OpenAI Announces Major Restructuring; Brockman Assumes Product Leadership

[New Wisdom Yuan Introduction] OpenAI has been shaken to its core late at night: ChatGPT, Codex, and the API—its three flagship products—are being urgently merged, with the CEO leading the charge! Its competitor Anthropic's valuation has surged to $900 billion; this is a life-or-death battle before IPO, and a super app is on the horizon.

Just now, the tech world broke major news on Saturday morning.

OpenAI unexpectedly announced its largest and most drastic organizational restructuring in company history, just before its IPO.

ChatGPT, Codex, and the developer ecosystem’s lifeline—API—have been fully integrated into a single unified product organization.

Even more astonishingly, Greg Brockman, the former tech powerhouse and co-founder and president of OpenAI who once stepped back from the spotlight and resigned in protest over Altman’s removal, has now been officially thrust into the spotlight and taken full control of product strategy.

On the surface, this is OpenAI’s strategic focus for the agent era.

But in reality, this is clearly a dramatic “Silicon Valley Game of Thrones”: ChatGPT’s founding figures have been reassigned, key executives have resigned one after another, and the head of AGI has taken an indefinite medical leave…

Now, OpenAI's critics are watching closely.

Anthropic has just secured a $30 billion funding round, pushing its valuation to $900 billion and surpassing OpenAI in a historic move; Google is also sharpening its tools ahead of next week’s I/O conference.

900 million weekly active users hang in the balance as the world’s most powerful AI empire faces its moment of truth.

The most surprising aspect of this adjustment was OpenAI cutting ties with its key contributors.

ChatGPT's "biological father" has been reassigned

If ranking the most prominent contributors at OpenAI over the past two years, Nick Turley would certainly be on the list.

As the sole leader of ChatGPT since its launch, Nick Turley personally nurtured ChatGPT from an overlooked bundled bonus into today’s number-one global super app, boasting 900 million weekly active users.

However, during this power reshuffle, this distinguished "father" of ChatGPT was abruptly reassigned from the company’s most central and high-profile consumer product line to oversee the relatively less glamorous enterprise users division.

He is no longer responsible for any consumer products. WIRED used this sentence to coldly announce the departure of a ChatGPT veteran from the consumer front.

Replacing him as head of consumer products is former Instagram vice president Ashley Alexander.

This executive, who previously led healthcare applications at OpenAI, has been directly placed at the heart of traffic.

The War God Returns: Brockman’s “Regency” Has Ended

If Nick Turley’s reassignment was a “major general reshuffle,” then Greg Brockman’s direct leadership marks a seismic shift at the highest level of OpenAI’s power structure.

As co-founder and president of OpenAI, Brockman has long been a formidable figure in the tech community.

He was willing to give up his stable job and stand by Ultraman when he was purged by the board, and after returning, he quietly worked behind the scenes to build out AI infrastructure.

Earlier this year, Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s nominal CEO for AGI deployment, began an indefinite leave of absence due to a recurrence of a serious chronic illness, starting in early April. Brockman had previously been temporarily overseeing products.

But this past Friday, OpenAI directly issued a memo to all employees: Brockman’s "interim" status has been made permanent.

He will fully and permanently take over all of OpenAI's product strategies!

The "shadow king" who built roads and bridges in the technical backend has finally been forced into the spotlight.

From now on, he must not only manage computing power, chips, and the Blackwell supply chain, but also oversee what 900 million people discuss daily on ChatGPT, becoming a true de facto ruler.

Why force these three product lines together at this critical moment?

In the leaked internal memo, Brockman provided an answer using highly industry-charged language.

We are strengthening our product efforts to fully embrace the Agentic Future with maximum focus, achieving comprehensive success among both consumers and enterprises.

For the first time in history, OpenAI’s leadership has explicitly acknowledged that its existing product line has become bloated and must change.

From the "Three-Horse Chariot" to "United as One"

Before the restructuring, OpenAI's three major product lines operated almost independently.

ChatGPT: Handles the glamorous side and drives consumer traffic, attracting 900 million weekly active users;

Codex: The ultimate tool for programmers, specializing in quiet success, relentless programming, and code generation;

API: Responsible for generating revenue from developers worldwide and building an ecosystem moat.

But in Brockman’s view, this separation is unacceptable. As AI capabilities evolve, these three elements are naturally converging.

If current ChatGPT cannot write code or automatically run APIs, it’s just a conversational ornament; without ChatGPT’s interactive interface, Codex cannot become a productivity tool usable by beginners.

Therefore, the three original teams have been disbanded and merged into a new core product and platform team, led by Thibault Sottiaux, the former head of Codex.

He once played a pivotal role in making Codex OpenAI’s fastest-growing flagship product; now, he is Brockman’s top lieutenant.

Along with this restructuring, OpenAI's real big move has finally come to light.

Thibault Sottiaux is currently secretly leading the development of an ultimate weapon internally referred to as the "super app."

This is far more than just a web-based upgrade of ChatGPT—it’s a unified desktop application integrating ChatGPT, the Codex programming agent, and OpenAI’s yet-to-be-released “Atlas web browser”!

This means OpenAI must completely break free from the constraints of the "chat box."

