Meet the OpenAI Engineer Leading ChatGPT’s Biggest Transformation Yet
Meet the OpenAI Engineer Leading ChatGPT’s Biggest Transformation Yet
遇见引领 ChatGPT 最大变革的 OpenAI 工程师
OpenAI is in the midst of overhauling ChatGPT. The goal is to transform the chatbot’s simple interface into a personalized AI agent that can handle tasks in every facet of your personal and professional life. The company has taken to calling this new product, privately and publicly, a “super app.” OpenAI 正在对 ChatGPT 进行全面改造。其目标是将聊天机器人简单的界面转变为一个个性化的 AI 智能体，能够处理你个人和职业生活方方面面的任务。该公司在私下和公开场合都将这一新产品称为“超级应用”（super app）。
The all-in-one platform represents one of the biggest bets OpenAI has ever made, and one engineering leader now holds enormous sway over whether it pays off: Thibault Sottiaux. Last month, Sottiaux was appointed OpenAI’s head of core products, overseeing both ChatGPT and Codex, as well as combining them into the future super app. 这个一体化平台代表了 OpenAI 有史以来最大的赌注之一，而一位工程领导者现在对这一赌注能否成功拥有巨大的影响力：Thibault Sottiaux。上个月，Sottiaux 被任命为 OpenAI 核心产品负责人，负责监管 ChatGPT 和 Codex，并将它们整合进未来的超级应用中。
To make the super app a reality, OpenAI has already shuttered several of its stand-alone products, including its video app Sora and an AI platform for scientists. Many of the executives who led those teams have since left the company, while Sottiaux’s influence inside OpenAI has continued to grow. He now reports directly to Greg Brockman, who is currently responsible for all of OpenAI’s product teams while Fidji Simo, the company’s CEO of AGI deployment, is on medical leave. 为了实现这一超级应用，OpenAI 已经关闭了几个独立产品，包括视频应用 Sora 和一个面向科学家的 AI 平台。许多领导这些团队的高管此后离开了公司，而 Sottiaux 在 OpenAI 内部的影响力却持续增长。他现在直接向 Greg Brockman 汇报，后者目前负责 OpenAI 的所有产品团队，而公司 AGI 部署首席执行官 Fidji Simo 正在休病假。
Sottiaux was instrumental in helping build out Codex, which has become one of OpenAI’s fastest-growing revenue streams. But leading Codex meant serving developers and working with AI researchers. Now, he’s being tasked with something new: revamping a consumer product with nearly a billion weekly active users. Sottiaux 在帮助构建 Codex 方面发挥了关键作用，该产品已成为 OpenAI 增长最快的收入来源之一。但领导 Codex 意味着服务开发者并与 AI 研究人员合作。现在，他被赋予了一项新任务：改造一个拥有近 10 亿周活跃用户的消费级产品。
“It’s incredibly exciting and mildly terrifying at the same time,” Sottiaux said in an interview earlier this week. “这既令人无比兴奋，又让人感到些许恐惧，”Sottiaux 在本周早些时候的一次采访中说道。
OpenAI has started talking publicly and often about its plans to build a super app, but it’s still unclear what exactly the final product will do. The term “super app” is usually used to describe platforms in Asia like WeChat, which bundle everything from messaging to payments and shopping into a single interface. But OpenAI is planning something seemingly far more ambitious. OpenAI 已经开始公开且频繁地谈论其构建超级应用的计划，但最终产品具体能做什么尚不清楚。“超级应用”一词通常用于描述亚洲的平台（如微信），它们将从消息传递到支付和购物的所有功能整合到一个界面中。但 OpenAI 正在计划的事情看起来要宏大得多。
Sottiaux says the goal is to build the “world’s best personal agent that deeply understands what humans care about.” Over the next year, he says that ChatGPT will become “delightfully proactive,” and bring people the right information at exactly the right time. Sottiaux 表示，目标是打造“世界上最好的、能深刻理解人类关切的个人智能体”。他表示，在未来一年里，ChatGPT 将变得“令人愉悦地主动”，并在最恰当的时间为人们提供正确的信息。
OpenAI is hoping that turning ChatGPT into a super app revitalizes the company’s growth as it races toward an IPO and tries to ward off intense competition from Google and Anthropic. OpenAI’s bet is that creating one personalized assistant for everything will make it the unequivocal leader in consumer, enterprise, and the overall AI race once again. OpenAI 希望将 ChatGPT 转变为超级应用能重振公司增长，因为该公司正冲刺 IPO，并试图抵御来自 Google 和 Anthropic 的激烈竞争。OpenAI 的赌注是，创建一个万能的个性化助手将使其再次成为消费者、企业以及整体 AI 竞赛中无可争议的领导者。
Engineering Roots
工程根基
Sottiaux grew up in Belgium and studied applied mathematics before joining Google’s London offices in 2015, where he worked on Google Maps before moving over to Google DeepMind. There, he helped build the infrastructure and tools researchers used to build things like AlphaGo, which made history in 2016 when it became the first AI to defeat a human Go champion. Sottiaux 在比利时长大，学习应用数学，2015 年加入 Google 伦敦办公室，在转入 Google DeepMind 之前曾从事 Google 地图的工作。在那里，他帮助构建了研究人员用于开发 AlphaGo 等项目的底层架构和工具，AlphaGo 在 2016 年成为首个击败人类围棋冠军的 AI，创造了历史。
