“Chat Is Dead” — OpenAI Planning Massive ChatGPT Overhaul Ahead of IPO

Hand holding a smartphone showing the ChatGPT logo over a teal screen with a mountain lake scenery in the background.

OpenAI is planning a big overhaul of ChatGPT, pushing it away from simple Q&A and toward a “superapp” built around AI agents and coding tools. It’s a major shift for the San Francisco company as it tries to bring in higher-margin revenue before going public.

A report from the Financial Times says the revamp would turn the chatbot into a platform that handles complex tasks on its own, writes software, and connects users with third-party apps. The new look on desktop and mobile will point people toward specific tasks like image generation and coding. Eventually OpenAI wants to drop manual prompts entirely and let its models figure out what you’re trying to do.

“Chat is dead,” a senior OpenAI employee told the Financial Times. 

Thibault Sottiaux, who now runs OpenAI’s combined core product and platform teams, said the tech is moving toward personal assistants that help people across their personal lives and work, whether they’re on a phone, a desktop, or talking to their car. Alex Embiricos, OpenAI’s head of enterprise product, figures that as artificial general intelligence develops, separate software categories will blur into a single assistant that does everything.

ChatGPT has close to 1 billion users, but most stick with the free version. To keep investors happy and cover the huge cost of running its models, OpenAI is leaning hard into corporate clients. People familiar with the matter told the Financial Times that about 40 percent of revenue now comes from its 2 million business customers, and the company wants to hit 50 percent by year’s end. A lot of that comes from Codex, its coding tool, which has grown past 5 million weekly active users since launching a desktop app. That puts OpenAI head to head with Anthropic, whose Claude Code tool has been growing fast with enterprises.

The enterprise push has already shaken up priorities internally. OpenAI recently folded its separate ChatGPT, Codex, and product teams under Sottiaux. It has also quietly axed a few consumer experiments to stay focused. An internal checkout system that would have let people buy things directly inside ChatGPT got dropped, and OpenAI shut down its video model Sora less than a year after first showing it off (RIP Sora).

Next week’s massive SpaceX IPO is sending shockwaves through the tech sector, and OpenAI looks ready to follow suit. Following xAI’s integration into the rocket company, a furious race has ignited between OpenAI and Anthropic to secure the next major public market debut.

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