ChatGPT has received a major update and will become a "super app" on the eve of OpenAI's IPO

OpenAI plans a major update to ChatGPT — the most significant since the service launched in 2022. The company intends to transform the chatbot into a "super app" that will combine tools for coding, AI agents, and integrations with third-party services.

The changes will be part of a large-scale reorganization within OpenAI: the company is reallocating resources toward corporate clients and intensifying competition with Anthropic — amid preparations for an IPO this year. The company's current valuation stands at $850 billion.

The central element of the new strategy will be the Codex product — a tool for writing code and creating software based on user requests. Since February, following the release of the desktop application, Codex's audience has grown sixfold, exceeding five million active weekly users. Most of them use the service on a paid basis.

Company management increasingly views ChatGPT not as a standalone product, but as an entry point to attract users to more expensive services. Of the nearly one billion chatbot users, most use it for free, while two million business clients account for about 40% of OpenAI's revenue. By the end of the year, the company aims to increase this share to 50%.

The first changes will appear in the interface of the ChatGPT website and mobile apps: new prompts and features will guide users toward tools for coding, image generation, and partner applications — specifically Canva and Booking.com. In the long term, such prompts are planned to be phased out: the focus is on models independently learning to recognize user intent.

The new strategy brings OpenAI closer to Anthropic's approach, which initially focused on the corporate segment. According to Jenny Xiao, a partner at Leonis Capital and former OpenAI researcher, the strategies of the two companies diverged significantly about a year ago, but now they are converging — both are preparing for an IPO, and investors are expecting real profits.

As part of the reorganization, the ChatGPT, Codex, and other product teams have been unified under a single leadership. Several initiatives aimed at mass consumers were discontinued: specifically, the in-chat shopping service was shut down, and work on Sora — a video generator that existed for less than a year after its launch — was halted.

Source: Financial Times