to OpenAI

Sottiaux grew up in Belgium and studied applied mathematics. He joined Google's London offices in 2015, where he worked on Google Maps before moving over to Google DeepMind. At DeepMind, he helped build the infrastructure and tools researchers used to create things like AlphaGo. AlphaGo 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 and find a way 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 explained.

Sottiaux joined OpenAI in 2024 and initially focused on developing tools for the company's own researchers, just as he had at DeepMind. Within a few months, he started building what would become Codex. As the AI coding tool exploded in popularity, Sottiaux became a minor celebrity in the developer community. He personally responded to bug reports on X and occasionally granted engineers' requests to reset their weekly token limits.

In his new role as head of OpenAI's core product, Sottiaux will now think about what the average person wants from AI, not just the needs of fellow engineers.

The Road Ahead

In practice, OpenAI's super app is expected to be a digital assistant with advanced memory capabilities. It could make dinner reservations, remind you to avoid menu items with allergens, or help automate work tasks like 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 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 will just ask for things in natural language, at least that is the plan.

Sottiaux says building the super app mostly involves converting Codex into a general-purpose agent and then merging that system into ChatGPT. As OpenAI shut down other initiatives, the project gained additional resources, though the core team remains relatively small. He declined to say how many people work 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 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 tasks, teaching people how to use ChatGPT in new ways will likely be a big part of the challenge Sottiaux faces.

"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," Sottiaux said. "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 noted that "a lot of what is going to be made available for everyone in ChatGPT is already available in the Codex app." OpenAI has already said it plans to merge Codex into ChatGPT in the coming weeks. Sottiaux added that OpenAI generally prefers a series of small releases so it can get feedback as it goes, partly 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, partly because it does not have any other choice.

WeChat and Alipay became ubiquitous by building the essential financial and information infrastructure that modern China runs on. Countries like the United States already have Gmail and Instagram accounts, credit cards, and Venmo. As a result, OpenAI's super app will likely have 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. 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, however, is convinced that we are heading 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 said.

, -

Related on Neura Market

• AI Tools Directory, Browse the latest AI assistants and productivity tools.
• Automation Marketplace, Explore platforms for building AI-powered workflows.
• OpenAI Company Profile, Keep up with OpenAI's latest products and updates.