Codex's one-year ascent: 40M weekly users and its leader now runs OpenAI's core products
danshipper · x · 2026-10-16
DAN Shipper's team publishes a deep dive calling Codex "one of the most important untold stories in tech":
- A year ago it was a scrappy corner project at OpenAI whose cloud product lacked PMF
- Within 12 months it absorbed the ChatGPT desktop app from the inside (running as com.openai.codex on Mac), and Codex + ChatGPT for Work surpassed 40M weekly users across engineering and knowledge work
- Its leader Thibault Sottiaux was elevated to run all of OpenAI's core products: ChatGPT, Codex, and the API
Key move: a dedicated model line trained separately from ChatGPT, with researchers and product folks working tightly together.
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