The Operating System of Everything

ChatGPT is no longer software. It’s a surface - one that sits between you and everything else you do online.

In 2023, OpenAI held its first DevDay: 2 million developers, 100 million weekly ChatGPT users, and 300 million tokens processed per minute on its API - all within a year of ChatGPT’s release.

Two years later, DevDay looks less like a developer conference and more like a sovereign address: 4 million developers, 800 million weekly users, and 6 billion tokens per minute. This, to use a technical term, is “a lot.”

The numbers are staggering, but the story isn’t size - it’s shape. OpenAI isn’t just getting bigger. It’s changing form.

From Tool to Terrain

The biggest DevDay reveal wasn’t a new model. It was that users can now invoke apps directly inside ChatGPT - Expedia, Figma, Canva, Zillow, Spotify to start - soon to be joined by Uber, DoorDash, OpenTable, and Target. This isn’t a UX tweak, it’s a reordering of the digital value chain.

OpenAI also launched a preview of the Apps SDK - a developer toolkit to build directly into ChatGPT. If you squint, it looks like Apple in 2008 - inviting developers to build on iOS. OpenAI is building an app economy for intent.

Until now, ChatGPT was an endpoint: a tool that helped you think. Now, it’s a gateway - a layer between you and the rest of the digital world. When you book a flight, ChatGPT will decide which travel app gets the call. When you order takeout, it decides which merchant gets surfaced.

Every other company just became a supplier.

This is precisely how operating systems consolidate power: not by replacing apps, but by absorbing them.

The First Real-World Aggregator

Tech empires are built on one question: Who controls the surface where intent begins?

Apple owned it with the home screen.
Google owned it with search.
Amazon owned it with the buy button.

OpenAI is coming for all of them. Their version is: you don’t go to the internet; you talk to it. Everything else - apps, APIs, companies - exist downstream of your conversation.

What makes this shift historic is what OpenAI is aggregating. Google aggregated links. Apple aggregated apps. Amazon aggregated transactions. OpenAI is aggregating intent itself - the moment before the action.

When you ask ChatGPT to “order sushi” or “call an Uber,” you’re not opening an app - you’re expressing an intent that the system fulfills on your behalf. Uber, DoorDash, and Spotify become fulfillment nodes rather than destinations.

It’s the first platform to sit above the app layer, dissolving the mobile grid into a single conversational surface that controls how digital intent becomes physical action. This is what makes it the first real-world aggregator.

If Google indexed the web, OpenAI is beginning to index the economy.

That’s the precise point where it stops being a model vendor and starts being an operating system for intent.

The Economics of Intent

This move also opens the door to a familiar platform playbook - and all its tensions. Once OpenAI sits between the user and every other service, it opens up a buffet of monetization levers:

• A transaction fee every time someone books a flight or orders sushi through ChatGPT.

• Sponsored placements in response rankings (“Here’s a highly relevant DoorDash option”).

• Developer revenue share, App Store-style.

• Tiered access to model performance: “Would you like your assistant to think faster for $20 a month?”

• And, of course, the enterprise edition with compliance dashboards, SOC 2 badges, and a reassuringly high price.

The economics are very familiar: capture distribution first, then tax it. You make it easier for everyone to reach users, and then you charge rent for the privilege.

The Ecosystem Math

Value in AI has migrated fast:

• In the early AI era, value sat in the models (compute, data, architecture).

• Then it shifted to applications (interfaces that made those models usable).

• Now, it’s moving to aggregation - the layer that controls how people access those applications.

OpenAI is building the new aggregator layer - the “app store for intelligence.”

And once aggregation sets in, it’s very hard to unseat. Not because you can’t build a better app, but because the user doesn’t see the app anymore.

When you ask ChatGPT to order Indian for dinner, you don’t care which app it uses. You just care that it works.

The app is the API call. The model is the brand. The rest of the internet is middleware.

The Developer Paradox

Of course, this is where things get complicated.

Every ecosystem begins with generosity and ends with rent-seeking.

When OpenAI was an API, developers were customers.
When OpenAI becomes an OS, developers become content.

Every developer building inside ChatGPT today is asking the same question every App Store developer asked in 2010: “How long until they clone my feature and bundle it for free?”

OpenAI needs developers to make the ecosystem work. But developers know that OpenAI, by definition, owns the user relationship. That’s a fragile equilibrium - and one that historically breaks in favor of the platform.

If OpenAI taxes the ecosystem too early or too heavily, it risks killing the flywheel before it spins.

The success of this model hinges not on how many integrations OpenAI can sign, but on whether it can build a platform developers want to build on, not just one they have to.

Everyone Else Has a Problem

The ripple effects of DevDay won’t be contained to OpenAI’s orbit. Every major platform will have to respond.

• Apple and Google face the risk of disintermediation: if app intent lives in ChatGPT, the App Store and Play Store become secondary gateways.

• Amazon risks losing retail search if ChatGPT becomes the preferred interface for discovery and purchase.

• Anthropic and DeepMind will need to decide whether to mirror this vertical integration - or double down on being neutral model suppliers.

The frontier question has shifted from “Who has the best model?” to “Who owns the daily interface?”

The Inevitable Endgame

First, OpenAI built the models, then the APIs, then the apps.
Now it’s building the environment.

It’s a little terrifying, and extremely predictable. Every great platform in history starts by “making things easier for users,” then ends by quietly mediating every transaction that follows.

If they succeed, ChatGPT becomes the default cognitive layer of the internet - the place where human intent gets parsed, priced, and routed.

If they stumble - on trust, transparency, or overreach - the system fragments into competing “AI shells,” each vying to be your preferred interpreter.

Either way, the model era is ending. The platform era of AI has begun.

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