DevDay 2025: Apps SDK, Agent Kit, MCP, Codex and why Prompting is More Important than Ever

**Alessio** (0:05)
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio from the Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swicks, editor of Latent Space.

**Swicks** (0:11)
Hello, hello. And we are here in the OpenAI Dev Day Studio with Sherwin and Christina from the OpenAI Platform Team. Welcome.

**Sherwin Wu** (0:19)
Thank you for having us.

**Swicks** (0:19)
Yeah, it's always- Great to be here. Yeah, it's such a nice thing. We've covered like three of these Dev Days now, and this is like the first time it's been like so well organized that we have our own little studio, podcast studio, in the Dev Day venue. And it's really nice that you actually get a chance to sit down with you guys. So thanks for taking the time.

**Sherwin Wu** (0:38)
Yeah, I feel like we- Dev Day is always a process, and like we've only had three of them, and we try to improve it every time. And I actually- I know for a fact that I think we have this podcast studio this time, because the podcast interviews and the interviews with folks like yourselves last time went really well. And so we want to lean into a little bit more. I'm glad that we were able to have this studio for you all.

**Alessio** (0:56)
We were kneeling on the ground interviewing like Michelle last year.

**Sherwin Wu** (1:01)
I just saw it post-production.

**Swicks** (1:03)
We had to have people like cordon off the area so they wouldn't walk in front of the cameras.

**Alessio** (1:08)
People would just come up, hey, good to- I'm like, we're recording.

**Christina Huang** (1:11)
I guess if you guys have been to three, like what stood out from today or what's your favorite part?

**Swicks** (1:17)
I feel like the vibes are just a lot more confident. Like you are obviously doing very well. You have the numbers to show it.
Every year in Dev Day, you report the number of developers. This year, it's four million. I think last year was like three. I have more questions about that kind of stuff. But also just very interesting, very high confidence launches. Then also I think the community is clearly much more developed. I think there's just a lot more things to dive into across the API surface area of OpenAI, than I think last year in my mind.

**Alessio** (1:56)
I don't know about you. We were at the OG Dev Day, which was the dally hack night at OpenAI in 2022
I think Sam spoke to like 30 people. I think it's just crazy to see the...

**Sherwin Wu** (2:07)
Yeah, honestly, I think it's like it's kind of similar to this podcast studio, which is I think we've had a number of Dev Days now. We honestly were like slowly figuring things out as a company over time as well, both from a product perspective and also from how we want to present ourselves with Dev Day. At this point, we've had a lot of feedback from people.
I actually think a lot of the attendees will get an email with a chance for feedback as well. We actually do read those and we act on those. One of the things that we did this year that I really liked were all of those, there was some art installations and the little arcade games that we did, which came up via engaging with the feedback from people.

**Christina Huang** (2:43)
Yeah, the arcade games were so fun. I loved the theme of all the ASCII art throughout. This was my first SF Dev Day, but I've been to the Singapore one. That was actually my first week.

**Swicks** (2:52)
Yeah, that's the one I spoke at.

**Christina Huang** (2:53)
I saw you there. That was my first week of OpenAI. So really in the deep end.

**Sherwin Wu** (2:57)
We're on our way to Singapore.

**Swicks** (2:59)
Yeah, that's awesome. Well, congrats on everything. And kudos to the organizing team. We should talk about some developer API stuff. So we're going to cover a few of the things. You're not exactly working on Apps SDK, but I guess what should people just generically take away? What should developers take away from the Apps SDK launch? Like, how do you internally view it?

**Sherwin Wu** (3:22)
So the way that I think about it is I actually view OpenAI since the very beginning as a company that is really valued, kind of like opening up our technology and bringing it out to the rest of the world. One thing we talk about a lot internally is our mission at OpenAI is to, one, build AGI, which we're trying to do.
But two, potentially just as important is to bring the benefits of that to the entire world. And one thing that we realized very early on is that we as a company, it's very difficult for us to just bring it to every truly every corner of the world. And we really need to rely on developers, other third parties to be able to do this, which is, Greg talked about the start of the API and how that was formulated. But that was part of that mentality, which is we need to rely on developers and we need to open up our technology to the rest of the world so that they can partake for us to really fulfill our mission. So the API obviously is a very natural way of doing that, where we just literally expose API endpoints or expose tools for people to build things. But now that we have, you know, ChatDBT with its 800 million weekly active users, I forgot the stat that we share. I think it's like now the fifth or like sixth largest website in the world.