February 14, 2026
Chat wars get a chaos upgrade
OpenAI should build Slack
Half the crowd begs for it, half screams “don’t be Teams 2.0”
TLDR: A popular newsletter says OpenAI should build a Slack-style work chat that fuses AI and coding tools. Commenters split between “yes, unify everything” and “lol, it’ll be a buggy meme,” with many warning Slack Connect is the real moat—making this a big swing that could change how teams and AI collaborate.
Sam Altman said “tell us what to build,” and a spicy corner of tech yelled back: build a better Slack. The pitch? OpenAI turns its chat and coding tools into a single, smarter workplace messenger that doesn’t feel like three logins and a prayer. Fans imagine an agent-filled group chat where humans and bots build together; skeptics foresee chaos. One commenter went full meme, saying OpenAI would “Ralph Wiggum” a buggy app and then baby-talk excuse it. Drama level: high.
The thread split into camps. The optimists say OpenAI is almost there already with group chats and projects—just stitch them together and you’ve got a magic office chat. The realists say Slack still owns cross-company messaging (Slack Connect), and without that, chat is just chat. The haters lobbed tomatoes at Microsoft Teams (“success? have you used it?”), while some loyalists admitted Slack’s basic chat is fine—but integrations “randomly break,” prices creep up, and the new AI feels buried. Meanwhile, people keep side-eyeing OpenAI for “shipping the org chart” while rival Anthropic flexes one clean app.
Jokes flew (“adorable Slack clone when?”) and so did wish lists: smarter recaps, less notification spam, and huddles that actually do real-time AI magic. Whether it’s a dream office or a meme disaster, the crowd agrees on one thing: if OpenAI jumps in, it better be fast, unified, and actually useful.
Key Points
- •AINews proposes that OpenAI build a Slack-like enterprise collaboration platform to unify chat, coding, and multiagent workflows.
- •Slack moved upmarket in 2019 and was acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion in 2021; the article cites ongoing issues with pricing, outages, and AI feature discoverability.
- •OpenAI launched ChatGPT group chats about three months ago, but the article notes limited usage outside OpenAI.
- •Anthropic’s unified desktop app strategy is contrasted with OpenAI’s fragmented chat, browser, and coding apps, with repeated logins.
- •The proposal envisions “OpenAI Slack” doubling as a coding agent interface enabling multiplayer collaboration, aiming to address gaps in the Codex app.