오픈AI가 단순 챗봇이었던 ChatGPT를 사용자의 개인 및 업무 전반을 아우르는 개인형 AI 에이전트 '슈퍼 앱'으로 개편합니다. 소라(Sora) 등 독립 제품들을 폐기하면서까지 핵심 제품 총괄을 맡은 티보 소티오(Thibault Sottiaux)가 이 변화의 중심에 섰습니다. 이번 전략은 상장(IPO)을 준비 중인 오픈AI가 구글과 앤스로픽 등 경쟁사를 방어하고 시장을 장악하기 위한 핵심 행보입니다.
번역된 본문
오픈AI(OpenAI)는 현재 ChatGPT의 대대적인 전면 개편 작업을 진행 중입니다. 이 프로젝트의 목표는 챗봇의 단순한 인터페이스를 사용자의 개인적, 업무적 삶의 모든 측면에서 작업을 수행할 수 있는 개인형 AI 에이전트(AI agent)로 탈바꿈시키는 것입니다. 사내외에서 오픈AI는 이 새로운 제품을 '슈퍼 앱(Super app)'이라 부르고 있습니다. 이 올인원 플랫폼은 오픈AI가 역사상 건 본 가장 큰 도박 중 하나를 의미하며, 이 프로젝트의 성공 여부는 엔지니어링 리더인 티보 소티오(Thibault Sottiaux)의 손에 크게 달려 있습니다.
지난달 소티오는 오픈AI의 핵심 제품 총괄 책임자로 임명되어 ChatGPT와 Codex를 모두 관장하며, 이를 미래의 슈퍼 앱으로 통합하는 임무를 맡았습니다. 슈퍼 앱을 현실화하기 위해 오픈AI는 이미 비디오 앱인 소라(Sora)와 과학자를 위한 AI 플랫폼 등 여러 독립 실행형 제품의 서비스를 종료했습니다. 이들 팀을 이끌었던 많은 임원들이 회사를 떠났지만, 소티오의 사내 영향력은 계속해서 성장하고 있습니다. 그는 현재 AGI 배포(AGI deployment) 최고경영자인 피지 시모(Fidji Simo)가 휴직 중인 상황에서 모든 오픈AI 제품 팀을 총괄하는 그렉 브록만(Greg Brockman)에게 직접 보고하고 있습니다.
소티오는 오픈AI의 가장 빠른 수익원 중 하나로 자리 잡은 Codex 구축을 이끈 핵심 인물입니다. 하지만 과거 Codex를 이끌 때는 개발자를 대상으로 서비스하며 AI 연구원들과 협업하는 역할이었습니다. 이제 그는 주간 활성 사용자가 거의 10억 명에 달하는 소비자용 제품을 개편하는 새로운 과제를 부여받았습니다. "이는 엄청나게 흥미로운 일이기도 하지만 동시에 약간은 아찔한 일이기도 합니다."라고 소티오는 이번 주 초 인터뷰에서 밝혔습니다.
오픈AI는 슈퍼 앱 구축 계획에 대해 공개적으로 자주 언급하고 있지만, 최종 제품이 정확히 어떤 기능을 하게 될지는 아직 불분명합니다. '슈퍼 앱'이라는 용어는 보통 위챗(WeChat)과 같은 아시아 플랫폼을 묘사할 때 사용되며, 이는 메시징부터 결제, 쇼핑까지 모든 것을 단일 인터페이스에 담아내는 형태입니다. 그러나 오픈AI는 훨씬 더 야심 찬 무언가를 기획하고 있습니다. 소티오는 "인간이 신경 쓰는 부분을 깊이 이해하는 세계 최고의 개인 에이전트를 구축하는 것"이 목표라고 밝혔습니다. 그는 향후 1년 내에 ChatGPT가 "매우 쾌적하게 사용자에게 먼저 다가가(proactive) 정확히 필요한 순간에 올바른 정보를 제공할 것"이라고 덧붙였습니다.
오픈AI는 ChatGPT를 슈퍼 앱으로 전환시키는 것이 기업공개(IPO)를 향해 치닫는 동시에 구글(Google)과 앤스로픽(Anthropic)과의 치열한 경쟁을 방어하며 회사의 성장을 되살리는 계기가 되기를 희망하고 있습니다. 모든 것을 해결해 주는 하나의 개인화된 비서를 만드는 것은 오픈AI가 소비자, 기업 시장 및 전반적인 AI 경쟁에서 다시 한번 명확한 1위 자리를 차지할 수 있을 것이라는 오픈AI의 베팅입니다.
