OpenAI president admits new ChatGPT desktop app is 'kind of a mess,' teases tab-free design

OpenAI President Greg Brockman acknowledged in an interview published Tuesday that the company's recent redesign of the ChatGPT desktop application is "kind of a mess," according to a report by Joanna Stern. Brockman said the confusing interface represents incremental progress toward a future tab-free design where agentic features blend seamlessly into the main chat experience. Stern published the full interview on her YouTube channel New Things after releasing a teaser days earlier. The discussion covered OpenAI's decision to merge the ChatGPT and Codex desktop apps while introducing Work, a new agentic mode. The resulting interface proved confusing for users trying to locate chat history, prompting a subsequent update that added separate Work and Chat tabs plus a drop-down menu for switching between ChatGPT and Codex. Brockman told Stern the company had hoped to launch with zero tabs but chose to deploy iteratively to gather feedback. He predicted the Work tab would disappear by year-end as functionality molds into ChatGPT. Brockman also said Codex grew from 5 million to 10 million users in a few days following the merge. He conceded the growth resulted partly from "shoehorning" Codex into the app but argued the goal is to bring agent capabilities to mass consumer scale.