Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Head of ChatGPT & Codex: AI Agents for Everyone Are HERE | Thibault Sottiaux OpenAI

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

Thibault Sottiaux is the head of ChatGPT and Codex at OpenAI. He told me that in a few months, people who don't use AI at all will get the same benefits as those who've spent two years figuring it out. So what's actually going to be your edge in a market this competitive? Thibault opened up and shared a few of his secrets — he showed me how his own agents work and how anyone can set them up. We covered the must-have files everyone should create, the one file you should never write yourself, and the new skill that replaces prompting entirely. If you work with a computer for a living, this is the one to watch this week.Links: Subscribe to my free newsletter where I go deeper on AI tools, career strategies, and everything I can't fit into a 30-minute podcast: ⁠https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=Tibo🔗 My Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠📌 My Companies & Products: ⁠⁠⁠https://Marinamogilko.co⁠

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There is going to be dramatic change. Everyone is going to get their own little personal assistant on their computer that allows you to do more than whatever was possible three months ago, six months ago. This is Thibol. He runs ChatGPT, Codex and the APIs at Open AI. The tech powering most of the AI you already use every day. And he just told me that in a few months, people who don't use AI at all will get the same benefits

as the ones who've spent the last two years figuring it out. Today, you have to actively prompt and be creative about what you're asking. In the future, that's not the case anymore. What's going to make people brilliant, I guess? If you're a creative person with good ideas, it's a great time to experiment. Can you show me a workflow that everyone should be deploying today? One thing that I think this will mean is that...

My audience is some of them are developers, but a lot of them are knowledge workers. And they're very excited about AI. And what we've been seeing with software engineering, right? Google says 75% of the code is now AI-ridden. So it has been really transformed by AI. And you said something that this transformation will extend to all knowledge work over the next six months. So what do you think is going to be changing for people who are knowledge workers? I think it's not that much that people are going to change as the technology has matured.

And now agents are reliable over long horizons. It's not very capable of using many different tools, computer use being one of them, browser use. We have added over like 100 different plugins that can tap in. into every little tool that you already use in your life. And the agent and GPD-55 is extremely reliable at it. So it's more that the technology has matured and is ready. And so everyone will be able to get benefits from an agent. Whereas before, you have to be a little bit technical and get in there.

If it wasn't reliable, if it was struggling five minutes in, you could maybe have to go into the configuration. Obviously, that requires like a technical background. That's not the case anymore. So that's why I think it's going to become like very widespread. What do you think is going to change the most and say, like, if you take a marketer, what's going to change their day-to-day with agents? So you're going to look at what can you automate? Oh, maybe I spend like one hour, you know, doing market research.

Maybe I spend one hour like summarizing a whole bunch of inbound and emails. Maybe I spend like, you know, two hours going through like prospects. And so a lot of the concepts that were like, you know, advanced concepts, maybe six months ago, such as like running something on on a Cron schedule. It's like nowadays, it's just like in the app, you can just say, like, you know, run this every 12 hours, you know, do some market research, send me a PDF. And it's going to send it to you over email? Yes, and I can send it to you over email or you can, you know, just consume it in the app. Maybe you can print it. I did this a couple of weeks ago where I would summarize all the news from Slack and then print it on my printer physically like every day.

So I would have it with the coffee. Oh, wow. This is like very executive way. It's getting like, you know, maybe old school. I just like, you know, kind of want my newspaper. This kind of thing is just going to be mainstream. You know what I was really inspired by? I was watching one of your podcasts where you were talking with Greg about having this dashboard,

basically when you wake up in the morning, you have your coffee, and it just tells you like, can you approve this and I'm going to run it? So you just basically read through whatever your AI agent did while you were sleeping and you were approving and it's continuing its work. When do you think it's going to be a reality? It's not that far off. the technology already exists. It's about packaging it.