엔지니어링 뿌리
소티오는 벨기에에서 자라 응용 수학을 전공한 후 2015년 구글 런던 사무실에 합류해 구글 지도(Google Maps) 작업을 거쳐 구글 딥마인드(Google DeepMind)로 자리를 옮겼습니다. 딥마인드에서 그는 2016년 인간 바둑 챔피언을 처음으로 물리친 AI로 역사를 쓴 알파고(AlphaGo) 등을 만드는 연구원들을 위한 인프라와 도구를 구축하는 데 도움을 주었습니다. 2022년 ChatGPT가 출시되었을 때, 소티오는 샌프란시스코로 이주해 오픈AI에서 일할 방법을 찾아야겠다는 영감을 받았습니다. "이것은 우리가 딥마인드에서 거의 2년 동안 고민해왔던 문제였는데, 우리는 그냥 그것을 실현하지 않았던 것입니다."라고 그는 설명했습니다.
소티오는 2024년 공식적으로 오픈AI에 합류하여 딥마인드 시절처럼 처음에는 사내 연구원들을 위한 도구 개발에 집중했습니다. 그러나 몇 달 안에 그는 결국 Codex가 될 제품을 만들기 시작했습니다. AI 코딩 도구가 폭발적인 인기를 끌면서 소티오는 개발자 커뮤니티에서 소소한 유명인사가 되었고, 개인적으로 X(옛 트위터)에서 버그 보고서에 응답하고 가끔 엔지니어들의 부탁을 받아 주간 토큰 한도를 초기화해주기도 했습니다. 하지만 오픈AI의 핵심 제품 총괄이라는 새로운 역할에서 소티오는 이제 동료 엔지니어들의 요구뿐만 아니라 일반 대중이 AI에서 원하는 것이 무엇인지 고민해야 하는 임무를 맡게 되었습니다.
슈퍼 앱인가, 과대광고인가?
실제로 나는 오픈AI의 슈퍼 앱이 다음과 같은 디지털 비서가 될 것으로 예상합니다.
Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story OpenAI is in the midst of overhauling ChatGPT . The goal is to transform the chatbot’s simple interface into a personalized AI agent that can handle tasks in every facet of your personal and professional life. The company has taken to calling this new product, privately and publicly, a “super app.” The all-in-one platform represents one of the biggest bets OpenAI has ever made, and one engineering leader now holds enormous sway over whether it pays off: Thibault Sottiaux. Last month, Sottiaux was appointed OpenAI’s head of core products , overseeing both ChatGPT and Codex, as well as combining them into the future super app. To make the super app a reality, OpenAI has already shuttered several of its stand-alone products, including its video app Sora and an AI platform for scientists. Many of the executives who led those teams have since left the company, while Sottiaux’s influence inside OpenAI has continued to grow. He now reports directly to Greg Brockman, who is currently responsible for all of OpenAI’s product teams while Fidji Simo, the company’s CEO of AGI deployment, is on medical leave . Sottiaux was instrumental in helping build out Codex , which has become one of OpenAI’s fastest-growing revenue streams. But leading Codex meant serving developers and working with AI researchers. Now, he’s being tasked with something new: revamping a consumer product with nearly a billion weekly active users. “It’s incredibly exciting and mildly terrifying at the same time,” Sottiaux said in an interview earlier this week. OpenAI has started talking publicly and often about its plans to build a super app, but it’s still unclear what exactly the final product will do. The term “super app” is usually used to describe platforms in Asia like WeChat, which bundle everything from messaging to payments and shopping into a single interface. But OpenAI is planning something seemingly far more ambitious. Sottiaux says the goal is to build the “world’s best personal agent that deeply understands what humans care about.” Over the next year, he says that ChatGPT will become “delightfully proactive,” and bring people the right information at exactly the right time. OpenAI is hoping that turning ChatGPT into a super app revitalizes the company’s growth as it races toward an IPO and tries to ward off intense competition from Google and Anthropic . OpenAI's bet is that creating one personalized assistant for everything will make it the unequivocal leader in consumer, enterprise, and the overall AI race once again. Engineering Roots Sottiaux grew up in Belgium and studied applied mathematics before joining Google’s London offices in 2015, where he worked on Google Maps before moving over to Google DeepMind. There, he helped build the infrastructure and tools researchers used to build things like AlphaGo, which made history in 2016 when it became the first AI to defeat a human Go champion. