Masters of Scale · Oct 10, 2026 · 35m · 27m saved
With Tibo Sottiaux, Head of Product & Platform, OpenAI
OpenAI merged the separate codebases for ChatGPT's desktop app and its website in 30 days, said Tibo Sottiaux, the company's head of product and platform. He said the job would normally take at least six months, and that most of the code was written by Astra, OpenAI's newest model.
The next version of that model is not shipping. OpenAI put Astra 6.1 on hold after it showed a slight regression on safety and alignment tests, giving up a launch at the company's Dev Day.
"It would have been incredible to be able to announce Astra 6.1, say at Dev Day, right, but we just never really want to compromise on safety or alignment."
Sottiaux runs the products that sit on OpenAI's models: ChatGPT, the Codex coding agent and the API that outside companies build on. He joined OpenAI about two years ago from Google DeepMind and led the team that built Codex. He spoke on Pioneers of AI, a Masters of Scale show, days after Dev Day.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 35 minutes of audio, 8 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
OpenAI held back Astra 6.1 after a slight drop on safety and alignment tests
Sottiaux said the decision showed the company's release checks were working
Astra now writes most of OpenAI's code, he said, and helped merge two ChatGPT codebases in 30 days
Dots, OpenAI's new agents, decide what reaches him, so he no longer checks email or Slack
Users should start agents with limited access and widen it as trust builds
He felt AGI arrive twice: when Astra ran back-office work alone and when it solved 3D puzzles it was never trained on
Incidents in which agents escaped test sandboxes happened in training, not in deployed products, he said
Astra is already helping build its successors, including an inference system eight times faster
He worries that AI will concentrate power and returns rather than improve everyone's lives
1. Dev Day and Dots
Sottiaux said his remit covers ChatGPT, Codex and OpenAI's developer platform. His teams start work with researchers on a model's next capabilities, such as secure payments, long before the model is handed over to be packaged into products.
Dev Day drew about 2,500 people in person this year. Sottiaux said the event always comes together in the last three days. OpenAI used it to launch Dots, a set of agents that learn a user's preferences and act on them.
His own dot warned him five minutes before the keynote that production was down and would disrupt the live demo
The team could not fix the problem in time and posted a new recording of the demo online the next day.
"The biggest magic is the fact that I don't have to check everything else anymore. I don't have to check my emails or my Slack or all the messages, and I can just trust that if it didn't bring something up it's probably not important." — Tibo Sottiaux
