OpenAI: new model, outage, APAC hire

OpenAI spent Monday doing three things at once: pushing GPT‑5.4 as its default model for professional work, fixing a global outage, and adding a new Asia-Pacific marketing chief. (openai.com) OpenAI introduced GPT‑5.4 on March 5, 2026, in ChatGPT, the application programming interface, and Codex, and called it its “most capable and efficient” frontier model for professional work. The release also added GPT‑5.4 Pro and said GPT‑5.4 Thinking can show an upfront plan while handling long, multi-step requests. (openai.com) OpenAI said GPT‑5.4 supports up to 1 million tokens of context and is its first general-purpose model with native computer-use features in Codex and the application programming interface. In the company’s published benchmarks, GPT‑5.4 scored 83.0% on GDPval and 57.7% on SWE‑Bench Pro, ahead of GPT‑5.2 on both tests. (openai.com) On Monday, April 20, 2026, OpenAI’s status feed said users were “unable to load ChatGPT, Codex and API Platform,” then later marked the incident resolved after recovery. Separate status updates said the company had “applied the mitigation” and was monitoring results. (status.openai.com) OpenAI’s public status page now shows ChatGPT at 99.85% uptime for the January-to-April 2026 period and Codex at 100% uptime on its aggregate dashboard. The company notes those figures are reported across tiers, models, and error types, and may differ for individual customers. (status.openai.com) The company also named Jennifer Lien as head of marketing for Asia-Pacific on April 21, 2026, according to Marketing Interactive. The report said she will be based in Singapore and lead efforts to build adoption and local relevance across consumer and business markets in the region. (marketing-interactive.com) Lien’s appointment follows another Asia-Pacific leadership move in March, when Business Standard reported that OpenAI hired former JioStar executive Kiran Mani as managing director for the region. That report said Mani would move to Singapore and report to chief strategy officer Jason Kwon. (business-standard.com) Business Standard also reported that India is OpenAI’s second-largest market and that the company has opened offices in Tokyo, Singapore, Australia, Korea, and India over the past two years. Those hires put product, operations, and marketing into place in the same region within a month. (business-standard.com) Taken together, the week’s developments show OpenAI trying to do two jobs at once: sell a more capable model to professional users while keeping ChatGPT and Codex reliable enough for daily work. Monday’s outage briefly interrupted the same products OpenAI is positioning as core business tools. (openai.com) (status.openai.com)