OpenAI's Codex and ChatGPT Work hit 10M users, with non-developers making up 20%

Codex from 0 to 10M Users: Building ChatGPT Work — Akshay Nathan, OpenAI

OpenAI product engineering lead Akshay Nathan walked through the origin of ChatGPT Work on the Latent Space podcast. Codex started as a coding tool but took off internally among non-engineers; knowledge workers now account for roughly 20% of its user base and are growing over 3x faster than developers. The team extracted Codex's agent harness to build ChatGPT Work for documents, spreadsheets, and slides, launching July 9 and reaching 10M combined users within two weeks. Akshay detailed the shared harness, differing UX and sandboxing defaults, and how Sites, OpenClaw, memory, and sub-agents let non-coders delegate work to AI. He also noted that when anyone can build, ideas and taste become the bottleneck—and LLMs still struggle to generate genuinely grounded new ideas.

Why it matters: OpenAI's product engineering lead gives a first detailed breakdown of ChatGPT Work's origin, with a concrete stat that knowledge worker growth is 3x that of developers. Directly useful for anyone building agent products. Score isn't higher because this is a podcast interview, ...