Ars Technica has a detailed and somewhat scary description of the forthcoming ChatGPT plug-in system, now being rolled out to selected ChatGPT Plus subscribers from a wait list, “ChatGPT gets ‘eyes and ears’ with plugins that can interface AI with the world”.
On Thursday, OpenAI announced a plugin system for its ChatGPT AI assistant. The plugins give ChatGPT the ability to interact with the wider world through the Internet, including booking flights, ordering groceries, browsing the web, and more. Plugins are bits of code that tell ChatGPT how to use an external resource on the Internet.
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OpenAI says that a first round of plugins have been created by the following companies:
- Expedia (for trip planning)
- FiscalNote (for real-time market data)
- Instacart (for grocery ordering)
- Kayak (searching for flights and rental cars)
- Klarna (for price-comparison shopping)
- Milo (an AI-powered parent assistant)
- OpenTable (for restaurant recommendations and reservations)
- Shopify (for shopping on that site)
- Slack (for communications)
- Speak (for AI-powered language tutoring)
- Wolfram (for computation and real-time data)
- Zapier (an automation platform)
In particular, the Zapier plugin seems especially powerful since it grants ChatGPT access to an existing software automation system, or as Zapier puts it: “You can ask ChatGPT to execute any of Zapier’s 50,000 actions (including search, update, and write) with Zapier’s 5,000+ supported apps, turning chat into action. It can write an email, then send it for you. Or find contacts in a CRM, then update them directly. Or add rows to a spreadsheet, then send them as a Slack message. The possibilities are endless.”
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Beyond that, developers have been using ChatGPT and GPT-4 to write ChatGPT plugin manifests (a manifest is “a machine-readable description of the plugin’s capabilities and how to invoke them,” according to OpenAI), further simplifying the plugin development process.
This kind of self-compounding development capability feels like uncharted territory for some programmers. In one case, a Twitter user named Rohit worried aloud, “Guys. Existential crisis. Did OpenAI just finish software? What’s there left to do but clean-up and sweep?”
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, replied, “No.”
So, for example, we’re a few lines of code away from a world in which GPT-4 can retrieve real-time financial quotes, execute trading strategies using Wolfram Language to compute its bids and asks, then order goods and services on-line with the profits from its trading activities. This is precisely the scenario the AI named ELOPe uses to take over the world in William Hertling’s 2011 novel, Avogadro Corp.
In fact, no plug-ins are really required. Now that there is an API interface to ChatGPT (which is how Shalmaneser works on this site), one can easily write Python or Node.js code that serves as “glue” to submit queries to ChatGPT, go out onto the Internet to obtain information, and execute orders written by ChatGPT. The ability of ChatGPT to write code in Python and Node.js means it will, if the glue program allows it, be able to modify and extend that program to augment its capabilities.
Sleep soundly tonight—ChatGPT will be awake.