The Financial Times, citing “more than a dozen current and former employees,” reports that OpenAI is radically rethinking its core product, ChatGPT. Apparently in a matter of weeks, it’s going to transform into a “superapp.”
A senior OpenAI staffer told FT, “Chat is dead.” Instead, ChatGPT is reportedly becoming a gateway for agents and coding tools, which generate more revenue.
Codex, OpenAI’s coding tool, has tiered monthly subscriptions, but enterprise-oriented pay schemes, where employers provide access to the product, and pay on a per-token basis, are a clearer path to the significant bump in revenue OpenAI desperately needs as it races its chief competitor, Anthropic, to the IPO finish line.
Anthropic is currently in the lead, having leapfrogged OpenAI over the past year by marketing itself to enterprise clients, rather than the general population.
An April blog post from OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser first spelled this out. OpenAI was planning a “unified AI superapp as the primary experience where employees get things done.” The superapp experience, Dresser wrote, is supposed to “bring together the best of ChatGPT, Codex, agentic browsing, and broader capabilities.” FT’s reporting now suggests that Dresser was not talking about a product intended as a compliment to ChatGPT; she was talking about ChatGPT itself.
Chatter about a “superapp” coming down the pike has been around since about October of last year, when OpenAI signaled vaguely in this direction during its Developer Day event.
But as soon as ChatGPT took off, OpenAI tried to pivot ChatGPT into some kind of hub or home base for online activity. The first attempt at this was called ChatGPT Plugins, and it materialized in March of 2023, only four months after ChatGPT first launched—and the month after ChatGPT was declared the “fastest-growing” app of all time in media reports. ChatGPT Plugins—third-party apps a little like browser extensions—were promising, but half-baked, and have since been deprecated.
The rollout of Apps in October of last year—arguably a more fleshed-out version of the Plugins idea—brought the notion of ChatGPT as a productivity hub into clearer focus. According to FT, the newly renovated ChatGPT will somehow “encourage” users to use Apps, along with coding and image generation.
After that, FT writes that OpenAI has grander—if somewhat less plausible—ambitions for the app:
OpenAI intends to ditch the prompts and features, betting that its models will be able to automatically understand users’ intentions when they are on the app or site.
Doing away with prompts certainly sounds like an ambitious plan, but it seems like OpenAI should focus for the time being on the creation of an interface that converts existing ChatGPT users into users of its coding and agentic tools. After all, a redesigned app interface is a promise OpenAI can deliver, but users will ultimately decide if the app is actually “super.”
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