News Summary

Glen Coates, the former head of Shopify’s core product, has joined OpenAI to lead its app development efforts. Coates, who was based in New York City and served as VP and head of core product at Shopify, left the Canadian e-commerce company in the summer. During his tenure at Shopify, Coates was responsible for the company’s main software and app ecosystem. He joined Shopify in 2019 after the company acquired his startup, Handshake. At OpenAI, Coates will work on transforming ChatGPT into an operating system. This move comes amidst significant executive changes at Shopify, including the departure of several top executives. OpenAI is reportedly in discussions to raise $10 billion from Amazon, with a valuation over $500 billion, to support its large-language models.