ChatGPT is about to get a lot more powerful.

That's because OpenAI plans to merge ChatGPT and Codex, its coding agent, into a single app. ChatGPT, now supercharged with agents that can search the web on your behalf, will suddenly be able to do things like send you a high level review of your emails and meetings for the day, analyze information from spreadsheets and organize the files on your computer.

The combined tool is geared towards working professionals, entrepreneurs and everyday users, says Tara Seshan, a member of product staff at OpenAI. The promise: people can now delegate complex tasks to AI agents to free up time for creative, high-stakes work, she says. Codex can be helpful for a wide range of tasks like generating spreadsheets for monthly reports, using a call transcript to prepare a brief and log it into Salesforce or spinning up six different types of content from one piece of text.

It's an attractive pitch. But it can take a fair deal of time to learn how to use Codex efficiently and set up automated tasks. Even then, you have to give it clear guardrails, as it has a tendency to run on a single task for hours on end without generating a usable answer. (In one instance when I asked Codex to extract the names of startups from a tweet and calculate how much they’ve raised, it ran for more than two hours.) “I think the best users of these tools really give context, define what good looks like, set boundaries, review outputs, and they make judgment calls about the end thing,” Seshan says.

OpenAI relaunched Codex as a desktop app in February. It’s now used by 5 million weekly active users (compared to 900 million for ChatGPT). OpenAI also teased new hardware for Codex that it plans to launch in mid-July— a keyboard-like device where you can assign........

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