The Inside Story of ChatGPT’s Most Ambitious Overhaul
· Maxwell Zeff
Thibault Sottiaux just got a massive promotion. He’s the guy who turned AI coding into one of OpenAI’s fastest growing business lines, and now he’s in charge of overhauling…
Thibault Sottiaux just got a massive promotion. He’s the guy who turned AI coding into one of OpenAI’s fastest growing business lines, and now he’s in charge of overhauling ChatGPT itself. That’s a big deal. The product already handles hundreds of millions of queries a week, but OpenAI clearly thinks it needs a serious refresh to stay ahead.
Sottiaux’s background is interesting. He joined OpenAI from Meta, where he worked on recommendation systems. At OpenAI, he focused on making the company’s code generation products actually useful and scalable. That work paid off. Developers started paying for it, and the revenue followed. Now he’s taking those lessons to the broader ChatGPT experience.
The overhaul isn’t just a few new features. It sounds like a fundamental rethinking of how ChatGPT works as a product. Think smoother interfaces, better memory, and maybe smarter ways to handle long conversations. The goal is to make it feel less like a chatbot and more like an actual assistant that remembers what you said last week.
There’s no exact launch date yet, but the internal pressure is real. Competitors like Google and Anthropic are catching up fast. OpenAI knows it can’t rest on its brand name. If Sottiaux can pull this off, it could redefine what people expect from AI tools. If he can’t, the lead OpenAI built might start shrinking. Either way, the next few months are going to be interesting.