OpenAI’s next “low-key research preview” has arrived.
This time, it’s not ChatGPT, but a coding agent dubbed Codex that is being made available to ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, and Team subscribers starting Friday. By drumming up comparisons to how ChatGPT was first described, CEO Sam Altman and other company leaders are positioning Codex as the company’s next major product. It doesn’t cost extra to use for now, though OpenAI plans to eventually charge for access once it gets a sense of demand.
The goal for Codex is to make ChatGPT a “virtual coworker” for engineers, Josh Tobin, OpenAI’s research lead for agents, said during a press call I attended this week. Like other vibe coding tools, Codex generates code from natural language. It can act independently on sandboxed code to fix bugs, run tests, and suggest changes to how code should run in the real world. This process can take anywhere up to 30 minutes, and OpenAI plans to let Codex work in the background for longer over time.
Codex is integrated into ChatGPT’s web app to start, but it’s intentionally cut off from being able to access the internet to mitigate security risks. It’s powered by a version of OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model that is customized for coding and called codex-1.
According to Tobin, the company sees Codex as complementary to more granular AI coding assistants like Cursor and Windsurf, the latter of which OpenAI is in talks to acquire for roughly $3 billion. Inside OpenAI, Codex is already being used by engineers as a “morning to-do list” that helps them run multiple tasks in parallel. They have it spin up multiple tasks in parallel that they can come back to check on, according to Alexander Embiricos, Codex’s product lead. He said that a handful of companies that have tested it externally are seeing Codex used by on-call engineers who oversee a service’s stability.
For now, Codex is relatively limited in what it can do autonomously. Eventually, OpenAI’s goal is for it to fully abstract away the complexity of coding. “The way that we think most development will happen in the future is that the agent will work on its own computer, and we’ll delegate to it,” said Embiricos. During a recent talk, Altman described coding as “central to the future of OpenAI.” There’s a belief in Silicon Valley that whoever creates a general-purpose AI engineer, which Codex is supposed to become, will have an edge in the race to build artificial general intelligence.
Codex was what OpenAI called its first AI coding tool way back in 2021, before ChatGPT was released. Now, models helping people code is perhaps the hottest area of AI, with Anthropic and others betting heavily on it as a business. On Thursday, Windsurf announced its own suite of coding models. And earlier this week, Google’s Gemini added the ability to connect to GitHub and announced AlphaEvolve, an AI coding agent specifically designed for developing algorithms.
Speaking of Google, the company’s annual conference, I/O, happens to be next week. Given the rivalry between OpenAI and Google, the timing of this week’s Codex announcement is likely not a coincidence. We’ll see how Google responds.
- Airbnb’s Apple envy: A minimal, all-black stage. A company founder in a black shirt showing live demos from an iPhone to an audience. Jony Ive sitting in the front row. You may be thinking of an early Apple keynote, but that was what I witnessed in Los Angeles earlier this week at Airbnb’s “Summer Release” event. There, CEO Brian Chesky announced a new “Services” offering, a reboot of Airbnb Experiences, and an app redesign that would make Scott Forstall grin. Steve Jobs has inspired a generation of founders who want to present like him. I understand the impulse, but I’m ready to see a fresh take on what a tech keynote can be. That said, if you’re curious about this week’s Airbnb news, I’d recommend two longreads from Wired and The Wall Street Journal.
- AI news rapid fire: Microsoft laid off three percent of employees, mainly targeting engineers. / Databricks bought the database startup Neon for $1 billion. / Meta delayed the release of its Llama 4.0 “Behemoth” frontier model. / Perplexity integrated with PayPal and Venmo to allow for purchases. / Cohere missed its revenue forecast by 85 percent. / Chegg laid off 22 percent of employees in large part due to the impact of AI.
“On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot’s prompt on X. ” – xAI’s post explaining why Grok was suddenly trying to debunk claims of white genocide in South Africa.
“When AR really works, I think that will wow people” – Google CEO Sundar Pichai on the All-In podcast.
“Flat design is over. The future is colorful and dimensional.” – Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky trying to will it into existence on X.
- Anand Swaminathan, Tesla’s senior manager of Optimus, left to be head of delivery flight performance for Zipline.
- Benjamin Joe is Meta’s new VP of Asia Pacific.
- Susie Dickson, Meta’s head of content design, left after 12 years.
- Alston Cheek, Snap’s former director of platform partnerships, joined Airbnb in the same role.
- Sterling Anderson, Aurora’s co-founder, joined GM as chief product officer.
- Richard Gringras, Google’s VP of News, left after 14 years.
- Christina Wootton, Roblox’s chief partnerships officer, left after over 11 years.
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