OpenAI is preparing the largest revision of ChatGPT since its release in 2022, transforming it from a chatbot into a "super application" integrating programming tools and AI agents. The company, valued at $850 billion, is preparing for an IPO this year and faces urgent pressure to drive revenue growth and achieve profitability.

According to reports from the Financial Times, citing information from more than a dozen current and former employees, the redesign will begin in the next few weeks. It will initially be presented as a redesigned interface on the ChatGPT website and mobile terminal, guiding users to use programming tools, image generation functions, and applications from external partners such as Canva and Booking.com. This is a major strategic shift for the company that brought AI into the mainstream with a chatbot and sparked a global AI craze.

"Chat is dead"

"Chat is dead." A senior OpenAI employee summarized the shift in judgment within the company.

The core logic behind this sentence is: the future of AI lies not in chatbots that answer questions, but in agents that can perform tasks for users—from booking travel to managing calendars. ChatGPT attracts nearly 1 billion users, but most of them are free users. OpenAI executives increasingly view it as a gateway to high-value products, not an endpoint.

The core beneficiary of this revision is the programming product Codex. Since the launch of the desktop app in February, Codex's weekly active users have grown sixfold to more than 5 million, with the majority of users being paid subscribers. Codex writes code and builds software based on simple instructions from users.

Thibault Sottiaux, who previously ran Codex and now oversees all core products and platforms of OpenAI, told the Financial Times: "What we are building is a personal intelligence that can help you in all aspects of your life - whether it is private life or work. You can connect to it through your mobile phone, desktop or web page, and you can also talk to it in the car."

As the model's capabilities improve, OpenAI plans to gradually eliminate the guidance prompts in the interface and allow the model to automatically understand user intentions. Executives believe that the boundaries between software categories such as chatbots, programming tools, and search products will gradually blur, and users will eventually interact with a single AI assistant rather than switching between multiple independent applications.

Move closer to Anthropic

This revision is also a strategic shift - from "dreaming" on the consumer side to "making money" on the enterprise side. This will also become the core story OpenAI tells investors in the IPO.

Currently, there are 2 million enterprise customers using OpenAI products, contributing about 40% of revenue, and the company expects this to rise to 50% by the end of the year. The rise of Codex has also intensified head-on competition with Anthropic, whose Claude Code has become one of its fastest-growing businesses.

Jenny Xiao, a partner at Leonis Capital and a former OpenAI researcher, pointed out: "About a year ago, OpenAI's strategy was to swing for the fences, while Anthropic's strategy was to make money first. Now the two are converging because they are both striving for IPOs, and investors value money more than dreams."

The organizational structure was adjusted accordingly. This year, OpenAI integrated ChatGPT, Codex and other product teams under a unified structure led by Sottiaux. Many executives, including former product leader Kevin Weil, have left. Some consumer-level businesses have been put on hold: ChatGPT’s built-in checkout function has been stopped, and Sora, a video generation product that was launched less than a year ago, has also been shut down.

Alex Embiricos, head of enterprise products at OpenAI, painted a further endgame: "When we achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), I don't think there will be a lot of different brands. There will probably be just one entity that I can talk to that does everything I need."