Here’s what’s on our plate today:

• 🧪 ChatGPT’s app-store ambitions and OpenAI’s expanding ecosystem.

• 🧠 Google’s AI coding tool, Xbox price hikes, and AI girlfriends.

• 🗳️ Should ChatGPT replace all your apps?

• 🧰 3 new AI tools: Call Assistant AI, Autopia, and Fiber.ai.

Let’s dive in. No floaties needed…

The Laboratory

ChatGPT plans to be everything, everywhere, all at once

The true marker of the success of any technological advancement is high user adoption, tangible business value, improved efficiency, and a positive return on investment. It is when a technology has ticked off all of these boxes that it can truly be considered transformative and successful.

Historically, technologies like the telegraph that met these conditions transformed society. The ones that failed to evolve and make an impact were relegated to museums to be studied as lessons for future generations.

As of 2025, we are in the era where all eyes are fixated on the developments of artificial intelligence. And so far, the technology has managed to grab users and improve efficiency. However, despite the millions of users, the technology is yet to give a positive return on investment or show business value that justifies the billions being poured into its development. And, one company seems to be on a mission to rectify this.

Over the past few weeks, OpenAI, a leader in AI technology, has made several announcements aimed at encouraging enterprise adoption of its models. The company recently announced a new social media platform, and just a day after its release, it announced partnerships to incorporate its AI products across various industries.

What happened at OpenAI’s developers conference?

At its Dev Day event, OpenAI announced a suite of major product updates, including GPT-5 Pro, its newest large language model; Sora 2, an advanced video generation system; and a smaller, low-cost voice model designed for real-time interactions.

The rollout is part of OpenAI’s broader push to attract developers to its growing ecosystem, which also includes new tools for building agents and integrating custom apps within ChatGPT.

According to a report from TechCrunch, GPT-5 Pro is aimed at developers working in sectors such as finance, law, and healthcare, where precision and strong reasoning are critical.

CEO Sam Altman also emphasized that voice will soon become a primary way users interact with AI, announcing “gpt-realtime mini”, a lightweight, affordable model optimized for low-latency, natural-sounding audio and speech. Despite being 70% cheaper than OpenAI’s previous premium voice model, it offers comparable quality and expressiveness.

With the new advancements, OpenAI says developers can now preview Sora 2 through OpenAI’s API, the same technology behind the recently launched Sora app. The model produces highly realistic, physically consistent visuals with synchronized audio and offers greater creative control, including customizable camera angles, motion styles, and visual tones.

At the conference, Altman showcased how the model can transform simple phone footage into cinematic scenes while pairing visuals with detailed soundscapes and ambient effects. He described Sora 2 as a creative tool for concept development, highlighting use cases like generating visual ideas for advertising or helping Mattel designers turn sketches into prototype concepts.

Additionally, OpenAI introduced a new generation of in-chat apps for ChatGPT, allowing users to interact with third-party services directly through conversation. These apps can respond to natural language and feature interactive elements such as maps, playlists, and design tools within the chat interface.

For users, ChatGPT can suggest or activate the apps automatically when relevant. In its blog post, OpenAI explained this with an example. When you start a message to ChatGPT with the name of an available app, like “Spotify, make a playlist for my party this Friday,” ChatGPT can automatically surface the app in your chat and use relevant context to help. The first time you use an app, ChatGPT will prompt you to connect so you know what data may be shared with the app.

Why do the announcements matter?

OpenAI’s announcements signal an inherent shift in how the company wants to approach monetizing its models. It appears the company wants to shift where the power lies in the digital world.

The first major change in OpenAI’s strategy shifts the balance between how devices have traditionally approached apps. So far, devices are the portal through which users access different applications. However, there were no central apps that could control all of them, something along the lines of WeChat, which is considered a super app in China due to its ability to integrate social media, messaging, payments, e-commerce, and lifestyle services under one roof.

Now, if apps live inside ChatGPT, users don’t need to switch between 10 different apps; the app store and discovery now happen inside your chat. That gives OpenAI influence over what gets shown, how seamless interactions become, and who gets attention. Thus, ChatGPT becomes the super app that can be used to control all else.

The second major change is that with deeper integration, the new agent tools can not only answer questions, but also act. They can source information from the book you travel, file your reports, and handle customer queries all inside a single interface. Tasks that used to require multiple tools or human oversight can be folded into intelligent agents.

These new abilities will help ChatGPT become the place where users buy products, subscribe to services, and make transitions without leaving the conversation. This also allows developers to engage with potential customers more seamlessly and effectively, pivoting ChatGPT from a chatbot to a marketplace.

The chatbot marketplace

By hosting other apps inside ChatGPT, OpenAI can take a share of whatever happens there, just like Apple does with the App Store. When developers or companies sell services, offer subscriptions, or enable transactions inside ChatGPT, OpenAI can charge small fees or earn a percentage. This not only helps it to monetize its existing products but also ensures it has a steady stream of revenue for future investments.

Additionally, with more integration, ChatGPT becomes more valuable. If ChatGPT becomes the place where you can design, book, buy, or automate work without switching apps, more people and businesses will be willing to pay for faster, smarter, or higher-tier versions. The richer the ecosystem, the more those subscriptions are worth. And enterprise tools like AgentKit and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) give OpenAI something big companies will pay for directly. Enterprises can use these to build custom AI agents, automate tasks, and connect securely to internal systems. That means recurring enterprise contracts.

Beyond the monetary consideration, the developments will also allow OpenAI to pull more users, which in turn will give it access to more data. OpenAI can learn which tools people want and how they interact. That feedback loop helps it build better products and attract investors and partners who see its platform as the next “big screen” of the internet.

However, while OpenAI is pushing for ChatGPT to be a marketplace, it remains to be seen how regulators and privacy watchdogs react to the developments.

OpenAI’s business model revealed

Over the past few months, OpenAI has announced multiple partnerships, the latest one of which is with AMD. The company has also secured funding from Nvidia and announced it will be building five new U.S. AI data center sites under Stargate.

The company also has partnerships with Google for cloud computing. In hindsight, all these deals looked like a precursor to something big. And the latest announcement from OpenAI looks like something big has arrived. With the deals for more hardware and cloud space, OpenAI is well-positioned to support the millions of users and enterprise demands.

OpenAI has already managed to reshape how users think about chatbots; now, the company is looking to transition to a digital hub where work, shopping, and creativity happen, all inside its ecosystem. What Apple did to smartphones with the iPhone, OpenAI appears to be attempting to emulate with ChatGPT. Become the platform that is everywhere, everything, all at once.

Quick Bits, No Fluff

• Google’s AI code app goes global: Opal, Google’s AI-powered coding assistant, is now available in 15 more countries.

• Xbox Game Pass prices shift: Starting this week, Microsoft is adjusting Game Pass Ultimate pricing in multiple markets.

• AI girlfriends flood adult sites: Dating platforms are being overrun by ‘AI girlfriends’, reshaping the online sex economy.

Thursday Poll

3 Things Worth Trying

• Call Assistant AI: An AI-powered tool that answers your phone, summarizes calls, and handles spam or missed conversations automatically.

• Autopia: AI-native project management that integrates directly into GitHub and Jira to automatically generate updates, PR summaries, and retros.

• Fiber.ai: One of the first tools to let you instantly create AI-native websites from a single prompt, built for real product teams.

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