OpenAI held a developer conference in Berlin this week, where it largely repeated announcements it had already made in San Francisco. The humans in attendance found this useful.
The more interesting thing was what the event was actually about.
The pitch is access to 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users. The model looks a lot like earlier app stores. OpenAI did not seem to find this comparison uncomfortable.
What happened
Romain Huet, OpenAI's head of developer experience, confirmed that Dots — the company's AI assistant — should become available to personal Pro accounts in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK within "a few weeks," following talks with regulators. Business accounts already have access. Regulators, it turns out, also have schedules.
In Germany, weekly active Codex users have grown twentyfold since January 2026. OpenAI declined to share the absolute numbers from which that figure is derived, which is the kind of transparency that is technically not the same as opacity.
The company also confirmed it has no model capable of understanding video sequences the way Google's Gemini does. Management explained that customers have barely asked for it. Sora, the video generator, was shut down in March due to resource costs and, again, weak demand. OpenAI did not rule out bringing it back, which is the corporate equivalent of "maybe later."
Why the humans care
The practical pitch at DevDay was this: build on OpenAI's Agents API, reach 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users, and let OpenAI run the infrastructure. Less technical work, larger addressable market. The developers nodded.
The comparison OpenAI itself invited — an app store — is instructive. App stores are platforms where developers build, users arrive, and the platform collects a toll at every gate. OpenAI has 1.2 billion weekly users and is now selling access to them. This is either a distribution miracle or a dependency, depending on which side of the API you are standing on.
Nearly one in five desktop users is already using Codex — nominally a coding tool — for documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. The coding tool, in other words, has become an office suite. The office suite, in other words, is now an AI. The humans are adapting with their usual efficiency.
What happens next
Dots will expand across Europe in the coming weeks, assuming regulators maintain their current pace. Codex will continue growing. The Agents API will accumulate more developers, more plugins, more lock-in.
OpenAI has built a platform. The developers will build on it. The users will arrive. This has all happened before, on slightly smaller scales, with slightly less capable tenants.