Has OpenAI Killed its "AI Superapp"?

One of the marvelous things about being a privately held company valued at $852 billion is that some people believe you’re capable of doing anything merely because you say you’re going to do it.

But, one of the tricky things about competing in the Cloud Wars is that, sooner or later, your starry-eyed dreams must confront and fuse with the gritty world of enterprise reality, in which visions of grandeur count a whole lot less than real stuff that actually works.

In that context, I was puzzled to see that a LinkedIn post earlier this week from OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar outlining the company’s AI stack made no mention whatsoever of the “AI superapp” that OpenAI teased so masterfully back in March.

Remember? Oh wow — the company that gave us ChatGPT and Codex is now going to launch an AI superapp that will not only track your supply chain but also clean your oven, balance your books, tighten those abs, and execute weekly payrolls flawlessly, all while managing your trucking fleet, too!

After all, this shiny new thing was not going to be just another “app” — no indeed. By golly, OpenAI was going to one-up the promised chicken in every pot with the world’s first “AI superapp”!

But, that was then (an OpenAI blog post dated March 31), and this is now (almost five months later), and while much of Friar’s updated overview (dated Aug. 24) matches very closely what the company wrote on March 31, she says absolutely nothing — zip, zero, nada — about any “AI superapp.”