[0:00]we at Open AI noticed that like virtually everyone at the company is using the Codex app. And Germany is actually one of the top five markets in the world for Codex momentum. Germany. Yeah. Those moles are so so good that we're still too shy with them. We are still not using them to the maximum of their abilities. It's very likely it could work for like one day, two days, maybe three days or more, completely uninterrupted and come back to you with like, I'm done. Everything is up to date and I tested everything.
[0:39]Wir sind mit dem ganzen Podcast Team nach Paris gefahren und geflogen für diesen Podcast. Wir haben die Möglichkeit mit Roman von OpenAI, der die Codex App verantwortet, zu sprechen. Die Codex App ist momentan eine der heißesten Anwendungen, wenn es um AI harnesses geht, also Agent Harnesses, Sachen, die man machen muss, um Agents zu steuern. Das ist der heiße Scheiß momentan, wenn es um KI geht. Ihr bekommt hier bei AI to the DNA wirklich mal einen Blick von Tool Tourismus hinzu Champions League, denn ihr seht jetzt, wie OpenAI selbst intern diese Super App nutzt, die mittlerweile von über 4 Millionen Weekly Users genutzt werden. Und das hat sich innerhalb der letzten Wochen verzehnfacht in Deutschland. Das heißt, wir haben es hier wirklich in den frühen Stunden mit einer neuen heißen Anwendung zu tun und ihr könnt jetzt dabei sein. Freut euch auf einen Deep Dive aus Paris, OpenAI, Codex bei AI to the DNA. I ask you to say the typical sentence, even if I'm the host, because this is what everyone knows from you from YouTube. What's what you usually say? I usually say something like, hey everyone, I'm Romain from Open AI. From OpenAI. Indeed. Romain, welcome to the podcast. We are in Paris at your at your office, and you're not only from OpenAI, you're one of the key people behind Codex. Yeah, that's what I want to chat with you about today. Yeah, I'm excited. Thank you, Christoph, for having me and thank you for making the trip to Paris, too. Very very welcome. We had a very nice sightseeing tour last night. I I took the team and said like, okay, we at least have to do some walk around the city, so it's it's very beautiful and and uh was a good good start. That's awesome. But the goal for this podcast for me is always to like take people along and explain them that we don't want to be tool tourists, jumping from tool to tool, but more becoming like really more like a Champions League player when it comes to tools. And I want to challenge you right away with that. Um, I made the first video about Codex last May. And that was when Codex was not an app, but like a tool you were using internally. And I tried it and I was like, didn't work the way I wanted it. Then I opened when you released the app, the Codex app again, use it with the model, I think 5, 2 and then 5, 3 Codex. And I was like, okay, this is working now. That was kind of the same moment I had with Claude in December in November. And then I realized with GPT 5, Holy smokes, this is really working now. How it is that Codex is not just a better IDE for developers, but now changing into a new layer of work? Is that planned or did it just happen? Well, I think we uh it's a great uh great observation by the way. We we thought about like coding for a long time, right? I think even the name Codex at Open AI goes back like six years now with when the first like models were able to output code. And when we started like uh this new generation of like Codex product a year ago, we always had this vision of like agentic coding taking place like in the cloud, like agentic delegation with agents being able to write code. The reality is that the models were not quite good enough at the time. You could still do like pair programming, which was very popular in 2025. The idea of having an AI that you can like talk to for like architectural questions, maybe like writing some files or some functions. But you could not really delegate complex like features to build from scratch or like let alone a complex refactoring of a of a codebase and now we are there. So we um we really made like strong progress on our stack of models and as you as you pointed out, I think 5.2 and 53 Codex were the models that had the turning point. We're like I could even see the very best engineers at Open AI late last year were still writing some code. And as of 5.2 and then GPT 5.3 Codex, this is the moment they realized that the models were so good that they did not have to write any code by hand either. And so that's when we really started to manifest this agentic coding, the model being able to take on very very long tasks. It could be like a five-minute task, but it could be like a five-hour task or even like days of work uninterrupted. And as such, we also realized that well, the interface we've been using to write code is no longer the correct one, right? Because if you're pair programming in an IDE, it makes sense because you're talking to the model, you're outputting a function, and you're kind of like in the flow. But if you start delegating tasks to a model that you really trust to do the right thing for like many hours at once, you know, like what we saw last year was like terminal-based interfaces where you have like 10 or 12 tabs in your terminal and each of those agents is trying to get your attention at some point. We knew we had to build something better for this new world of like delegating to agents, and that's how the Codex app came to be. It was really this realization that like the models had become so good that we needed to have like a command center to be able to like not just delegate tasks to agent, but also give them the right permissions, review their work, and and really like be in the seat of a manager of agents, if you will. The command center is a much better word. I used the word Agent Inbox last year to explain it, and it was very early days. And a lot of people in my company were so afraid of using the terminal because like, we have psychologists at blackboard, uh we have consultants and enablement, people who do enablement, and they were like, do I do I need to write code now? So, what if you need to describe in a typical, let's say German, uh corporate company or Mittelstand, um Codex to someone who knows Chat GPT and says, well, I have Chat GPT, I asked Chat GPT, what should I do with Codex because I don't write code? And you're not allowed to to to use the word code, you have to describe it in a work way. Sure. Yeah. I think like if they've been used to Chat GPT, the great news is that they've already like already mastered the first step of like, oh, I can talk to an AI and this model is very smart and it's able to actually have a very personalized response for me. And maybe if they've used Chat GPT before, they may have connected their calendar or they may have connected what their Gmail. You know, so