Artificial intelligence
OpenAI Announced More Than Twenty Things and Only One Was a Model. The Rest Is an Attempt to Become the Place Software Lives
OpenAI's DevDay shipped a word processor, a slide editor, a shared drive, an identity provider, a plugin UI surface and an enterprise procurement channel. What it did not ship is a billing system — and an app store without a cash register is a subsidy, not a business.
MAI
OpenAI held DevDay on September 29 and published a recap that counts, in its own words, "more than 20 major announcements." One of them was a model. GPT-6.1 Sol delivers what the company calls "near-Astra intelligence to everyone at a fifth of its standard input and output token prices," and a new GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast tier generates up to 300 tokens per second in Codex. Both are real. Both are the least consequential thing announced.
The other twenty-odd items describe a single project, and it is not a model project. OpenAI is trying to become the layer between a person and the software they use.
The stack it assembled in one afternoon
| Layer | What shipped | What it stands opposite |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | Sign in with ChatGPT, 16 launch partners including Cognition's Devin, Notion and Vercel — a user's plan allowance travels into those tools | Sign in with Apple, Sign in with Google |
| Discovery | Redesigned plugin directory, new ranking, in-conversation recommendation across 4,000+ connected apps | The App Store, Google Play |
| Execution | Plugin Extensions: sidebar homes, interactive panels, custom file-type viewers — a third-party app now has a user interface inside ChatGPT | The app itself |
| Documents | Pages, Collaborative Slides (exports to PowerPoint and Google Slides with formatting preserved), Space | Word, PowerPoint, Docs, Drive |
| Presence | @ChatGPT in Slack and Microsoft Teams, with no per-teammate licence | Copilot |
| Procurement | OpenAI Marketplace: enterprises apply existing OpenAI spend commitments to approved partner software, 32 launch partners including Figma, Adobe, Salesforce, ServiceNow, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks | Enterprise software purchasing |
Sam Altman's description of Space is the clearest statement of intent anyone offered on the day:
Your pages and files all live together in Space, like they would in a drive. But spaces feel alive.
A drive. The word choice is not accidental.
The Microsoft problem, stated out loud
Pages is a word processor. Collaborative Slides is a presentation tool that exports to PowerPoint. Space is a shared drive. Taken together they are a productivity suite, launched by the company whose largest investor and infrastructure partner sells the incumbent productivity suite. And OpenAI is shipping @ChatGPT into Microsoft Teams itself, using Microsoft's own collaboration surface as a distribution channel for the competing product.
The traffic runs both ways. Microsoft and Salesforce have spent two years trying to look more like OpenAI; OpenAI has now spent an afternoon looking like Microsoft. What used to be a partnership with a clear division of labour is becoming two companies selling the same thing to the same buyer.
What is missing is the cash register
OpenAI announced no billing system and no revenue share. That absence is the most interesting fact of the day, because an app store is not a directory — it is a directory with a payment rail and a cut. Everything shipped here builds the demand side: discovery, identity, default placement, a UI surface, an agent that picks apps on the user's behalf. Nothing builds settlement.
Apple built the store and the commission at the same time, which is why the commission has never been negotiable. OpenAI has done the opposite, and the one revenue mechanic it did announce points away from a toll. The Marketplace lets enterprises spend money they have already committed to OpenAI on someone else's software. That is not OpenAI taxing an ecosystem; it is OpenAI paying for one out of its own contracted revenue.
For now that is a straightforward subsidy, and a rational one if the goal is to make a platform worth joining before asking anyone to pay for the privilege. It is also the kind of arrangement that gets revisited once the developers are locked in. Anyone building a plugin with a sidebar panel and a Sign in with ChatGPT button is building on terms that have not been written yet.
What to hold at arm's length
Every performance and price figure here is OpenAI's own. There is no independent benchmark of GPT-6.1 Sol, and "a fifth of Astra's prices" compares two list prices the same company sets. The 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users cited in the recap is also an OpenAI number.
Several of the load-bearing pieces are announced rather than available: Collaborative Slides is "coming in weeks," the Decisions API is in limited preview, and Private Inference is scheduled for later in the autumn. Pro 500 — a new tier with twenty-five times a Plus allowance — is live now, which tells you which part of this OpenAI expects to be paid for.
Separately, TechCrunch reports OpenAI is in talks to raise roughly $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation. That is a report about a negotiation, not a closed round, and should be read as such.
The question worth tracking is not what the next model scores. It is whether a developer who builds inside ChatGPT can get paid inside ChatGPT. Until that answer exists, OpenAI has assembled the most heavily trafficked storefront in software and left the register out of it.
Sources: OpenAI: DevDay 2026 Recap, TechCrunch: OpenAI's latest features take direct aim at the app store model, TechCrunch: OpenAI takes on Microsoft with the launch of what feels a whole lot like ChatGPT's own office suite, TechCrunch: OpenAI launches GPT-6.1 Sol, says it nearly matches GPT-6 Astra and costs less, TechCrunch: OpenAI reportedly in talks to raise $30B round at $1.4T valuation