From now on, this super app lives on your desktop, featuring its own browser (Atlas) to browse the web, the most powerful code execution capability (Codex) to write scripts on its own, and the brain of ChatGPT to understand your intentions.

It doesn’t require you to copy and paste—it can autonomously perform complex digital tasks on your behalf.

This is what Ultraman and Brockman see as the "Agentic Future"—the Age of Agents!

This news appears to be a very positive proactive move.

But if you carefully review OpenAI’s recent personnel changes, you’ll find a troubling fact: OpenAI’s executive leadership is being emptied out.

Just one month before this restructuring, OpenAI experienced a seismic upheaval in its leadership.

Last month, OpenAI saw the departure of several top-tier experts.

Kevin Weil, Head of AI Workspace at OpenAI, has left!

Bill Peebles, co-head and core expert of Sora, has left!

Srinivas Narayanan, Chief Technology Officer for Enterprise Applications, has departed!

Not to mention that Fidji Simo, the supposed "AGI Deployment CEO" who should be orchestrating everything, is currently bedridden and can only coordinate with Brockman remotely from her hospital room.

So, the underlying logic behind this major restructuring isn't because OpenAI is strongly positioned, but because they have no one left.

After losing several vice presidents of engineering, CTOs, and project leads in succession, OpenAI has stretched itself too thin—trying to develop Sora video, SearchGPT, the Orion large model, and hardware chips all at once.

Brockman has bundled ChatGPT, Codex, and the API together—essentially a strategic downsizing.

Consolidate limited elite resources onto a single battlefield by launching a "super app" that serves both C-end and B-end users, masking the embarrassment of internal executive departures.

Valuation Surpassed! Competitors Have Arrived—The Capital Market’s “Deadly 30 Seconds”

The intense external competitive pressure, which has left Ultraman and Brockman so anxious that they undertook such a drastic restructuring just before the IPO, is also a major factor.

The AI throne of Silicon Valley has just changed hands this week.

Anthropic’s “backstab”: A $900 billion giant is born

This week, Anthropic, OpenAI’s most formidable rival, founded by former employees, quietly secured a new funding round that could reshape the industry.

In this $30 billion funding round led by top-tier consortia, Anthropic’s valuation was directly pushed to an astonishing $900 billion!

What does $900 billion mean? It has surpassed OpenAI’s latest valuation in the private market, becoming the world’s most valuable independent AI unicorn!

Worse still, Anthropic delivered a precise dimensional reduction strike against OpenAI in the programming domain—Claude’s models have overwhelmed OpenAI in long-form text and code generation.

Engineers are frantically flocking to Claude, while capital is pouring wildly into Anthropic. If OpenAI continues to cling to nothing more than the chat-focused ChatGPT website, its empire will crumble on the eve of its IPO.

In May, Anthropic's annual recurring revenue surged to $45 billion, representing a 500% revenue increase in just five months. This steep revenue trajectory has no precedent in the history of technology business!

Google is launching big next week, leaving little time for OpenAI.

Behind the assassin Anthropic, the titanic beast directly ahead—Google—is also closely watching OpenAI.

Next week, the annual Google I/O developer conference will officially kick off. According to Silicon Valley insiders, Google has prepared a wide range of new AI products targeting ChatGPT.

Last year, OpenAI stole the spotlight from Google by releasing GPT-4o the day before Google I/O; this year, the hollowed-out leadership at OpenAI no longer has the capacity to stage another event to steal the show.

The only way is to restructure our organization before Google unleashes its big move and tell Wall Street: Don’t be fooled by Anthropic’s high valuation—we’re already building a three-in-one Super App.

According to a WIRED exclusive, behind this restructuring lies an open secret across Silicon Valley: OpenAI plans to officially move forward with its IPO this year.

For any super unicorn preparing for an IPO, capital markets most dread "unclear storytelling" and "executive infighting and internal depletion."

During the critical listing window, if OpenAI’s prospectus stated: “We have a ChatGPT team, an independent Codex team, and an API team, and these three teams are constantly fighting over computing resources,” Wall Street analysts would unhesitatingly apply a significant discount to its valuation.

Through this restructuring, Altman has told the capital markets an incredibly compelling new story.

We don’t have cluttered products—we only have unified core capabilities. We’re about to launch a super Agent that will dominate all desktop platforms, serve 900 million weekly active users, and automatically get things done for you.

Having Brockman, a highly respected founder in Silicon Valley, personally lead the product also reassures shaky investors: see, even though some have left, the company’s technical core remains on the front lines driving innovation.

From a nonprofit lab founded in a San Francisco apartment to a commercial empire undergoing frantic restructuring for an IPO, OpenAI is experiencing its most turbulent journey since its inception.

Brockman stepping into the spotlight was a mission undertaken in a time of crisis and a last-ditch effort.

When ChatGPT, Codex, and the Atlas browser merge into that terrifying "Super App" in the near future, will we see the ultimate key to AGI?

The battle for AI dominance in Silicon Valley has just entered its most brutal, hand-to-hand combat phase.

Reference materials:

https://www.wired.com/story/openai-reorg-greg-brockman-product/

https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/openai-reorganizes-product-teams-around-unified-app-strategy?rc=epv9gi

This article is from the WeChat public account "New Intelligence Yuan," authored by New Intelligence Yuan.