OpenAI Codex is an AI tool developed by OpenAI that can generate code based on natural language input by understanding programming tasks and using existing code libraries and APIs to complete the tasks. Codex is built on GPT-3 and trained on billions of lines of publicly available source code, making it capable of generating code in languages like Python, JavaScript, and more. While Codex has advantages like making programming more accessible, it also has limitations such as not being able to decompose complex problems.