Airtable

OpenAI’s Vision for the AI Super App — Akshay Nathan, OpenAI

Jul 28, 2026 · 1:10:57

Akshay Nathan, OpenAI's head of core product engineering, explains why the company merged Codex and ChatGPT into a unified agent harness, arguing that the lines between software engineering and knowledge work are blurring. He reveals that Codex unexpectedly gained traction among non-developers at OpenAI, leading to the launch of ChatGPT Work, which shares the same underlying harness but offers opinionated UX differences like sandboxing and Git visibility. Nathan details how artifacts, Sites, plugins, memory, and sub-agents enable users to replace slide decks and spreadsheets with interactive websites, and shares that ChatGPT Work reached 10 million users shortly after launch. He discusses OpenAI's goal to bring useful agents from developers to all knowledge workers, emphasizing that the default model configuration should work for most users while power users can opt into deeper reasoning, Ultra, or multi-agent setups. Nathan also reflects on how AI transforms product development, noting that ideas and taste become the bottleneck when anyone can build, and warns managers not to conflate motion with progress.

Production AI Engineering starts with Evals

Oct 11, 2024 · 1:56:16

Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust, argues that evaluation is the core workflow of production AI engineering and shows how his platform makes evals accessible to software engineers. Drawing from his experience at SingleStore and Impira, he details Braintrust's evolution from an eval tool into an end-to-end AI development platform used by Stripe, Zapier, Vercel, and other top AI teams. He shares market data: OpenAI handles over 95% of production workloads, fine-tuning is declining, and open-source models account for under 5% due to reliability issues. Ankur explains why he avoided building a vector database—the real challenge is permissions and joins, not vector search—and predicts o1-style reasoning will replace complex agent frameworks. He reveals Braintrust's differentiators: hybrid on-prem, TypeScript-first SDK, and declarative eval structures.