When Nick Turley joined OpenAI in 2022 as the head of ChatGPT, he was tasked with commercializing the company’s research. He has made great strides toward that goal, growing the product to 800 million weekly active users. Now Turley wants to take an even bigger swing: transforming ChatGPT into a new type of operating system full of third-party apps.
I sat down with Turley this week on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Fort Mason, a former U.S. military post where OpenAI held its third annual developer conference, to discuss how he’s thinking about ChatGPT’s future. You can find a transcript of our conversation at the bottom of this article.
To turn ChatGPT into an operating system, Turley tells me he’s drawing inspiration from web browsers. Over the last decade, browsers have emerged as a new kind of operating system — not in the literal sense like macOS or Windows — because they’ve become the main place people work on computers thanks to a variety of web applications. Turley sees ChatGPT evolving in a similar way: a platform that could change how people interact with software.
OpenAI is reportedly developing a browser too. Turley doesn’t confirm or deny this, but he does say browsers are “really interesting.” The company is also working with Jony Ive and a team of longtime Apple designers on a family of hardware devices. Given these efforts, it’s easy to see how a ChatGPT operating system full of apps could become a central component of OpenAI’s consumer ecosystem.
OpenAI has been chasing this idea for a while. In 2023, the company launched an array of “AI app store” efforts such as ChatGPT plugins and the GPT Store. Those products didn’t exactly take off, but OpenAI seems to have a better approach this time around.
The launch of apps aligns with OpenAI’s desire to turn ChatGPT into an e-commerce destination. Apps from Expedia, DoorDash, and Uber could lead to more transactions in ChatGPT, something OpenAI can now facilitate and capture some of the r …