ChatGPT has dazzled with its poetry, prose, and academic test scores. Now prepare for the precocious chatbot to find your next flight, recommend a restaurant with good seating, and fetch you a sandwich, too.
Last week, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced that a slew of companies including Expedia, OpenTable, and Instacart have created plugins to let the chatbot access their services. Once a user activates a plugin, they will be able to ask ChatGPT to perform tasks that would normally require using the web or opening an app, and hopefully see the dutiful bot scurry off to do it.
The move potentially heralds a big shift in how people use computers, apps, and the web, with clever AI programs completing chores on their behalf. Until now, ChatGPT has been cut off from the live internet, unable to look up recent information or interact with websites. Changing that may also help cement OpenAI’s position at the center of what could rapidly become a new era for AI and personal computing.
“I think it’s a genius move,” says Linxi “Jim” Fan, an AI scientist at Nvidia who works on autonomous agents. Fan says ChatGPT’s ability to read documentation and interpret code should make the process of integrating new plugins remarkably smooth. He believes it may help OpenAI take on Apple and Google, which use their app stores to operate as gatekeepers. “The next generation of ChatGPT will be like a meta-app—an app that uses other apps,” Fan says.
But some are concerned by the prospect of ChatGPT—and OpenAI—gaining increasing dominance through its AI. If other businesses come to rely too heavily on OpenAI’s technology, the company could reap huge financial rewards and wield enormous influence over the technology industry. And if ChatGPT becomes a foundational layer of the tech industry, OpenAI will have an outsize responsibility for ensuring that a fast-moving technology is used carefully and responsibly.
“There’s some distress in the startup ecosystem among companies that were picking up pennies in front of the OpenAI steamroller,” says Sarah Guo, cofounder of Conviction VC, an investment group, in reference to businesses trying to make money by building technology similar to ChatGPT. Guo says that OpenAI’s latest maneuver “improves the staying power and strategic position” of the company’s consumer business.
OpenAI has captured the public’s imagination with ChatGPT, which is far more capable, coherent, and creative than previous chatbots, and it has also lured dozens of startups into building on top of its AI. Microsoft, which has also invested $10 billion in OpenAI, has added ChatGPT to the search engine Bing, and is rushing to fold it into other products, including its Office suite.
ChatGPT is built on top of an algorithm called GPT that OpenAI began developing several years ago. GPT predicts the words that should follow a prompt based on a statistical analysis of trillions of lines of text harvested from web pages, books, and other sources. Although GPT is, at heart, little more than an autocomplete program, the latest version, called GPT-4, is capable of some remarkable features of question-answering, including scoring highly on many academic tests.