“We are spending more and more compute on sort of like secondary monitoring. So you have, you know, you have all of the compute that is going into the primary system, you know, the agent that is like doing work. And then you have all of the compute that is going into monitoring, you know, the primary agent to make sure that it's like not taking too high risk of actions … If anything looks like, you know, maybe it's getting prompt injected and just like, you know, intervening with that. And the majority of our investment on the API stack is like, you know, actually going into the safety stack.”
Thibault Sottiaux, Head of Codex. Leads the team that builds the product he describes, so he speaks from inside it; OpenAI sells Codex.
OpenAI sells AI or agent tools or services, so it has a reason to publish flattering numbers about AI. The passage stays in the archive; read it with that in mind.
How this was checked
Not yet checked by an independent second reader. The wording, speaker and date come from the source linked above; treat it as a lead until it is confirmed.
Two whisper passes of the original audio agree on every content word quoted: pass 1 is a full-audio transcription, pass 2 a separate re-cut clip with 5 seconds of margin. Spoken filler ('you know', 'like') that either pass heard is kept, because whisper tends to drop filler; every other disagreement is marked with …. Normalization: punctuation, and the spelling of product and company names the passes heard as sound-alikes (none beyond punctuation; the words after 'high risk of actions' are cut because pass 1 heard 'or like not interrupting it' and pass 2 'or interrupting it'). OpenAI sells ChatGPT, Codex and Dots. Second reader (2026-11-08): unreachable. Reviewer saw: The supplied transcript for this video is truncated: whisper.srt ends around 03:30 mid-sentence (about 870 words). Nothing near 34:37 exists, and 'secondary monitoring' is not in it. No captions.md, and the rules bar fetching captions when a transcript folder exists, so I could not check this. Second reader (2026-11-08): unreachable. Reviewer saw: The local whisper transcript for MM-C3JqCXBk stops at about 03:41, so the 34:37 locator is not covered. I found no 'secondary monitoring' text. I did not try yt-dlp because a transcript folder exists.
How to cite this passage
Thibault Sottiaux (OpenAI), “OpenAI's Head of ChatGPT: We're entering a new era of AI (again)”, Lenny's Podcast (YouTube), 2026-10-04, at 34:37. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM-C3JqCXBk Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/openai-compute-on-secondary-monitoring-safety-stack-2026
Context. Asked for a recent AI use case that impressed him, Sottiaux describes his personal Dots agent warning him of a production outage shortly before the OpenAI DevDay live demo.
OpenAI