Codex's Untold Rise: 40M+ Weekly Users and a Year of Reinvention at OpenAI
danshipper · x · 2026-10-16
Dan Shipper's long-form piece tells the underreported story of Codex's rise: a year ago it was a scrappy OpenAI side project whose cloud product hadn't found product-market fit, forcing the team to start over.
Within 12 months:
- Codex swallowed the flagship ChatGPT desktop app from the inside (it literally runs as com.openai.codex on your Mac)
- Codex and ChatGPT for Work surpassed 40M weekly users across engineering and knowledge work
- Leader Thibault Sottiaux was elevated to run all of OpenAI's core products, including ChatGPT, Codex, and the API
The key move: the team trained a dedicated model line separate from ChatGPT, with researchers and product working tightly together. A quoted reply notes Shipper was among the earliest voices persistently pushing everyone to adopt Codex.
Related event: Every's "How Codex Happened" Chronicles Codex's Comeback(13 posts)→
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