Codex's year-long rise: it absorbed the ChatGPT desktop app and hit 40M+ weekly users
danshipper · x · 2026-10-16
Dan Shipper's deep-dive chronicles how OpenAI Codex went from a corner team without PMF to arguably the company's most important product in under 12 months: it now runs inside the flagship ChatGPT desktop app (as com.openai.codex on Mac), Codex plus ChatGPT for Work serve 40M+ weekly users across engineering and knowledge work, and its leader Thibault Sottiaux now runs all of OpenAI's core products including ChatGPT and the API. The key was training a dedicated model line separate from ChatGPT. The piece includes full interview transcripts readers can query with their own agents.
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