OpenAI Bets Big on Building an Everything App

OpenAI is making a big bet. One as old as time – at least time as measured by the course of app history. Having abandoned Sora and SmutGPT, the company has put all of its chips on an everything app, raising $122 billion to build it and fund its other operations.

If you listen to AppStories, you know this is a topic that goes back to our earliest episodes. Everything apps, known more commonly these days as superapps, have beguiled companies big and small forever. The temptation of “what if we stuffed so much in our app that nobody would leave” is hard to resist, but often fails. Just ask Mark Zuckerberg.

OpenAI is up front about its ambitions:

As models become more capable, the limiting factor shifts from intelligence to usability. Users do not want disconnected tools. They want a single system that can understand intent, take action, and operate across applications, data, and workflows. Our superapp will bring together ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and our broader agentic capabilities into one agent-first experience.

Maybe. Look, I think AI is one of the most significant innovations of my lifetime, but for my money, I also think this a classic example of the mismatch between what users sometimes say they want and what companies want to hear.

However, I’m willing to entertain the idea that AI might be different. After all, it’s closer to a natural language OS than your typical productivity app in just enough ways that it may just work as a sort of super-layer that sits on top of “real” OSes like macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android.

Part of what OpenAI is imagining is straight out of the iOS playbook:

Our consumer scale becomes the front door for enterprise usage, as familiarity in daily life drives adoption at work.

I remember when my old law firm finally caved and swapped Blackberries for the iPhone its employees were demanding. So, it’s not unprecedented that consumer demand can drive enterprise adoption, but historically, it’s rare.

And, while I agree with OpenAI that “Moments like this do not come often,” its comparison of its product to electricity and highways strikes me as a bit much. Will the app that OpenAI is imagining be something that will fundamentally reshape your life or will it be just another thing that competes for your attention, like TikTok? That’s the $122 billion bet OpenAI is making, and based on my experience with everything apps, I’ll take the other side of that bet.