For example, last week we released auto review, which is the concept. It definitely blew my mind away when we did the research on that. So you have the main agent doing actions, and then you have a second agent that is verifying all the actions of the first agent and verifying that they are not doing anything that could be harmful to you and, like, in our low risk. And so that's an innovation that came out of our safety team

and alignment team, primarily like alignment research. and it allows you to run an agent much more, like, you know, for longer periods of time autonomously, even handling, you know, quite sensitive data without risking, for example, you know, your agent like sending an email to a stranger with some of your personal information in there. Now that you have these pieces to make it more secure, more safe, and you're willing to give access to a lot of things in your life. How do we organize our data? Imagine we're all getting ready to deploy a first agent, right? And the thing is, agent needs good data.

And sometimes, you know, I've been working with mostly my tone of voice, like personal dossier. But then I realized that my agent would really benefit from knowing my strategy when it creates content for me. So what would you say to someone who's just starting out, how to organize this data, what are the must-have files that they have to create? I organize everything on local files on my computer. So I have a folder. I have my notes in there. I keep it like fairly tidy and you know, I use my agent to organize it. And then it grows over time.

That's my question. People work with local computers. I have a laptop that I travel with. I have two Macs and one of my studio, one in my office. Yeah. So what we're going to see over the next three months is all of this is going to come to the cloud. And you're not going to have to manage like local files on, you know, just your laptop. And then, you know, if you happen to travel and you're on your phone, now suddenly it's not the same agent.

Yeah. And that's annoying because you have two separate entities that you need to sort of like, you know, map two different things in your life. So a lot of this is going to come to to the cloud. It's going to manage its own memory. It's going to help you manage, like, files that are just like hosted somewhere. There's no good solution yet, which is, you know, sort of surprising. Yeah, I'm just putting everything to my Google Drive and I'm connecting a Google Drive. Yeah, that works.

That works. What are the files that everyone should come up with for their agents? If we're talking about productivity for knowledge workers. Yes. Tone of voice is a good one. And for that, maybe surprisingly, like, I don't recommend, you know, actually trying to explain your tone of voice. I recommend just including examples of, you know, like, past, you know, newsletters maybe that you published or, you know, snippets from, you know, like recordings or, you know, like messages that you sent, you know, to friends and in different, like, maybe professional and personal settings. I have a lot of notes around like projects that I have.

Each project has its own folder with various files in it. Yeah. And then contacts. But you don't have to maintain everything in files. You can also just rely on, you know, like all the productivity apps that you already have. And then, you know, Codex, for example, will be able to go and pull the right information. How do you know when you stay inside a project or you want to codex to actually build something like a tool or an app? Sometimes I feel like, you know, I need like a dedicated app for like a new use case and then I go and like I create a new folder and then I just like experiment in there.

But nowadays more and more, I feel like I need less of static apps that just can do one thing and I rely just more on my agent to do everything for me. If somebody starts using agents and somebody doesn't, what's the difference in their productivity in say one or three years? one to three years that's like so far off the technology itself like will change so much by then what we're going to see is that you know like people who are willing to adapt and discover these things are you know going to be quite a bit more productive and it's going to enable to do like you know all these things that you sort of like now maybe put off everyone is going to you know get their own like little personal assistant on their computer doing all of the you know that maybe filing your taxes setting up like email filters telling you and helping you like get more on touch

with like, you know, your loved ones. That is something that will connect a lot of people. When I started using more AI, I felt this responsibility dilemma. You just mentioned like taxes, right? Right. Yeah, AI can totally do taxes for me. And I have this automation that tells me every month how much tax I'm going to owe and what tax strategies I could be deploying.

Do I want to be responsible for that? I don't know. Like, when it comes to these tasks, also as an entrepreneur, I totally realize if you're just starting out today, you're much more productive. but if you're an existing entrepreneur, I wouldn't really fire anyone on my team because an AI agent can run it. I would just ask that person to use that AI agent.

