OpenAI calls ChatGPT desktop UI “kind of a mess”

OpenAI president Greg Brockman has acknowledged that the company’s redesigned ChatGPT desktop app is “kind of a mess” after it merged the ChatGPT and Codex apps and introduced a new Work agentic mode.

In an interview with Joanna Stern for her YouTube channel, New Things, Brockman discussed the rollout and OpenAI’s longer-term plan for a tab-free interface. The initial design made it difficult for users who simply wanted ChatGPT to find their chat history. OpenAI later added separate Work and Chat tabs at the top, plus a drop-down menu in the left panel for switching between ChatGPT and Codex.

OpenAI’s tab-free ChatGPT plan

Brockman said the current layout is an interim step toward integrating Work directly into ChatGPT. He agreed with Stern’s description of the interface and said OpenAI had originally hoped to launch with no tabs.

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“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.”

The company has not provided a more specific date for removing the Work tab. Brockman’s comments also leave open how Work’s features will appear once they are integrated into the main ChatGPT interface.

Codex users jump from 5 million to 10 million

Despite the confusing rollout, Brockman said Codex reached 10 million users, up from 5 million, within just a few days of the merged desktop apps becoming available. When Stern suggested that the growth came from “shoehorning” Codex into ChatGPT, Brockman conceded that many people were being brought into the product this way, while saying that broader access to agents was part of the goal.

“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.”

Stern’s wide-ranging interview also covers the new ChatGPT Voice, OpenAI’s hardware ambitions, the Apple lawsuit, and the recent Hugging Face hack.