With Just 5 Words, OpenAI’s President Admitted the Problem With the New ChatGPT App

Confused about the new ChatGPT desktop app? OpenAI president Greg Brockman thinks it’s messy, too. Brockman addressed the app’s unintuitive user interface in a wide-ranging interview with tech journalist Joanna Stern, released on YouTube this Wednesday. Stern pointed out that the app was “kind of a mess,” and Brockman echoed her, saying, “it’s kind of a mess, we agree.” OpenAI launched a do-it-all app on July 9, transforming what was formerly the ChatGPT app into an everything app, merging it with their standalone coding agent app, Codex, and introducing a “Work” mode alongside “Chat” and “Codex.” The app formerly known as “ChatGPT” became “ChatGPT Classic,” which only has the chat mode. At launch, users struggled to understand the difference between the Chat and Work options, and were frustrated by how unintuitive it was to switch between the different modes. “I am so confused right now,” wrote tech writer and investor M.G. Siegler in a post titled “The ChatGPT ‘Super App’ Sort of Super Sucks.” The next day, Codex engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux acknowledged user complaints in an X thread, and on July 16, OpenAI updated the desktop app with a clearer way to switch between Chat, Work and Codex. But navigation is still not intuitive. The app now has a “Chat/Work” toggle at the top of the app, but to select the Codex mode for coding work, users have to navigate to a drop-down menu on the left sidebar to choose between “ChatGPT” and “Codex.” The default mode is also not consistent across the desktop and web apps. The desktop app defaults to “Work” but the web interface defaults to “Chat,” while “Work” on the web is only available for Pro plans. “I’m almost afraid to ask but… in the web interface, what on earth is the difference between chatgpt ‘work’ and ‘chat’ mode?” posted Lucas Beyer, Meta researcher and ex-OpenAI employee, on X. “Asked ChatGPT Work to summarize it for you (and agree the UI should tell you this directly and you shouldn’t have to come here to ask),” replied Codex engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux. “ChatGPT Work is optimized for work!” Sottiaux and OpenAI describe Work as intended for longer, multi-step tasks where “agents” plan and carry out tasks more autonomously, such as generating research reports. Work follows Codex usage structure, so can draw down more tokens than Chat. OpenAI product engineering lead Akshay Nathan also said this week that ChatGPT tries to push users to the “Work” mode if they are creating a spreadsheet. In his interview with Stern, Brockman said he expects they will phase out the Work tab by the end of the year. “We were hoping to land with zero tabs,” he admitted in the interview. “But I definitely think that by end of year there should be no work tab. You know, that this will be something that will just seamlessly mold into ChatGPT.” In the meantime, don’t ask Brockman to call it a super-app. “We actually don’t really use the word super-app,” he told Stern. “I regret that [it] has become the term of art,” he said with a laugh. BY JULIE LEE