In a wide-ranging interview with Joanna Stern, OpenAI president Greg Brockman addressed the company’s recent changes to the ChatGPT desktop app and discussed its plans for a tab-free interface. Watch it below.
Work might soon work seamlessly within ChatGPT #
A few days ago, Joanna Stern published a teaser of an upcoming interview with OpenAI president Greg Brockman on her new YouTube channel, New Things.
Today, Stern published the full interview, which covers topics including the new ChatGPT Voice, OpenAI’s hardware ambitions, the Apple lawsuit, and the recent Hugging Face hack.
At one point, Stern brings up OpenAI’s recent decision to merge the ChatGPT and Codex desktop apps while introducing Work, a new agentic mode for ChatGPT.
The resulting interface proved confusing, particularly for users who simply wanted to keep using ChatGPT but struggled to find their chat history.
OpenAI later updated the app, adding separate Work and Chat tabs at the top of the interface, along with a drop-down menu in the left-hand panel for switching between ChatGPT and Codex. While the app is now less hard to navigate, it remains somewhat convoluted.
When asked about the misstep, Brockman agreed with Stern’s characterization that the new UI “is kind of a mess,” adding that it represents “incremental progress towards the future,” where the Work tab will eventually disappear and its functionality will “seamlessly mold into ChatGPT.”
Here’s Brockman’s full quote:
It’s kind of a mess. We agree. And so what you’re seeing is incremental progress towards the future. We were hoping to land with zero tabs, but this is… I think the way that we also view it is that we need to iteratively deploy, right? We need to get this out there, get feedback, and so this is the current state of where things are. But I definitely think that end of year, there should be no Work tab. You know, that this will be something that will just seamlessly mold into ChatGPT.
Brockman also said that despite the confusing rollout of the merged apps, OpenAI is still seeing the results it hoped for, with Codex going from 5 to 10 million users in just a few days.
When pressed on whether that growth was simply the result of “shoehorning” Codex into the ChatGPT app, Brockman again conceded, while also arguing that this was partly the point:
For sure there’s lots of people coming in, but the point is that there’s so many people who could be getting much more value from AI. And my vision, the way that we think about this, is that we want to help bring those people who are relying on AI to get far more value and so to really be able to experience agents, to have agents be something that do come to mass consumer scale. The entire interview is quite interesting and well worth watching. It also includes a very Joanna Stern-like attempt to include ChatGPT Voice into the conversation, and that went as well as you’re probably imagining.
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