Introduction: Sam Altman’s pronouncements at OpenAI’s 2025 DevDay painted a picture of an AI-powered future where ChatGPT becomes the central nervous system of our digital lives, potentially even our physical ones. While the audacity is undeniable, seasoned observers can’t help but recall the graveyards of tech history littered with similar “everything” platforms and hardware gambits. This grand vision demands a healthy dose of skepticism.

Key Points

• OpenAI’s aggressive pivot from model provider to a full-stack computing ecosystem, aiming to replace existing operating systems and hardware.
• The proposed “App Store” within ChatGPT, combined with agentic AI and autonomous coding tools, threatens to reshape software development and distribution, potentially creating a new walled garden.
• The enormous hurdles of creating new hardware, cultivating a truly open developer ecosystem, and managing astronomical computational costs cast a long shadow over these ambitious claims.

In-Depth Analysis

OpenAI’s DevDay 2025 unveiled a vision so expansive it almost defies belief: transforming a chatbot into an operating system, empowering AI agents to autonomously manage workflows, and forging new hardware alongside Jony Ive. It’s a strategic pivot from supplying picks and shovels to building the entire gold mine, but the journey from “chatbot” to “computing platform” is riddled with historical precedents of failure.

The notion of ChatGPT as the “new app store” or an operating system, facilitated by the “Apps SDK,” sounds remarkably like the “super app” dreams that have long been touted but rarely achieved in the Western market. While demos showed rich UIs and full-screen experiences within the chat, this fundamentally positions ChatGPT as an elaborate browser or a sophisticated launcher, not a foundational OS. True operating systems like iOS or Android manage hardware, memory, security, and a vast array of low-level processes that OpenAI has yet to demonstrate, or even claim, it intends to handle. The allure for developers – “hundreds of millions of chat users” – is compelling, but it’s a distribution channel built on OpenAI’s terms, echoing the very app store economics that developers frequently decry. Is this truly “open,” or simply a new, potentially monopolistic, gatekeeper?

The “Agent Kit” for building autonomous AI workers addresses a clear enterprise need, promising to automate complex processes that currently bog down human capital. Ramp’s procurement agent demo was compelling, but the real world is messy. Agents often struggle with edge cases, ambiguity, and the nuanced context that human operators take for granted. Moving from “prototype to production” with AI agents requires rigorous validation, robust error handling, and a tolerance for occasional failure that many mission-critical enterprise systems cannot afford.

Perhaps the most profound, and dubious, ambition lies in the graduation of Codex and the introduction of Jony Ive-designed hardware. Turning whiteboard sketches into functional apps is a seductive notion, but it glosses over the complexities of architecture, scaling, security, and maintainability – areas where even the most advanced AI falls short. The hardware play, especially with Ive’s involvement, screams “new computing paradigm,” but these are notoriously difficult to create. Building innovative devices from scratch, establishing manufacturing pipelines, and finding a compelling, mass-market use case beyond “better interaction with AI” is an Everest-level challenge that Apple, with its decades of experience, still grapples with. OpenAI, primarily a software and research company, would be venturing into profoundly unfamiliar and capital-intensive territory.

Contrasting Viewpoint

While OpenAI casts itself as a revolutionary platform, a skeptical view suggests this is less a disruption and more an attempt to re-monopolize the digital stack. The company’s drive to become the “de facto entry point into the commercial web” positions it squarely against tech giants like Google, Apple, and Microsoft, who have their own formidable AI initiatives and established ecosystems. These incumbents possess unparalleled hardware expertise, manufacturing might, and deep integration across software, services, and vast user bases. OpenAI’s hardware gambit, despite the Jony Ive halo, risks diluting focus and bleeding resources in an area where it has zero inherent advantage.

Furthermore, the idea of a “super assistant” that runs everything relies on a fundamental shift in user behavior that isn’t guaranteed. Do users truly want all their digital interactions funneled through a single AI interface, even with rich UI overlays? This could lead to cognitive overload, privacy concerns, and a chilling lack of choice. The massive computational resources required to power sophisticated agents and ever-evolving models also raise significant questions about long-term sustainability and cost, for both OpenAI and its users. The “App Store” promise could quickly devolve into a heavily curated, proprietary garden, stifling genuine innovation and replicating the very lock-in mechanisms it ostensibly seeks to evolve past.

Future Outlook

In the next 1-2 years, OpenAI’s grand vision will face immense headwinds. We’re likely to see incremental advancements in agentic AI, particularly within enterprise settings where specific, well-defined tasks can be automated. The “Apps SDK” might attract initial developer interest for novelty, leading to some interesting chat-centric applications, but it’s unlikely to dislodge established app stores or fundamentally redefine how users interact with software. The transition from “chat interface” to “operating system” is a generational shift, not a single DevDay announcement.

The Jony Ive hardware collaboration is the most speculative and, frankly, least likely to yield substantial results in the near term. Developing, manufacturing, and bringing a truly new category of hardware to market is a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar endeavor fraught with peril. The biggest hurdles remain developer adoption, proving the economic viability and scalability of its agentic AI for the masses, and the sheer computational cost of an always-on, “do anything” intelligence. Without a breakthrough in AI efficiency or a truly compelling killer app for its rumored hardware, OpenAI risks overextending its reach and becoming a jack of all trades, master of none.

For a deeper look at the historical challenges of building new computing platforms, explore our feature on [[The Rise and Fall of OS/2]].

Further Reading

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Original Source: OpenAI Dev Day 2025: ChatGPT becomes the new app store — and hardware is coming (VentureBeat AI)

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