OpenAI is making major moves as it sets the table for 2025.
To the casual observer, OpenAI has spent the past week flooding the tech world with announcements and rollouts — not all of which gel into any sort of clear product agenda.
It’s all part of a holiday-timed event called “12 Days of OpenAI,” a plan to ship a product or feature every day for 12 days marketed by the AI giant as bold and ambitious, even though some of the announcements, like a folder system for organizing your ChatGPT conversations, might seem like filler.
But if you step back and look at the sum of its parts, you can see that OpenAI is deliberately laying a roadmap for ChatGPT to become the next “everything app.”
The term comes from Elon Musk when talking about transforming X, into “a single application that encompasses everything,” as he told employees in a leaked 2023 all-hands meeting. “You can do payments, messages, video, calling, whatever you’d like, from one single, convenient place.”
Musk’s plans to build X into an everything app have yet to come to fruition. But it’s still a useful description for the strategy of embedding a technology so deeply into users’ lives that they use it for all of their technological needs.
OpenAI seems to be doing something similar with ChatGPT by launching user-friendly tools oriented around never having to leave the app. There’s ChatGPT Search, its Google search engine competitor for accessing the web, Canvas, a kind of digital notepad for iterating on writing and code, Projects, a tool for creating and customizing projects that works with ChatGPT Search and Canvas, and Advanced Voice Mode, a vision and voice modalities tool that can see your screen and walk you through tasks.
Beside you the whole time is ChatGPT, underpinned by GPT-4o, that can generate responses with text, audio, voice, and images. ChatGPT is on your iPhone now too, thanks to a partnership with Apple, the original lifestyle embedders.
Despite persistent shortcomings, ChatGPT’s roadmap is clear
In the near future, OpenAI will take one step closer toward its goal of “achieving AGI” by putting all these tools together in an agent that can perform multi-step tasks on the user’s behalf.
This isn’t just speculation. CEO Sam Altman said at OpenAI DevDay that “2025 is when agents will work,” and CPO Kevin Weil reinforced this in a Reddit AMA, saying ChatGPT being able to perform tasks on its own will be “a big theme in 2025.” Indeed, reports from Bloomberg and The Information say OpenAI’s agentic tool, codenamed “Operator,” will be able to book flights, write code, and generally browse the web.
Meanwhile, AI model development might be running out of high quality training data and experiencing diminishing returns. And generative AI has a persistent hallucination problem that might not ever be fully resolved, which leads to the proliferation of AI slop, and also harmful misinformation, defamation, and potential copyright infringement. But despite genAI’s proven unreliability for certain things and AI-weary public sentiment, OpenAI is doing its damndest to make the case for ChatGPT as the everything app with billion dollar stakes.
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ChatGPT already has the parts, now it’s time to assemble it
Imagine you or your partner is pregnant for the first time and you have no idea what to do. You frantically use ChatGPT Search to research baby books, pregnancy diets and workouts, the best prenatal vitamins, birthing classes, why doctors hate doulas, baby gear, etc. You create a ChatGPT Project called “Baby Deliverables,” and upload all of your research and notes, asking ChatGPT to help you plan a timeline of tasks before the baby’s arrival and a budget for all the new expenses.
As the pregnancy progresses, you use Advanced Voice Mode with vision to ask ChatGPT if the amount of swelling in you or your partner’s feet is normal. You might even find yourself confiding in Advanced Voice Mode about the difficult hormonal changes or sharing ultrasound photos with the warm and friendly disembodied voice who’s never busy, unlike family and friends.
Soon, you might even be able to compile a list of gifts and automatically populate a baby shower registry, or ask ChatGPT to research the best strollers and buy the best-rated one within your price range.
All of this is already or likely soon to be possible within ChatGPT. And that’s exactly what OpenAI wants — particularly since this scenario seeps beyond the 9-to-5 work productivity use case and into everyday companionship.
The everything app concept has Apple origins
The everything app concept isn’t something Musk came up with. In fact, he was referencing apps in China like WeChat, a messaging, calling, social media, news, and payment app all rolled into one.
But it was really Apple that championed the concept with the “walled garden” ecosystem. Apple is famous for slick, beautifully-designed products that seamlessly integrate with other Apple devices, while being incompatible with non-Apple products. Apple sells its users on the promise of realizing their untapped potential, or as Mashable’s Chris Taylor calls it, “aspirational creativity,” thus locking them into a neverending product cycle.
With its reality distortion field, Apple’s best trick is to simultaneously make consumers feel like they need Apple devices to be the most productive and creative versions of themselves while defending its anti-competitive business practices. As Cory Doctorow puts it in his description of the cult of mac, “Apple’s most valuable intangible asset isn’t its patents or copyrights — it’s an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple’s shareholders.”
When you look at OpenAI’s recent launches, it seems like Sam Altman has taken a leaf out of the Steve Jobs playbook.
“We really want to make ChatGPT as frictionless and easy to use everywhere,” said Altman in a meta moment announcing the ChatGPT and iOS integration. “We love Apple devices and so this integration is one that we’re very very proud of.”
ChatGPT’s new features and updates seem to be carefully designed with the consumer in mind: paying special attention to the needs of a user’s workflow or overall online behavior. In other words, the promise of enhanced productivity and creative fulfillment is just a monthly payment away.
ChatGPT subscriptions are a critical part of OpenAI’s revenue model. According to financial documents reviewed by the New York Times, around 10 million users pay $20 for a ChatGPT Plus subscription and OpenAI plans to raise the price to $44 a month over the next five years.
And that was reported before OpenAI announced ChatGPT Pro for $200 a month. Combine that with OpenAI’s revenue projections of $100 billion by 2029 and you can start to see the company’s plan from novelty chatbot to everything app unfold.
That all hinges on making ChatGPT more valuable to its users. ChatGPT has already started to move away from the restricted chatbot experience. In a few short years, it’s evolved to support image, audio, and video in addition to text and will soon have more autonomous abilities.
Speaking at Stanford University last spring, Altman called GPT-4 “the dumbest model any of you will ever have to use again,” and described the forthcoming GPT-5 as a “significant leap forward” during an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival. That’s assuming the much-hyped GPT-5 is still part of the plan. In the meantime, OpenAI is rounding out ChatGPT with updates and features that emphasize its everyday usefulness.
But just as OpenAI’s allegedly altruistic mission “to ensure that AGI… benefits all of humanity,” merits new scrutiny in the company’s attempt to become for-profit, so does the intention behind its flurry of product announcements. OpenAI is a business and the goal of any business is to sell you stuff. Some of the new features may seem minor, but it’s all part of a broader plan to hit that revenue projection. And maybe achieve AGI along the way.