When ChatGPT launched in 2022, Sottiaux said he felt inspired to move to San Francisco and find a way to work for OpenAI. “This is something that we had been sitting on at DeepMind for almost two years, and we were just not doing it,” he explains. 当 ChatGPT 在 2022 年发布时，Sottiaux 说他深受启发，决定搬到旧金山并设法为 OpenAI 工作。“这是我们在 DeepMind 搁置了近两年的东西，而我们当时却没有去做，”他解释道。
Sottiaux officially joined OpenAI in 2024 and initially focused on developing tools for the company’s own researchers, just as he had at DeepMind. But within a few months, he started building what would eventually become Codex. As the AI coding tool exploded in popularity, Sottiaux became a minor celebrity in the developer community, personally responding to bug reports on X, and occasionally granting engineers’ pleas for him to reset their weekly token limits. Sottiaux 于 2024 年正式加入 OpenAI，最初专注于为公司内部研究人员开发工具，就像他在 DeepMind 时所做的那样。但几个月内，他开始构建最终成为 Codex 的产品。随着这款 AI 编程工具的爆火，Sottiaux 在开发者社区成了小有名气的人物，他会在 X 上亲自回复错误报告，偶尔还会满足工程师们重置每周 Token 限制的请求。
But in his new role as head of OpenAI’s core product, Sottiaux will be tasked with thinking about what the average person wants from AI—not just the needs of his fellow engineers. 但在担任 OpenAI 核心产品负责人这一新角色后，Sottiaux 的任务将是思考普通大众对 AI 的需求，而不仅仅是他同行工程师的需求。
Super App or Super Hype?
超级应用还是超级炒作？
In practice, I’m expecting OpenAI’s super app to be a digital assistant with advanced memory capabilities. It will likely be capable of, say, making dinner reservations, but also reminding you later to avoid menu items that contain allergens, or that upset your stomach last time. The platform could also help automate work tasks, such as filing expense reports before they’re due. 在实践中，我预计 OpenAI 的超级应用将是一个具备高级记忆能力的数字助手。它可能不仅能预订晚餐，还能在稍后提醒你避开含有过敏原的菜单项，或者提醒你上次吃过导致胃部不适的食物。该平台还可以帮助自动化工作任务，例如在截止日期前提交费用报销单。
Under the hood, Sottiaux says the super app will largely be powered by Codex, which is already seeing strong growth with nontechnical users. To complete a task, the agent may write software code, run an API call, or surf the web, but the user won’t see any of it. They’ll just ask for things in natural language—or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. 在底层技术上，Sottiaux 表示超级应用将主要由 Codex 驱动，该产品在非技术用户中已经呈现出强劲的增长势头。为了完成任务，智能体可能会编写软件代码、运行 API 调用或浏览网页，但用户不会看到这些过程。他们只需用自然语言提出要求——至少，它应该是这样运作的。
Sottiaux says building the super app mostly involves converting Codex into a general-purpose agent, and then merging that system into ChatGPT. As OpenAI shuttered other initiatives, Sottiaux says the project gained additional resources, though the core team remains relatively small. He declined to say how many people are working on the super app now, but his Codex team consisted of only around 40 people two months ago. Sottiaux 表示，构建超级应用主要涉及将 Codex 转换为通用智能体，然后将该系统合并到 ChatGPT 中。随着 OpenAI 关闭其他项目，Sottiaux 表示该项目获得了额外的资源，尽管核心团队规模仍然相对较小。他拒绝透露目前有多少人在开发超级应用，但两个月前他的 Codex 团队仅有约 40 人。
This isn’t OpenAI’s first attempt at turning ChatGPT into an agent. Last year, the company launched Operator, a tool within ChatGPT that tried to navigate the web on a user’s behalf. It eventually morphed into ChatGPT Agent, but neither product ever saw significant adoption. Sottiaux says those attempts were “too early”—the models powering them weren’t reliable enough, so OpenAI had to heavily restrict what they could do. Now, he claims, the technology is there. 这并不是 OpenAI 第一次尝试将 ChatGPT 转变为智能体。去年，该公司推出了 Operator，这是 ChatGPT 内的一个工具，试图代表用户浏览网页。它最终演变成了 ChatGPT Agent，但这两个产品都没有获得显著的采用。Sottiaux 表示，这些尝试“太早了”——驱动它们的模型不够可靠，因此 OpenAI 不得不严格限制它们的功能。他声称，现在技术已经成熟了。
Another problem with OpenAI’s earlier agents was that consumers didn’t really know what to do with them. While software engineers have proven adept at using agents to automate a wide range of tasks, teaching people how to use ChatGPT in new ways will likely be a big part of the challenge Sottiaux is facing. OpenAI 早期智能体的另一个问题是，消费者并不真正知道如何使用它们。虽然软件工程师已证明擅长使用智能体来自动化各种任务，但教导人们以新的方式使用 ChatGPT 很可能将是 Sottiaux 面临的一大挑战。
“We have to bring the user along. Initially, maybe it’s a small thing that we can do for you, and then increasingly, build confidence that ChatGPT can do bigger and bigger things,” says Sottiaux. “Maybe then you start…” “我们必须引导用户。起初，也许我们只能为你做一些小事，然后逐渐建立信心，让用户相信 ChatGPT 可以做越来越大的事情，”Sottiaux 说。“也许到那时你就会开始……”