Where do you see this go? Because I feel like when I started running so many agents, I feel responsible that I need to check on them. I need to verify their output. I'm like, oh, I'll just let somebody else handle it. That's interesting. So at the end of the day, humans remain responsible. And then the way that we think about it

this is actually about augmenting your own capabilities and giving you a tool that allows you to do more than whatever was possible three months ago, six months ago, and take a lot of like the boring parts of the work as well and just do that automatically for you. It is important as we see this for coding. For us, it's like if you produce a piece of code, you know, you are responsible for it. If it breaks, it's not the agent's fault. It's your fault. Same for code review. And like, you cannot outsource like understanding. At the end of the day, day, humans, you know, are still, remain in control and remain the people who need to understand the entire system and how things work. And so if you view it under the lens of,

like, you know, augmenting your own productivity as you're human and say, you know, obviously, you know, you need humans. After all, we're building for ourselves to better our own lives. Yeah, it's just I feel like I've become much more productive first, but then I'm like, because I want to optimize so many things, my brain just started exploding. There's a, there's a pitfall of like, no, maybe, you know, falling too much into, you know, using, using it for everything and feeling like maybe you can do things, but you're a little bit too early on the capability curve. And so, like, maybe things, you know, will be possible with future models. That's good. That means that you're pushing and you're sort of like, you know, discovering, you know, where

it's reliable, where maybe it needs a little bit more work. And maybe this will be something that you can do in three months, six months. Okay, let's talk about vibe coding in general. So I shared before the podcast that in Language Trip, we're actually vibe coding a lot of different apps and we have a technical person who can actually write code and he's really good at it, but then it's also us who can't. And when we vibe code something, it's, if it works great, but then the technical person comes in and says, oh, I would have structured it in a different way because if we wanted to grow it, like for example, we have this app that is 300 most useful words in English, right? And the way, it was vibecoded in a perfect way, so it's usable. But if we

want to extend it and make it like a thousand useful words, then the architect, is a little bit off. What would you say, like, how would you approach vibe coding these days? If you're thinking of building something like it's going to be a big company, should you work with a technical person or still try and vibe code it? If the goal is to share it with, you know, a couple of people and like try something out and, you know, build it for for the joy of it, you know, definitely like just cutting it by yourself with the help of an agent. It's like, that's perfectly fine. If the goal is to scale it and, you know, make something that is successful, you know, for like, you know, hundreds of thousands of people or more.

Having that technical person, like, in the mix is still useful. I do expect that, you know, over time to go away, where, you know, you will have agents which are able to, like, you know, understand the long-term maintenance aspects, you know, the right structure and be able to, like, you know, handhold you all the way to scaling to, like, a very large and successful, like, product. What do you think is the timeline? Because it's been changing so fast.

We will see significant improvements towards long-term maintainability of code over the next six to nine months. In order to not need the help of someone more technical at all, that feels like quite a far off. What do you think in general about the future of software engineering? I was just moderating a panel around it with a deep learning AI. And we're talking about like how we're all had a consensus of six people in the panel that you just, you still need technical knowledge, but you also need to become a generalist. And because everyone is vibe coding apps, like as a creator, I would have never thought of building an app 10 years ago because I knew how expensive it was. Now I would build an

app, but then I will see thousands of people using it and I will experience some bugs and I will need a technical person. Yes. Are we going to need more software engineers or less with this? Yeah, I think we're going to see an explosion in the amount of infrastructure and apps that we built. And nowadays, it's just, it's awesome because if you just have an idea, you can, you can build it, or at least in some shape you can build it. If you're a creative person, you know, with good ideas, it's a great time to experiment. And then you can quickly prototype, iterate and get to something that you feel, you know,

like might be successful either. And then it's hard to, like, put a limit and, you know, how much software is enough, how much demand is there for more software in the world? Like, how many more problems can we solve? It feels like we're at the very beginning. It feels like we keep coming up with problems we can solve. Exactly, right? So it's like, you know, as long as that continues to be through

and, you know, we're able to continue technological, like, advancement, and it feels like, you know, there will be demand for a lot of technical folks. Yeah. Can you show me a workflow that everyone should be deploying today to maximize their productivity? Can you think of something? It really varies. It depends.

