What Did OpenAI Do This Week? - 26/03/2023 [+30 LINKS]

While OpenAI's CEO "feels awful" about the bug that exposed brief descriptions of other users' conversations and financial data to people on the service, causing OpenAI to take ChatGPT offline temporarily, the bug isn't the big story this week. ChatGPT's launching plugins is huge news for the company and the wider world.

Why? Per OpenAI, "Plugins are tools designed specifically for language models with safety as a core principle, and help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services." Before ChatGPT was stuck in 2021, now it can go real-time. OpenAI also open-sourced the code for a knowledgebase retrieval plugin and launched two of its own (a web browser and a code interpreter) amidst an array of partner plugins:

In layman's terms: ChatGPT plug-ins will allow companies to offer the AI-based natural language processor for their products, allowing users to ask detailed questions and get human-like answers with minimal coding. OpenAI has made it so that ChatGPT can now access the internet, run its own code to solve problems, accept and work on uploaded files, and write its own interfaces to third-party apps.

The move exponentially expands ChatGPT’s capabilities and user base, as many users are unlikely to know they are using ChatGPT. The Zapier integration alone allows ChatGPT to execute +50,000 actions (including search, update, and write) with Zapier's 5,000+ supported apps.

According to critics, browsing live data from the web opens a whole new area of issues. The big picture? ChatGPT is no longer stuck in 2021, but fear not, ChatGPT’s plugins are not going live widely (yet); just to “a small set of users” comprised of developers and ChatGPT plus users who we can all be certain have nothing but the best intentions(!).

OpenAI is at least appearing to think - or say they are thinking - about safety concerns. OpenAI mentioned safety +15 times throughout the introductory post, so it's on OpenAI's mind. The most significant sticking point for critics seems to be that OpenAI's plugin doesn't just retrieve real-time information but can utilise APIs that let it "perform actions on behalf of the user".

The biggest loser here? Publishers. Publishers who don't want to provide ChatGPT with their content – after all, the AI is likely to prevent a click on the corresponding website – can block the ChatGPT crawler. You're not wrong if that sounds like upending how the web works today. OpenAI acknowledges it; "We appreciate that this is a new method of interacting with the web and welcome feedback on additional ways to drive traffic back to sources and add to the overall health of the ecosystem." If the startup mantra 'move fast, and break things' is ringing in your ears, you are not alone. Another critical issue remains the potential for disinformation.

The company says it has considered threats posed by these plug-ins and has “implemented several safeguards” along with different formatting to let readers know the issues at hand. The move is designed to inspire more developers to build future use cases for ChatGPT and get a stranglehold on the market before Google has time to utilise its scale with Bard. Analyst Benedict Evans raised a good point; “Wondering if ChatGPT plug-ins are the new App Store or the new Alexa skills. And, by extension, an admission that this is orders of magnitude less powerful than it looks.”

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