Users of OpenAI's software engineering tool Codex might know Thibault Sottiaux as the guy who resets their token limits whenever the product hits a growth milestone. Now, OpenAI is trying to bring that dopamine hit to the rest of us with ChatGPT Work, a platform for white collar workers to leverage AI agents. I spoke to Sottiaux for our feature on the product and its challenges, but we wanted to share more of that conversation with our readers. Here's a lightly edited and condensed version of our interview about winning over skeptics, discovery as a product design philosophy, and the cost of intelligence.
TechCrunch: I know you're a member of the technical staff. Is it right to say that you're the product lead for Codex and Work? Sottiaux: I lead all of core products—that is API, agent infrastructure, enterprise, all of ChatGPT, which includes ChatGPT Work, but also ChatGPT classic, and then everything that is Codex as well. I like to say that everyone reports to Greg at the end of the day.
Sottiaux: We wanted to bring the power of coding agents to everyone, and so this is an exercise in taking something that was made for technical people, and then packaging it in a way that is like safe and delightful to use, but also you can use on the go on mobile, on web, and making it available to as broad of a population as possible. This is why we launched it as part of the Plus plan as well, which is only $20 a month, and the amount of value you get out of it is quite incredible. So it's like that's like what we were pursuing. It's like “make this technology available to the broadest population possible.
” Q: Analysts say that there's an important economic motivation here, that OpenAI needs to own the application relationship with the user. Sottiaux: The more value and the more utility that we generate for users, the more they will be willing to also pay for some part of that utility, and that's how we've always seen ChatGPT as well. It’s like I'm bringing so much utility to you as a user that you just sort of sit there and you're like, "of course I want to pay $20 bucks a month for this," because you know the value that you get is so much more.