The first business ChatGPT will upend is likely to be the industry that created it.
Why it matters: Making software has never been easy. But programming practitioners and experts are increasingly confident that generative AI will change their world — supercharging the work of the best coders and empowering everyday users to get more done.
What they’re saying: “The current generation of AI models are a missile aimed, however unintentionally, directly at software production itself,” venture investors Paul Kedrosky and Eric Norlin wrote last week in an essay on “Software’s Gutenberg Moment.”
- “Such technologies are terrific to the point of dark magic at producing, debugging, and accelerating software production quickly and almost costlessly.”
Driving the news: OpenAI late last week released pilot versions of plugins for ChatGPT that allow it to roam the internet at users’ bidding and connect with other services and data.
- It’s a big first step toward transforming the conversational chatbot into a more capable intelligent agent that can accomplish tasks for users. It’s also a move toward turning ChatGPT into a platform other businesses can build upon.
- The first batch of plugins extends ChatGPT into travel, shopping, dining, math and other realms by linking the bot to well-known services like Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna and OpenTable.
Of note: Sure, these app-like plugins are OpenAI’s bid to turn ChatGPT into a new “everything app,” as New York’s John Herrman argues.
- But they also provide evidence of how radically AI’s new large language models will change the work of coding.
How it works: Typically, to connect two programs, a software developer will need to understand the APIs (or definitions of how a system interacts with other systems) at both ends, then write some “glue code” so the two services can talk to each other.
- To create a ChatGPT plugin, you just “instruct the model.” You provide ChatGPT with a “manifest” of your service’s API — in English. ChatGPT reads…
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