Key Takeaways: OpenAI hires former xAI CFO Mike Liberatore to manage massive AI infrastructure spending amid Musk-Altman rivalry. GPT-5-Codex launched as specialized AI model optimized for autonomous...
OpenAI has made two significant moves this week that underscore its aggressive expansion strategy: hiring a key executive from rival xAI and launching a powerful new AI model designed specifically for software engineering tasks.
OpenAI has hired Mike Liberatore, former finance chief at Elon Musk's xAI, to be the artificial intelligence startup's business finance officer, responsible for overseeing its massive infrastructure spending. The hire was confirmed by a company spokesperson on Tuesday, September 16, 2025.
Liberatore, who left xAI in July after just three months on the job, begins Tuesday and will report to CFO Sarah Friar and work with Greg Brockman's team, which manages the contracts and capital behind OpenAI's compute strategy.
The timing is particularly significant given the escalating tensions between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk. At Elon Musk's xAI, Liberatore helped arrange $10 billion in financing and approved major data center expansion plans before departing in late July.
Liberatore, who is also a former Airbnb executive, was involved in xAI's $5 billion debt raise in June and a separate $5 billion strategic equity investment.
Liberatore brings extensive financial experience to OpenAI, having previously spent almost nine years at Airbnb, and before that worked in senior finance roles at SquareTrade, eBay and PayPal. His departure from xAI was part of a string of high-profile departures at Musk's AI startup.
In a separate but equally significant development, OpenAI announced the launch of GPT-5-Codex on September 15, 2025, marking a major advancement in AI-powered software development tools.
GPT-5-Codex becomes the default engine for cloud tasks and code review, with developers able to use it locally through the Codex command line interface (CLI) and IDE extension.
The model represents a new, fine-tuned version of its GPT-5 model designed specifically for software engineering tasks in its AI-powered coding assistant, Codex.
What sets GPT-5-Codex apart is its ability to work autonomously for extended periods. "During testing, we've seen GPT‑5-Codex work independently for more than 7 hours at a time," according to OpenAI staff. Alexander Embiricos, OpenAI's Codex Product Lead, said he's seen the model take upward of seven hours in some cases.
The new model demonstrates significant performance improvements over its predecessors. On SWE-bench Verified, an evaluation based on real-world software engineering tasks, GPT‑5 scores 74.9%, up from o3's 69.1%.
Additionally, GPT‑5 also excels at long-running agentic tasks—achieving SOTA results on τ2-bench telecom (96.7%), a tool-calling benchmark released just 2 months ago.
Unlike GPT-5, which is built as a general-purpose AI model, GPT-5-Codex is optimized for what OpenAI calls "agentic coding," essentially where the AI agent functions as an autonomous colleague to a developer and can go off and code, run code, and make alterations all on its own for up to hours at a time.
"GPT-5-Codex can decide five minutes into a problem that it needs to spend another hour," explained Alexander Embiricos, highlighting the model's ability to reassess a problem's difficulty mid-task.
Early customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Companies using the technology report significant improvements in development workflows, with the model able to handle complex refactoring tasks and comprehensive code reviews autonomously.
These developments come as OpenAI faces intensifying competition from tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and emerging AI startups. OpenAI, which was recently valued by investors at $500 billion, has been steadily increasing its compute commitments, including a $300 billion deal with Oracle.
The hiring of Liberatore is particularly strategic given his experience with large-scale AI infrastructure financing. His role will be crucial as OpenAI continues its massive infrastructure expansion to support its growing AI models and services.
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