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TS Tibo Sottiaux On Masters of Scale

“We had a separate code base for chatgpt.com on web. So we decided to merge the desktop application and chatgpt.com. And this is something that would have traditionally taken at least six, maybe 12 months, and something that you would do very, very carefully because this is our main surface. We have hundreds of millions of users visiting this website, right? And so we just merged it and we merged it in 30 days.”

Masters of Scale · Startups & Venture · October 2026

“We had a separate code base for chatgpt.com on web. So we decided to merge the desktop application and chatgpt.com. And this is something that would have traditionally taken at least six, maybe 12 months, and something that you would do very, very carefully because this is our main surface. We have hundreds of millions of users visiting this website, right? And so we just merged it and we merged it in 30 days.” — Tibo Sottiaux, Masters of Scale

The OpenAI executive was asked for an example of what the company's Astra model made possible in the sprint before Dev Day. Asked next who wrote most of that code, he said: "Majority of the code these days is written by Astra."

Masters of Scale · 2026-10-10 Listen to the episode → More from Tibo Sottiaux → More Startups & Venture quotes →

Transcript

Masters of Scale Around 10:04 into the episode
Speaker 3

…you don't want your personal intelligence to kind of like be boxed up and have access to nothing. Otherwise, it would not be very useful in your life. And so it's up to us to kind of earn that trust and earn the right to provide that utility to you. And we take it obviously super, super seriously.

Speaker 4

I want to talk about Astra, about the Astra model for a bit. You actually called the lead up to this dev day your most ambitious sprint yet. Give us an example of what Astra made possible that wasn't possible before.

Speaker 3

That's right. So a clear example is that we had, you know, previous to Dev Day, like roughly a month ago, we had a separate code base for chatgpt.com on web. So we decided to merge the desktop application and chatgpt.com. And this is something that would have traditionally taken at least six, maybe 12 months and something that you would do very, very carefully because this is our main surface. We have like, you know, hundreds of millions of users visiting this website, right? And so we just merged it and we merged it in 30 days.

Speaker 4

Okay. I have to ask you this question. Who wrote most of the code? Was it AI or humans or both? Can you tell?

Speaker 3

Majority of the code these days is written by Astra.

Speaker 4

Super interesting. Okay. Yeah. So OpenAI has called Astra the most aligned model. What do you mean by that?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

More from Masters of Scale

“During the pandemic, supporting testing nationwide through the work we did at Ginkgo, the number of labs across the country where the operator loads the 96-well plate in a flipped direction is like double-digit percentages. The robot didn't do anything wrong. It's the human in the loop that is still part of autonomous science that we're not observing.” — Renee Wegrzyn, Masters of Scale “You talked about how AI is kind of transforming drug design. We think of that as top of the funnel. Now, you can test billions of designs in silico. Some subset of those you can actually test in the lab, but we haven't seen billions new clinical trials. It's because the rest of that pipeline is still bottlenecked.” — Renee Wegrzyn, Masters of Scale