Like, you know, one of the things that I do is I use it to stay in tune with what the world thinks, for example, about Codex. And so I receive like a daily summary of like the highlights. Can we build something for me? Yes, something like that. So let's do a new chat. For example, you know, I am on a podcast talking about AI and Codex. find relevant emails in my inbox and prepare draft replies based on what you know about my priorities from memory. So you haven't built memories yet.

But if you use codex a lot, it will learn about yourself. But it's going to put memory from chat GPT as well, right? Yeah. Another one is go through popular internet sources and give me a breakdown of what codex shipped over the last two weeks. We can go back to email. I have messy inbox for Gmail, for Gmail, set up filters. for it to keep. You know, I remember, I think it was like 2019 or something.

I spent a couple of days just organizing my emails and folders and then I realized such a waste of time because I spent so much time with it. I went to plan a trip, you know, to like where should we go? Based on my calendar availability, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it can connect to my calendar. A trip plan and use my calendar. availability to your planet.

For example, and so it's going to go, like here you can see it's gone through your email. So this one is like I'm a podcast to talk about AI and Codex. It's already gone through your email, found several live threads related to today's thing. You know, it went through the calendar. It's all still going through email. So it's found like a bunch of things. Apparently you have like, you know, with Kodak. Which is today.

And then, you know, here you have another one. So, you know, you can see like we're doing a lot of things, you know, in parallel. You can just like run little agentic treads. Here, you could say like I am making a presentation, put this in Google slide. And it will go and it will just prepare like, you know, a Google slide

for all of the content. The editing is going to be within the app or I will have to leave and go to Google slides. So there is an app browser as well. I don't know if you've set up your pet. No, not yet. So we also shipped like this cute little feature. Oh, I just said on your X. So now, you know, you can move this across and you can see like, you know, which, which

treads it's still working on. So for example, like it's still summarizing codex updates. It's currently setting up some email filters. I don't want to make changes to your inbox. So I'm just going to stop this one. But yeah, this is sort of like a brief. Can you talk to me about this dashboard that I was true? You have a trip to Crete's plant now.

Nice. So it went through my calendar. Okay, so this morning I actually asked my Chad GPT, based on my queries, what app should I build? And it gave me five ideas. And this was one of the ideas where it's content repurposing. And can you rate it? Like my, so it was basically a very basic prompt.

I gave it a link to my MD files. Oh, that's cool. It created this app. But the only thing, I wanted to be able to dictate into the app, so it can convert it into an actual email newsletter. But I don't think it worked. Okay, so let's have a look. So this was Content Repurposing Engine, you know, from all the posts.

Okay, and then it just built all of that for you. Well, it built something too fancy. I'm like, let's just make. make it very simple. You were like, okay, this is a, you're a little being a little bit too ambitious here. Yeah. Yeah.

And then it has, oh, I see, I see. A-B testing. It's like already a newsletter draft. Yeah, and actually, I like that. It didn't wait for my prompt. It just went ahead and generated. It just did a lot of these things. It by itself, it was like, you know,

this is probably what you need. Yeah. And then the only thing that doesn't work is like a voice input. I want to be able to dictate into the app. Yeah. Is it something that another prompt? is going to fix or yes yes so um don't you all to speak to the we have voice dictation here right so no i mean into the app yes yes yes so let's use it let's do a nest it okay so in the app we have we don't

have dictation working so can you integrate it with the open a i speech to text API for that you will need an API key but you can just make it up for now and you can go through the this documentation online to figure out, you know, how to integrate the Open AI speech to text API into this app. That was a very sophisticated prompt. How do I know that I needed that prompt? Because I would never think about API keys. That's why sometimes you still need someone who's like a little bit technical.

