Lenny's Podcast · Oct 4, 2026 · 37m · 21m saved
With Tibo Sottiaux, Head of ChatGPT and Codex at OpenAI
OpenAI launched more than 20 products at DevDay, and the head of ChatGPT and Codex said the one people are underrating is not the new agent but the decision to open ChatGPT's 1.2 billion users to outside developers, with a revenue share for popular plugins.
Most companies are still building software for people to click through. Tibo Sottiaux said that is the wrong target, and that builders who are not planning for models roughly 10 times better within a year are going to build the wrong thing.
"I think the majority of actions on the internet will be taken by agents." — Tibo Sottiaux
Tibo Sottiaux, who leads ChatGPT and Codex at OpenAI, spoke on Lenny's Podcast in front of a live audience at DevDay, hours after his team shipped Dots, OpenAI's new personal agent platform. He has overseen Codex, ChatGPT Work and now Dots, and he told the audience he took production down on his third day at the company.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 37 minutes of audio, 16 minutes of reading.
Here are the 15 insights that matter.
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Key Takeaways
Sottiaux said the majority of actions on the internet will be taken by agents, and products have to be built for that scale
Hand-built agent loops are a passing phase; the goal is a system that learns what you want
OpenAI will merge ChatGPT's chat and work modes and eventually put everything Dots can do into ChatGPT
The sleeper hit is the open ecosystem: Sign in with ChatGPT has 16 partners, and popular plugins will get a revenue share
Plugins are recommended on retention and quality, not on how many people write about them
His own Dot spotted a production outage 5 minutes before his live demo and offered to fix it
Typing fast is a skill trending down; taste and knowing the user are trending up
OpenAI has held back a more capable model than Astra and is spending more and more compute on monitoring its agents
The thing that annoys him most about ChatGPT today is that users need "a PhD in model pickers"
1. Launch Night in the Library
The host opened by asking how Sottiaux had slept after a day of launches. He said his team had done the late shift.
The team turned an office room into a war room for the launch
"So, while I sleep, they were awake most of the night. We have this amazing room at the office called the library, which we completely repurposed as like a mega war room." — Tibo Sottiaux
Asked whether he still writes code after years as an engineer, he first answered "What is coding?" and then said he merges code every once in a while. Codex writes most of it for him, for analysis of trends, of the business and of how earlier launches are doing.
He codes by hand only on weekends, as a break
"Occasionally, at the in during the weekends, I'll have like a little therapeutic moment where I do a little lead code just by hand." — Tibo Sottiaux
