It's open source software - it can be baked into pretty much anything given they follow the license terms.

The question is whether the 10 million active users of Codex / ChatGPT Work count towards the download count.

That would contradict the cause implied in the title here.

Explains the download records as well

Not really. One entity embedding the software into another will only account for at most a handful of downloads.

Unless Codex is vibe coded and it downloads it directly on every installation…

Didn't people find it bundled with a bunch of other things in a single runtime? Downloaded as part of a whole runtime would suggest it wasn't downloaded directly from the source.

I think it's not baked into codex, but codex has either been instructed to download it when asked to edit word docs/excel spreadsheets, or it picked it up during training.

from the thread last week, it seems to be installed by default on every mac install, possibly not on windows installs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49528079

i think that's a perfectly coherent and reasonable way for both these apps to work.

people don't want AI features leaking into their non-ai apps. I'm not an AI hater - I want my AI app to be able to read and write word docs, but when i decide to open up libreoffice i'm doing that because i want to write something myself, not use AI. i don't need my word processor to bundle an inferior version of what the ChatGPT can do for me.