Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
Follow ZDNET:
Add us as a preferred source on Google.
**ZDNET’s Detailed Overview**
At the highly anticipated OpenAI DevDay event, the company revealed a transformative set of innovations aimed at redefining how users and developers engage with ChatGPT. These new capabilities mark a decisive step toward creating a more expansive, integrated, and versatile ChatGPT environment—one that goes far beyond the conventional Q&A interactions the tool is most widely known for. Nick Turley, Head of ChatGPT, characterized this evolution as the platform beginning to behave less like a mere application and more like a full-fledged operating system, suggesting a structural and experiential shift that could reshape how people and businesses harness AI.
During the past year, artificial intelligence has witnessed an extraordinary surge in advancements across multiple frontiers. We’ve seen the rapid emergence of agentic assistants capable of autonomously handling tasks, as well as increasingly natural, multimodal methods for communicating with chatbots—using not only text but also voice, images, and potentially other interactive forms of input. However, despite such sweeping progress in the broader AI ecosystem, the fundamental way users converse with ChatGPT has remained relatively static: a text-based dialogue, rooted primarily in the question-and-answer model. Until now. That longstanding dynamic appears poised for disruption as OpenAI introduces tools that aim to redefine how AI can serve as both a platform and a functional interface for the digital world.
**Highlights from OpenAI DevDay 2025**
At OpenAI DevDay 2025, the organization showcased an array of cutting-edge updates crafted to empower developers to build, integrate, and deploy AI solutions more efficiently. Among these announcements, one particularly striking revelation stood out: the introduction of the Apps SDK. In essence, this development toolkit enables engineers and creators to design fully functional applications that exist and operate directly within the ChatGPT interface. This innovation represents not just an incremental improvement, but rather a preview of ChatGPT’s next stage of evolution—a glimpse into its transformation from a conversational AI into a complete digital ecosystem.
Nick Turley elaborated on this future direction during a press Q&A session, explaining that over the course of the next six months, ChatGPT will progressively evolve from being an exceptionally useful app into something that resembles an operating system in scope and functionality. Users will soon be able to access both familiar business tools and entirely new forms of software built natively atop ChatGPT’s core framework. According to Turley, this represents an exciting leap toward a system where the user can seamlessly move between tasks, services, and applications through a single, intelligent interface.
The DevDay keynote offered early demonstrations of how this forward-looking vision could manifest in practice. One illustrative case involved a live presentation by Alexi Christakis, a software engineer at OpenAI, who showcased the deep integration of the Canva design platform within ChatGPT. Using a simple prompt, Christakis instructed ChatGPT to generate a poster via Canva, and within moments, four unique poster designs appeared in line within the chat. He then requested that those posters be compiled into a slide deck—again using nothing more than a text-based instruction. The process underscored the new multimodal ease of interaction, where creative tasks requiring multiple steps can now be executed entirely through conversational prompts.
This marked demonstration was complemented by additional examples. In one case, Christakis interacted with a Zillow app integrated into ChatGPT to refine real estate search results. Instead of clicking through numerous filters or menus, he issued a single line of text to narrow the listings, achieving in seconds what would typically require multiple interactions on Zillow’s website. This fluidity exemplifies the vision of dynamic, contextual engagement that OpenAI hopes to normalize within ChatGPT’s next evolution.
Of course, this approach is not OpenAI’s first venture into applications within its chatbot. Previous iterations—such as custom chatbots and “GPTs”—had already given users modular experiences inside the system. Yet, those earlier models remained largely confined to simple inline exchanges, functioning more like specialized conversation templates rather than fully integrated applications. The distinguishing characteristic of the newly introduced apps lies in their deep embedding within ChatGPT’s environment. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described this change as a turning point, noting that by opening app development to the broader community, OpenAI aims to “enable a new generation of interactive, adaptive, and personalized applications that users can literally converse with.” The significance of this statement cannot be overstated: ChatGPT is being positioned not simply as another AI service but as an extensible platform hosting its own self-contained digital ecosystem.
Among the additional upgrades introduced was the ability to view applications in a full-screen mode within ChatGPT. This change elevates usability and aesthetic coherence, allowing third-party creators to build experiences that look and feel native to the platform itself. The list of early partners adopting the App SDK includes recognized industry leaders such as Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, and Spotify—well-known names representing travel, education, productivity, and entertainment sectors. OpenAI also announced plans to expand this list by an additional eleven partners before the year concludes. For developers, the App SDK is now open in preview, enabling immediate experimentation and development, with the ability to submit finished applications later this year for official review and listing.
This expansion aligns with OpenAI’s broader vision of democratizing AI integration. All ChatGPT users, regardless of their subscription level, will have access to these new applications. To launch and interact with one, users simply begin their message to ChatGPT by naming the app they wish to engage with. The platform’s intelligence further extends this functionality by automatically suggesting relevant apps based on conversational context, ensuring an increasingly intuitive user experience.
Looking ahead, OpenAI anticipates that these applications will ultimately benefit from the integration of more agentic features—tools that enable ChatGPT to initiate and perform certain tasks autonomously on a user’s behalf. Whether designed for creative, analytical, or logistical purposes, such apps will significantly broaden the range of what ChatGPT can accomplish. As Nick Turley emphasized, users should expect this enhanced version of ChatGPT to be “greatly expanded” in capability and to feel “meaningfully different” from its current form. In essence, OpenAI is signaling a transformative intersection where artificial intelligence, functionality, and human creativity converge into one cohesive, operating platform—ushering in a new era in digital interaction and intelligent software development.
Sourse: https://www.zdnet.com/article/chatgpt-wants-to-act-more-like-an-os-as-it-transforms-into-an-app-platform/
