But in his novel role as head of OpenAI’s core product, Sottiaux will be tasked with thinking through what the average person wants from AI, not just the needs of other engineers.
Great app or great hype?
In practice, I expect the OpenAI super app to be a digital assistant with advanced memory capabilities. He or she will probably be able to make a dinner reservation, for example, but also remind you later to avoid menu items that contain allergens or have recently caused an upset stomach. The platform can also facilitate you automate work tasks, such as submitting expense reports before they are due.
Sottiaux says the super app will be based largely on Codex, which is already seeing sturdy growth among non-technical users. To perform the task, the agent may write software code, run an API call, or surf the Internet, but the user will not see any of it. They’ll just ask for things in natural language – or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work.
Sottiaux says building a super app is basically a matter of turning Codex into a general-purpose agent and then connecting that system to ChatGPT. Sottiaux says that as OpenAI has wrapped up other initiatives, the project has gained additional resources, although the core team remains relatively compact. He wouldn’t say how many people are currently working on the super app, but two months ago his Codex team numbered only about 40 people.
This isn’t OpenAI’s first attempt at turning ChatGPT into an agent. Last year, the company launched Operator, a tool within ChatGPT that attempts to navigate the Internet on the user’s behalf. It eventually evolved into the ChatGPT agent, but neither product ever saw significant adoption. Sottiaux says these attempts were made “too early” – the models they were based on weren’t stalwart enough, so OpenAI had to severely limit its capabilities. Now, he says, the technology is available.
Another problem with earlier OpenAI agents was that consumers didn’t 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 apply ChatGPT in novel ways will likely be a huge part of the challenge Sottiaux faces.
“We need to take the user with us. Maybe it’ll be a small thing we can do for you, and then build more and more confidence that ChatGPT can do bigger and bigger things,” Sottiaux says. “Maybe then you will start teaching your peers, friends and family these new possibilities that you have discovered in ChatGPT. Then also the model itself in ChatGPT has a role to play there, almost as a mentor.”
Not like others
Hundreds of millions of people in China and other countries have been using super apps to do almost everything on the Internet for years. OpenAI proposes a different vision, in part because it really has no other choice.
WeChat and Alipay became ubiquitous, building the indispensable financial and information infrastructure on which newfangled China now operates. On the other hand, countries like the United States already have Gmail and Instagram accounts, credit cards and Venmo. As a result, an OpenAI superapp will likely need to find a way to connect to pre-existing systems.