OpenAI Agrees: Remote Work is the Future

With something like 133 million views at the time of writing, chances are pretty good that you’ve seen OpenAI’s launch video for ChatGPT-6 Astra. It’s a wildly impressive demo, showing off the new model’s prowess at everything from autonomous 3D modeling and code generation to ordering lunch and booking tennis court time.

But I want to talk a little bit about the part that stuck out to me, which is less about the Astra demo itself, and more about how OpenAI chose to demonstrate it.

If you watch the video, it takes place not in a cubicle farm or open-office workspace, but what’s clearly intended to be a living room or home office. It’s hard not to take this as an acknowledgement from OpenAI of what so many of us already know: The future of work is in the home.

As Sequoia’s Konstantine Buhler pointed out in a recent X article, home (and its surroundings) has been the default place for work to get done for almost the entirety of human history. It was only around the industrial revolution that it became the default for workers to leave the house and commute somewhere to work.

This was for the very simple reason that the machines needed to do the kinds of work enabled by automation were too big to be kept at home – you couldn’t exactly assemble a Model T off the assembly line or do complex textile milling in your living room.

But now, as OpenAI’s launch video slyly spotlights, this new age of AI means that all of the intelligence you’d ever really need to get your work done now lives in your phone or computer. The need to leave the house is fading, as Konstantine writes, “because the machine now lives everywhere and one of the most powerful tools in history fits in your pocket. Home and work are recombining.”

As somebody with strong feelings about remote work, I have a few takes of my own here.

First off, models like Astra mean that even if you went into an office, you’d probably end up chatting with a bunch of AI agents anyway. If you can do that from your iPhone, why would you go into the office in the first place?

Second, this is all very validating for our work at Roam, where we’re focused on building the best tools for people who work from anywhere – whether they’re collaborating with their fellow humans or AI agents.

The moment is going to require human workers to embrace a brand-new way of looking at the world, and tools that let them be the most productive no matter where they are.

I’m excited for OpenAI and Astra, but I’m also excited to see that the future of remote work that we envisioned is getting built right in front of our eyes, for an audience of millions.