- OpenAI foresees millions of AI agents working in companies' data centers under human supervision.
- OpenAI launches GPT-5 Codex on Monday, which it says can handle complex software projects.
- OpenAI said human supervision is still needed to keep powerful AI tools aligned with goals.
OpenAI is betting the future of software engineering on AI agents.
On the "OpenAI Podcast," which aired on Monday, cofounder and president Greg Brockman and Codex engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux outlined a vision of vast networks of autonomous AI agents supervised by humans but capable of working continuously in the cloud as full-fledged collaborators.
"We have strong conviction that the way that this is headed is large populations of agents somewhere in the cloud that we as humanity, as people, teams, organizations supervise and steer in order to produce great economical value," Sottiaux said.
"So if we're going a couple of years from now, this is what it's going to look like," Sottiaux added. "It's millions of agents working in our and companies' data centers in order to do useful work."
OpenAI launched GPT-5 Codex on Monday. Unlike earlier iterations, OpenAI said that GPT-5 Codex can run for hours at a time on complex software projects, such as massive code refactorings, while integrating directly with developers' workflows in cloud environments.
OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil said on tech entrepreneur Azeem Azhar's podcast "Exponential View" that internal tools like Codex-based code review systems increased efficiency for its engineers.
This doesn't mean human coders would be rendered obsolete. Despite successful examples of "vibe coding," it is obvious when a person using the AI agent doesn't know how to code, engineers and computer science professors previously told Business Insider.
Brockman said that oversight will still be critical as AI agents take on more ambitious roles. OpenAI has been strategizing since 2017 on how humans or even less sophisticated AIs can supervise more powerful AIs, he said, in order to maintain oversight and "be in the driver's seat."
"Figuring out this entire system and then making it multi-agent and steerable by individuals, teams, organizations, and aligning that with the whole intent of organizations, this is where it's headed for me," said Sottiaux. "It's a bit nebulous, but it's also very exciting."