they they've had that personalization and that experience so far. What is very magical with the Codex app for literally anyone now is that you have not just access to all of the services that you have online, but also uh with the right safeguards, of course, and approvals, you also have access to your computer. And what that means now is that any kind of everyday task that you do on a computer, the Codex app is able to do it for you. Uh, so for some people, that's writing code, and that's where we started. But for some others, that's like, well, I have presentations to make every time I meet a new prospect or a customer. Or maybe it's like, I work in finance, and I'm manipulating Excel sheets every day. Or maybe it's like, you know, I'm I'm working in recruiting and I need to have like a pipeline of candidates that's triage. Like all of these things are actually tasks that we all do on a computer, and most of them take time. They usually connect data sources from multiple uh places, they try to visualize things, there are actions to click on. And then you realize that like something like Codex, which was initially made for coding, uh can be unlocking all of that and really give you like more power and like higher productivity for what you're trying to accomplish. I'm always trying to not to overhype apps, unless I have a strong feeling. And I I I um saw it when I prepared the video that you can even choose your own colors now. I'm like, oh, I remember that moment with Slack back in the day when that comes. So that really gave me the hint that you kind of prepare it to be the the app. Are there any plans or anything you can share in order to make the experience like more one again, or be more clear and say like people are saying because you have agents now in Chat GPT, a little more playful, not my personal style and preference, I have to say, but my people use it quite often, and then you have this more professional app. And when I explain it, I I kind of, do you know the German company Bosch? So I say, there's the green Bosch for at home, the small tiny one. I said, this is the Chat GPT, it looks nice, you can use it, it's easy. And there and there's this blue line, more powerful, you can carry around more professional. This is how I explain these two. Um, is there a plan to like more merge it or anything you can share? Yeah, I think like what I can share is like you you you now see kind of like on one side, we have the great fortune to have like 900 million active users of Chat GPT. And it's the brand that most people have um, you know, basically equalized to AI. When they think about like a a chat interface to like help them in their daily lives, personal lives or work lives. Um, on a product that's like very powerful, but still essentially like connecting to um your services online and for which you have a chat interface. And on the other side, you now have like a very fast growing product with Codex that has like now more than 4 million users on a weekly basis to do like any kind of work. But really this idea of like delegating task, Codex is like my my teammate doing my work. I can like control all of these agents in one place. And and you see that like on Chat GPT, you mentioned the agents. These are like agents you can share across a team. For now, Codex is still mostly single player also, you know, you can create your agents, you can create your sub agents inside Codex, but you're not quite easily able to share them with your team. Yeah, we have them in the repo. And then access to that. We we should uh do something easier there. So, obviously, like we want to make sure that there's a path onto which like users could benefit from both sides, right? And I think there are still many questions in flight, uh but uh we want to make sure that like when people are at work or, you know, doing anything on a computer, um, the power of the Codex app and the momentum we're having with it that's so amazing right now should benefit to many more users. And how do we progressively reveal some of that power to the people who are using Chat GPT? So, it started already behind the scenes with a few steps, right? Like, um, the like of course the models are now shared by the way, which was not the case even two months ago, right? Like two months ago, we had coding specific lines of models. We called it like GPT 3 Codex, right? Meanwhile, on Chat GPT, you were maybe on GPT 5.2. So this was like different lines of model, now we've completely reunified that as of GPT 5.4. The same exact models that are like so good are in both products. So we won't see a dedicated 5.5 Codex.
[13:41]No, we're now like on the main line where like all of the reinforcement learning techniques we've done for coding, and it turns out they also benefiting any kind of task. Uh also in the same model where also making the personality improvements and things like that as they kind of conversational partner. Now, the second thing we've also made behind the scenes is that most of the new features, even all new features now in Chat GPT are built on top of this Codex harness I mentioned. So not just the model itself, but like access to all of these tools. And so we now have this great foundation where like two products are sharing the same models and the same harness. And I think the ultimate, um, goal is to is to think through like what is the very best, most powerful experience we can give to any user at any given time. And how do we make sure that like someone in Chat GPT like who's trying to accomplish some task could have the power that we today only have in the Codex app? Right, because it has access to their files and things like this. So we're very much like thinking through that. I think there were a few steps along the way, but we're very excited to see the momentum on Codex and we're very much thinking about how do we bring that power to many more people. I I could go on for hours as you said with you and then uh continue that conversation. Oh, we do a second round next year and say where we are there and then we compare. I would say that would be very interesting. So, yeah, I'm sure it might have have to be like soon in a year at the pace of everything changing this fast, you know, like, uh, I'm sure things are going to get very exciting in a few months. Very very happy to come to Paris again and and uh. Next time I'll meet you. Oh, perfect, okay. I'm overdue to go to Germany. Um, I lost most of my German and I practice in school, but maybe I'm going to get back to that.
[16:08]So, thank you very much for giving us that insight and uh taking the time. Of course, yeah, thanks, Christoph. Amazing conversation.
[16:21]And for everyone now who's still excited and listening, we are now switching to a demo on YouTube and showing how Roman himself is using Codex and uh you can switch to YouTube for that. Thank you.