But a lot of these things that right now maybe are still a little bit in the realm of like, oh, you need more of a technical background are going to come and become mainstream. So, you know, maybe you need you need me today. but in three months, it will be able to set all of this up. It will just connect it to your open AI account. And you don't need to set up like a separate API key. And it's going to be able to just connect to everything. Okay, well, as building.

Can you talk about like the most sophisticated use case or maybe like the use cases that are very sophisticated in terms of workflow, but that change productivity tremendously for people day to day, something that everyone could get inspired by? So you can say, like, you know, go through, you can tag a lot of different plugins. So you can say Gmail, calendar, if you have, like, docs, yeah. And be my chief of staff and give me a breakdown of my day, a summary of what is important. and prepare me. And then you just run this at the start of the day,

and then you can be more specific than the example prompt that I gave here. Like some people that I've seen, like, you know, have, like, fairly sophisticated, you know, requests for, like, you know, how to be prepared. Yeah, and, like, where am I wasting my time? Should I be hiring someone to fix something where you see I'm spending most of my hours or building an app that's going to, like, optimization? You can really discuss, you know, with codex and start to brainstorm.

you know, about how you can streamline things. Your counters doesn't disbarred with high consequence, so it seems like you're doing good. Okay. Yeah, because I only put important stuff in the calendar. I don't put day to day. Okay, cool. What do you personally use and in what order for which tasks? So I use it for coding a lot.

I use it to help strategize for the different pieces that we're planning to put out, like know, in what order, like, the narrative to construct. So it's like, it's a great taught partner. Use it to, like, organize all my own notes throughout the day. So instead of taking notes in, like, a separate notes app, now I just take them, like, straight into Codex. Oh, interesting. And it just built up memories.

Like, you just start a new chat for anything you want to say. And I'm just like, hey, this is what I'm thinking, yeah. And then at the end of the day, does it automatically summarize it or you have to prompt it? I prompted to, like, then, you know, dump everything into a dock. but also it's like builds up memories. I use it to often stay on top of an answer, like important unanswered emails or Slack messages. Are you seeing this shift from more code work being done

with AI to more productivity stuff? Or has it been equal? So it is interesting to think about, you know, what is an engineer, what does a programmer do all day? And like already there, the majority of the time is not spent on coding, actually. So we saw a shift over time. even including in our technical user base,

way over like 50% of the tasks done on Codex are non-technical tasks today. Already? Yes. And it's been, what, a year since you? The app has only been three months. Okay. So we launched the apps.

The Codex CLI, which was definitely for programmers, that was a year ago. So what are people using it for? What do you see? What are the use cases? There's a lot of like, help me plan, help me organize, thinking through thrips. Now with computer use and browsers,

it can do things such as like order on DoorDash for you, like, you know, do your shopping. Does it take long? I haven't tried it on browse yet, but sometimes the agenetic browsers is like... No, we have the fastest computer-use implementation out there. It's surprisingly quick. So, you know, you will see it, like, you know, click around.

So, for example, I can... Can we ask it to go and download my LinkedIn analytics? Okay, so let's do... as you add computer, and then go to LinkedIn and download my analytics. And then the format we said, Excel spreadsheet, yeah. And create a spreadsheet. There we go.

So let's see what it does. I'll use the desktop controls. This might take five, two time. So the difference from Chad GPT is that it can use your computer. Yes. It can use your computer. It's a full agent that works and has access to your browser, can click around on your apps as well. And you can look at it here.

So it's already, it's visiting. Yeah, it is. It is already on my LinkedIn page. Yes. So let's see what it does over time. I think it's here. You can see it's like it's navigating here. Oh, it's exporting something.

