OpenAI Dev Day 2025: ChatGPT becomes the new app store — and hardware is coming
In a packed hall at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, against a backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman laid out a bold vision to remake the digital world. The company that brought generative AI to the mainstream with a simple chatbot is now building the foundations for its next act: a comprehensive computing platform designed to move beyond the screen and browser, with legendary designer Jony Ive enlisted to help shape its physical form.At its third annual DevDay, OpenAI unveiled a suite of tools that signals a strategic pivot from a model provider to a full-fledged ecosystem. The message was clear: the era of simply asking an AI questions is over. The future is about commanding AI to perform complex tasks, build software autonomously, and live inside every application, a transition Altman framed as moving from "systems that you can ask anything to, to systems that you can ask to do anything for you." The day’s announcements were a three-pronged assault on the status quo, targeting how users interact with software, how developers build it, and how businesses deploy intelligent agents. But it was the sessions held behind closed doors, away from the public livestream, that revealed the true scope of OpenAI’s ambition — a future that includes new hardware, a relentless pursuit of computational power, and a philosophical quest to redefine our relationship with technology.From chatbot to operating system: The new 'App Store'The centerpiece of the public-facing keynote was the transformation of ChatGPT itself. With the new Apps SDK, OpenAI is turning its wildly popular chatbot into a dynamic, interactive platform, effectively an operating system where developers can build and distribute their own applications.“Today, we're going to open up ChatGPT for developers to build real apps inside of ChatGPT,” Altman announced during the keynote presentation to applause. “This will enable a new generation of apps that are interactive, adaptive and personalized, that you can chat with.”Live demonstrations showcased apps from partners like Coursera, Canva, and Zillow running seamlessly within a chat conversation. A user could watch a machine learning lecture, ask ChatGPT to explain a concept in real-time, and then use Canva to generate a poster based on the conversation, all without leaving the chat interface. The apps can render rich, interactive UIs, even going full-screen to offer a complete experience, like exploring a Zillow map of homes.For developers, this represents a powerful new distribution channel. “When you build with the Apps SDK, your apps can reach hundreds of millions of chat users,” Altman said, highlighting a direct path to a massive user base that has grown to over 800 million weekly active users. In a private press conference later, Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, elaborated on the grander vision. "We never meant to build a chatbot," he stated. "When we set out to make ChatGPT, we meant to build a super assistant and we got a little sidetracked. And one of the tragedies of getting a little sidetracked is that we built a great chatbot, but we are the first ones to say that not all software needs to be a chatbot, not all interaction with the commercial world needs to be a chatbot."Turley emphasized that while OpenAI is excited about natural language interfaces, "the interface really needs to evolve, which is why you see so much UI in the demos today. In fact, you can even go full screen and chat is in the background." He described a future where users might "start your day in ChatGPT, just because it kind of has become the de facto entry point into the commercial web and into a lot of software," but clarified that "our incentive is not to keep you in. Our product is to allow other people to build amazing businesses on top and to evolve the form factor of software."The rise of the agents: Building the 'do anything' AIIf apps are about bringing the world into ChatGPT, the new "Agent Kit" is about sending AI out into the world to get things done. OpenAI is providing a complete "set of building blocks... to help you take agents from prototype to production," Altman explained in his keynote. Agent Kit is an integrated development environment for creating autonomous AI workers. It features a visual canvas to design complex workflows, an embeddable chat interface ("Chat Kit") for deploying agents in any app, and a sophisticated evaluation suite to measure and improve performance.A compelling demo from financial operations platform Ramp showed how Agent Kit was used to build a procurement agent. An employee could simply type, "I need five more ChatGPT business seats," and the agent would parse the request, check it against company expense policies, find vendor details, and prepare a virtual credit card for the purchase — a process that once took weeks now completed in minutes. This push into agents is a direct response to a growing enterprise need to move beyond AI as a simple information retrieval tool and toward AI as a productivity engine that automates complex business processes. Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's COO, noted that for enterprise adoption, "you needed this kind of shift to more agentic AI that could actually do things for you, versus just respond with text outputs." The future of code and the Jony Ive bBombshellPerhaps the most profound shift is occurring in software development itself. Codex, OpenAI's AI coding agent, has graduated from a research preview to a full-fledged product, now powered by a specialized version of the new GPT-5 model. It is, as one speaker put it, "a teammate that understands your context." The capabilities are staggering. Developers can now assign Codex tasks directly from Slack, and the agent can autonomously write code, create pull requests, and even review other engineers' work on GitHub. A live demo showed Codex taking a simple photo of a whiteboard sketch and turning it into a fully functional, beautifully designed mobile app screen. Another demo showed an app that could "self-evolve," reprogramming itself in real-time based on a user's natural language request. But the day's biggest surprise came in a closing fireside chat, which was not livestreamed, between Altman and Jony Ive, the iconic former chief design officer of Apple. The two revealed they have been collaborating for three years on a new family of AI-centric hardware.Ive, whose design philosophy shaped the iPhone, iMac, and Apple Watch, said his creative team’s purpose "became clear" with the launch of ChatGPT. He argued that our current relationship with technology is broken and that AI presents an opportunity for a fundamental reset.“I think it would be absurd to assume that you could have technology that is this breathtaking, delivered to us through legacy products, products that are decades old,” Ive said. “I see it as a chance to use this most remarkable capability to full-on address a lot of the overwhelm and despair that people feel right now.”While details of the devices remain secret, Ive spoke of his motivation in deeply human terms. “We love our species, and we want to be useful. We think that humanity deserves much better than humanity generally is given,” he said. He emphasized the importance of "care" in the design process, stating, "We sense when people have cared... you sense carelessness. You sense when somebody does not care about you, they care about money and schedule." This collaboration confirms that OpenAI's ambitions are not confined to the cloud; it is actively exploring the physical interface through which humanity will interact with its powerful new intelligence.The Unquenchable Thirst for ComputeUnderpinning this entire platform strategy is a single, overwhelming constraint: the availability of computing power. In both the private press conference and the un-streamed Developer State of the Union, OpenAI’s leadership returned to this theme again and again.“The degree to which we are all constrained by compute... Everyone is just so constrained on being able to offer the services at the scale required to get the revenue that at this point, we're quite confident we can push it pretty far,” Altman told reporters. He added that even with massive new hardware partnerships with AMD and others, "we'll be saying the same thing again. We're so convinced... There's so much more demand." This explains the company’s aggressive, multi-billion-dollar investment in infrastructure. When asked about profitability, Altman was candid that the company is in a phase of "investment and growth." He invoked a famous quote from Walt Disney, paraphrasing, "We make more money so we can make more movies." For OpenAI, the "movies" are ever-more-powerful AI models.Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s President, put the ultimate goal in stark economic terms during the Developer State of the Union. "AI is going to become, probably in the not too distant future, the fundamental driver of economic growth," he said. "Asking ‘How much compute do you want?’ is a little bit like asking how much workforce do you want? The answer is, you can always get more out of more." As the day concluded and developers mingled at the reception, the scale of OpenAI's project came into focus. Fueled by new models like the powerful GPT-5 Pro and the stunning Sora 2 video generator, the company is no longer just building AI. It is building the world where AI will live — a world of intelligent apps, autonomous agents, and new physical devices, betting that in the near future, intelligence itself will be the ultimate platform.
