A lot of these features aren't that much work to build. Plugins is Toolformer, you basically tell the model what to emit and then the rest is fairly straightforward plumbing of the sort many coders can do, probably GPT-4 can do a lot of it as well. What is a lot of work and what AI can't do is lining up the partners, QAing the results etc, so the humans are likely working mostly on that.

Also I think it's easy to under-estimate how obvious a lot of this stuff was in advance. They were training GPT-4 last year and the idea of giving it plugins would surely have occurred to them years ago. The enabler here is really the taming of it into chat form and the fine-tuning stuff, not really the specific feature itself.

Is it really that hard? I mean ChatGpt is doing the work (that is how I undestand it). Basically if ChatGpt want's to call an external API, it just gives a specific command and waits for the result, then just simply reads the texts and completes the propt. Sounds like a feature that you could prototype in a week of work.

Of course they fed the entire product roadmap into GPT-4.. jk.

So obviously it's been in the works for a few years now but didn't release to capture the market in a blast. Likely they have GPT-8 already in the making.

They probably do.

>Continued Altman, “We’ve made a soft promise to investors that, ‘Once we build a generally intelligent system, that basically we will ask it to figure out a way to make an investment return for you.'”

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/18/sam-altmans-leap-of-faith/

They're using GPT5

I find the website to be extremely buggy. Obviously they're prioritizing banging out new features over QA

Alternatively, they are a company 100% focused on AI research and deployment, not website designers/developers/"webmasters".

That's not 100% true. They're focused on now selling a product and developing an ecosystem. They have basically a non-existent settings interface. You can't even change the email tied to the account or drop having to be logged into Google if you signed up with your Google account.

I wish I had known how restrictive they are when I casually signed up last year.

Microsoft is the one packaging and selling it all as a polished product now.

It's just that things move so fast that all the fun is on the bleeding edge, so that's where people go if they have access, bugs and warts and all.

I tried to contact their support over that latter aspect, their support doesn't respond at all. They don't have a GPT bot answering their support requests..

Which is almost always the right move in a nascent industry

You don’t have to code anything because it understands human language.

You just tell it “you now have access to search, type [Search] before a query to search it” and it can do it

By not being a stagnant conglomerate, for one.

Google is so toast. Who needs search after GPT-4 + plugins? The position of search moved down from "the entry point of internet" to "a plugin for GPT".

We don't even know how powerful the GPT-4 image model is. This one might solve RPA leading to massive desktop automation takeup, maybe also have huge impact in robotics.

Perhaps they'll end up mostly being an email and storage company.

Alien tech, of course.