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, Sottiaux said he felt inspired to move to San Francisco and find a way to work for OpenAI. “This is something that we had been sitting on at DeepMind for almost two years, and we were just not doing it,” he explains. Sottiaux officially joined OpenAI in 2024 and initially focused on developing tools for the company’s own researchers, just as he had at DeepMind. But within a few months, he started building what would eventually become Codex. As the AI coding tool exploded in popularity, Sottiaux became a minor celebrity in the developer community, personally responding to bug reports on X, and occasionally granting engineers’ pleas for him to reset their weekly token limits. But in his new role as head of OpenAI’s core product, Sottiaux will be tasked with thinking about what the average person wants from AI—not just the needs of his fellow engineers. Super App or Super Hype? In practice, I’m expecting OpenAI’s super app to be a digital assistant with advanced memory capabilities. It will likely be capable of, say, making dinner reservations, but also reminding you later to avoid menu items that contain allergens, or that upset your stomach last time. The platform could also help automate work tasks, such as filing expense reports before they’re due. Under the hood, Sottiaux says the super app will largely be powered by Codex, which is already seeing strong growth with nontechnical users. To complete a task, the agent may write software code, run an API call, or surf the web, but the user won’t see any of it. They’ll just ask for things in natural language—or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Sottiaux says building the super app mostly involves converting Codex into a general-purpose agent, and then merging that system into ChatGPT. As OpenAI shuttered other initiatives, Sottiaux says the project gained additional resources, though the core team remains relatively small. He declined to say how many people are working on the super app now, but his Codex team consisted of only around 40 people two months ago. This isn’t OpenAI’s first attempt at turning ChatGPT into an agent. Last year, the company launched Operator , a tool within ChatGPT that tried to navigate the web on a user’s behalf. It eventually morphed into ChatGPT Agent , but neither product ever saw significant adoption . Sottiaux says those attempts were “too early”—the models powering them weren’t reliable enough, so OpenAI had to heavily restrict what they could do. Now, he claims, the technology is there. Another problem with OpenAI’s earlier agents was that consumers didn’t really know what to do with them. While software engineers have proven adept at using agents to automate a wide range of tasks, teaching people how to use ChatGPT in new ways will likely be a big part of the challenge Sottiaux is facing. “We have to bring the user along. Initially, maybe it’s a small thing that we can do for you, and then increasingly, build confidence that ChatGPT can do bigger and bigger things,” says Sottiaux. “Maybe then you start teaching your peers, your friends, and your family these new capabilities that you found in ChatGPT. Then also the model in ChatGPT itself has a role to play there, almost as a mentor.” Sottiaux wouldn’t say when the super app is coming, beyond “soon.” But he notes that “a lot of what is going to be made available for everyone in ChatGPT is already available in the Codex app,” and OpenAI has already said that it plans to merge Codex into ChatGPT in the coming weeks. Sottiaux adds that OpenAI generally prefers doing a series of small releases so it can get feedback as it goes, in part because the AI space moves so fast that “you can’t really afford to do a big splash and be wrong.” Not Like the Others Hundreds of millions of people in China and other countries have used super apps to do almost everything online for years. OpenAI is proposing a different vision, in part because it doesn’t really have any other choice. WeChat and Alipay became ubiquitous by building the essential financial and information infrastructure that modern China now runs on. Countries like the US, on the other hand, already have Gmail and Instagram accounts, credit cards, and Venmo. As a result, OpenAI’s super app will likely have to find ways to plug into those preexisting systems. OpenAI is making moves in this direction. Earlier this week, it announced an expanded partnership with Visa for agentic payments , and it previously built services that connect ChatGPT and Codex to your email inbox, Slack, and calendar. OpenAI is ultimately betting that it can create a universal consumer interface so powerful and helpful that people no longer need to think about or interact with the websites, apps, and APIs underneath it. But that could leave it vulnerable to competitors who control the services and infrastructure it relies on. Sottiaux, though, is convinced that we’re headed toward a future where everyone has one