It is already saving stuff. That's amazing. While we wait for him to finish, I wanted to ask you something. You dropped out of your PhD, right? After two weeks? After two weeks, that's right. To start a company? Would you recommend to someone who's doing their PhD

or bachelor's and master's now and feel that they're just hating it? Is it a good time to quit? This was a long time ago. This was almost 15 years ago. But now it's even like... It's relevant. But it's interesting how the meaning of education has changed in these 15 years. What do you think from seeing all the innovation inside open AI, deep mind,

Should people be still pursuing, like, very deep education, or should they just go out and start building? The reason I dropped out of my PhD is I just actually, after starting it, I felt like that was committing four years of my life to that specific subject was actually not what I wanted to do. And I had more ideas and more things that I wanted to try. And so I felt like a startup environment was, like, right for me. I think it's very important to, like, time and time again, like, in my own life, you know, I've realized that it's important to follow. your instincts and do things that give you energy. Was it the right decision for you? Oh, absolutely.

I guess it was. I had such a great time. You know, I built that company for like a year and then I went on, worked for Google. Initially, I was like working on Google Maps and different parts, ads and then I ended up working at the Deep Mind, which was during the golden ages of Deep Mind, like when it was a grand challenge after grand challenge. And then it became like a little bit less interesting. And around the time where, you know, everyone was scaling.

and like Open Ahead had proven that you could scale transformers and create something like very compelling and this was probably the road to to building AGI. That's when, you know, I was like just, okay, let me go to school work for Open AI. And, you know, time and time again, it's sort of like, you know, challenging myself to pursue new things. So before we look at what it's created, one final question, what do you think is going to happen to our lives in three to five years from all the innovation that you've seen, do you think we're going to see this dramatic change that a lot of people are

talking about, or are they exaggerating? I think there is going to be dramatic change. I think it's important, you know, for us and for me personally, to really bring the benefits to everyone. And one thing that I think this will mean is that you will have the benefits, you know, whether you're actively engaging with this technology or not. Today, you have to actively prompt and sort of like, you know, be creative about what you, what you're asking. And, you know, it's almost like the, the benefits that you get are definitely like, you know, proportional to like, you know, how good you're prompting us. You know, in the future, that will not be true. It's sort of like, it will, to me, you know, be very similar to going to a nice tailor.

Sort of like, you know, instantly looks at you and gets you and it's like, you know, this is the kind of clode that would, you know, make you shine and that is like, you know, just like right for you. So what will it depend on then? If it's not your prompting, what's going to make people brilliant, I guess. Yes, it will be much more like benefiting from, you know, good advice from a friend or like, you know, having a natural conversation, like the conversation that we have right now. So like the ability to ask the right questions, not to necessarily prompt them. It will, it will be about engaging, you know, as you're authentic self in a conversation and then getting the appropriate help at the right time. And, you know, benefiting it from

this ambient intelligence that is just like supporting the society. It has created a spreadsheet. Oh, there we go. So it has downloaded all the analytics from. Oh, that's amazing. Well, it's okay, we needed, but this is okay. Like if I ask it to do more specific because it did like one screenshot, but we can. What else would you like it?

We could run it again. So I need more data, you know, for example, impressions per post. Okay, so I am very lazy now with Codex and I just do everything to avoid. So I need more data, impressions per post. Yeah, same. I just use the whisper flow across all my. Yeah. Okay, let us end this daily brief.

It did it. Yeah. Oh, this is getting better. See? And then you can continue to go and, you know, you can get more advanced. If you, there is a workflow then that you like, then, you know, you can use a, a skill creator, this is a skill by itself. You can say, like, create a skill to capture this workflow,

such that I can run it every day. And then it will create a bespoke skill for you. So we can just collect analytics and edit too far. Okay, this is fascinating. Thank you so much. I feel like I have some work to do when I come back home tonight. This is really fascinating. Thank you for building it.

Of course, yeah. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. I also write a newsletter where I go deeper on AI tools that I use, career strategies, and things I can't fit into a 30-minute podcast. It's free. Link is in the description.