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.
