In an interview yesterday (July 29) with The Wall Street Journal technology columnist Joanna Stern, OpenAI co-founder and President Greg Brockman admitted that the new ChatGPT desktop app is “a bit messy.”
ITHome reported on July 10 that OpenAI had announced the merger of Codex and the ChatGPT desktop app, creating an all-new ChatGPT desktop app consisting of three components: Chat, ChatGPT Work, and Codex.
In the interview, Brockman acknowledged that the interface of the merged ChatGPT desktop app has caused confusion for many users, making it difficult for some users who only want to continue using ChatGPT to find their chat history.
Brockman said in the interview:
We acknowledge that the new ChatGPT desktop app is a bit messy, but this is a phase that inevitably has to be experienced in the process of evolutionary progress. The current design is a “progressive evolution” aimed at the future.
OpenAI had originally hoped to adopt a “zero tabs” design directly, but it needed to launch the product and collect feedback first, so it has temporarily retained the existing structure.
I can say with certainty here that by the end of 2026, the ChatGPT desktop app will no longer have a Work tab. The related functionality will be seamlessly integrated into ChatGPT.
Brockman also said that although the merged app confused some users after its launch, from the perspective of user scale, the number of Codex users increased from 5 million to 10 million in just a few days after the integration.
Brockman said:
There are currently many users entering the AI field, but the key is that there is still significant room to unlock the value of AI.
My vision, or the way we think about this issue, is to help people who rely on artificial intelligence gain more value, enable them to truly experience agents, and bring agents into the mainstream consumer market.