Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead)

Lead work on Codex. Codex is OpenEI's coding agent. We think of Codex as just the beginning of a software engineering teammate. It's a bit like this really smart intern that refuses to read Slack, doesn't check data dog unless you ask it to. I remember Carpothe tweeted the gnarliest bugs that he runs into, that he just spends hours trying to figure out nothing else, assault, he gives it to Codex. Let's it run for an hour and it solves it. Starting to see glimpses of the future where we're actually starting to have Codex be on call for its own training. Codex writes a lot of the code that helps manage its training run, the key infrastructure. And so we have a Codec Code Review is like catching a lot of mistakes. It's actually caused some like pretty interesting configuration mistakes. One of the most mind-blowing examples of acceleration is the Sora Android app, like a fully new. Uh we built it in eighteen days. And then 10 days later, so 28 days total, we went to the public. How do you think you win in the space? One of our major goals with Codex is to get to proactivity. If we're gonna build a super assistant has to be able to do things. One of the learnings over the past year is that for models to do stuff, they are much more effective when they can use a computer. It turns out the best way for models to use computers is simply to write code. And so we're kind of getting to this idea where if you want build any agent, maybe you should be building a coding agent. When you think about progress on codex, I imagine you have a bunch of emails and there's all these public benchmarks. A few of us are like constantly on Reddit. You know, there's a there's craze up there and there's a lot of complaints. What we can do basically as a product team just try to always think about how are we building a tool so that it feels like we're maximally accelerating people rather than building a tool that

makes it more unclear what you should do as the human being at open AI, I can't not ask about how far you think we are from AGI. The current underappreciated limiting factor is literally human typing speed or human multitasking speed. Today, my guest is Alexander Embirios, product lead for Codex, OpenAI's incredibly popular and powerful coding agent. In the words of Nick Turley, head of Chat GPT and former podcast guest, Alex is one of my all-time favorite humans I've ever worked with. and bringing him and his company into OpenAI ended up being one of the best decisions we've ever made. Similarly, Kevin Wheel, OpenAI's CPO, said Alex is simply the best. In our conversation, we chat about what it's truly like to build product at OpenAI.

How Codex allowed the Sora team to ship the Sora app, which became the number one app in the appstore in under one month. Also the twenty X growth Codex is seeing right now and what they did to make it so good at coding. Why his team is now focused on making it easier to review code, not just write code. His AGI timelines, his thoughts on when AI agents will actually be really useful, and so much more, a huge thank you to Ed Bays, Nick Turley, and Dennis Ying for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free.

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