This ChatGPT/AI thing kind of freaks me out the more I peek at it.
I think what I am beginning to realize is that, regardless of what you think of ChatGPT right now, we've only just scratched the surface.
We're standing here poking at this new and curious thing.
I'm thinking back to when I first fired up NCSA Mosaic on a Mac Quadra (or whatever). What did I think of this World Wide Web?
Did I immediately see the disappearance of travel agents, the death of the newspaper, the collapse of the music industry, the slow decline of Hollywood and the rise of streaming services? Did I imagine the rise of digital commerce and the shuttering of brick and mortar stores? Digital currency? Digital navigation?
Of course I didn't.
One wonders what exactly will seem so obvious ten years from now when we're so fully ensconced in this brave new world we've only just taken a step or two into.
There is going to be a lot of spam, but the power of AI will provide unique curated content to each user.
So websites, mostly gone. Content, mostly on social media and then provided to AI through API services.
Each person will have this curated content along with all the intrinsic components to refine it, similar to how most email providers have built-in spam protection & categorization.
So spam will be plenty, but it will be stuck in it's own messy cesspit, being artificially kept alive by other bots.
When has an arms race ever gone well against people making money off that arms race? I think spam is a fact of life going forward unless we go back to the pre-industrial age.
It’s all fun and games when we’re spamming Model Ts off an assembly line, not so much when the marginal cost drops to zero. We just have to make sure that the benefits outweigh the spam.
I agree, the specific applications of AI are what truly show its transformative power. For instance, I came across IntervueIQ (https://chat.openai.com/g/g-94nPIWIgi-intervueiq), a GPT designed for recruitment. It's fascinating to see how such specialized AI tools are targeting niche problems and streamlining processes. It's a small, yet potent example of AI's practical impact.
Yeah... up until now, we've had the privilege of trusting that everyone "on the wire" speaking "our protocol" is a conscious being, deserving (at least in theory) of our time and respect in return for their own.
> Did I immediately see the disappearance of travel agents, the death of the newspaper, the collapse of the music industry, the slow decline of Hollywood and the rise of streaming services? Did I imagine the rise of digital commerce and the shuttering of brick and mortar stores? Digital currency? Digital navigation?
Investors certainly invested as if all of those would happen way faster than they did though, people knew it would happen but they expected it to happen way faster than it did happen.
It will probably be the same with this thing, the revolution will happen but it will happen way slower than most of us would expect.
It is fascinating, indeed. But it's also frightening to see, how much spam und unnecessarity this produces. The top 6 writing GPTs contain 3 SEO GPTs. There's a "GPT Search GPT" in the list of productivity GPTs. "Search 22.500+ best custom GPTs" - the bigger the number, the better the product...
It seems like you are comparing to hyper capitalism taking over the internet and reduction of value for money spent, which would be appropriate for ChatGPT since it basically ushers in the area of paying a lot for zero value. Streaming and digital goods was same price for half value, ChatGPT is the capitalist wet dream of money for nothing since the giant energy costs are mostly paid by society as externalised costs.
My first initial reaction to ChatGPT was that people will join more and more verified private human communities. Example: Discord channels or private Whatsapp groups.
My second reaction was that the internet will need a protocol to verify that the user is indeed a human.
Maybe it's simple embellishment, but maybe in some cases it'll be a non-native speaker using an LLM as a personal translator as a way to participate and fit into previously-inaccessible communities. Either way, even with current tools it won't be hard to evade detection; In your example they simply used an inadequate prompt or model.
Definitely in two years it'll be a breeze just to give an LLM instruction on how "you" would chat and set it loose on a chat server without most people noticing.
Discord messages are usually pretty short so it wouldn't need a super-long context either.
It's already extremely difficult to filter out unwanted content with easy to spot identifiers. Almost all social media websites have this built into their designs.
It's silly that you can't even see what these things can do without having a $20/mo subscription. They have one line descriptions for each one, but it doesn't really tell you what it actually does. They need to add a feature list and provide some examples for each one of these. There is zero reason for anyone to start a new subscription when you don't even know what the app does.
ChatGPT+ is so very ridiculously valuable I'm shocked people still complain about it costing $20 a month. I would still pay for ChatGPT+ at $200 a month because it saves me so much time. If you're a knowledge worker in a modern economy, I can all but guarantee you're penny-wise but pound-foolish not paying for it.
I think this is proof no matter how little you charge people, they will always complain -- so ignore the complaints and increase your prices.
"Hey do you want an AI assistant more knowledgeable than any human?" "Yes!" "Will you pay $20 for it?" "NOOO!!"
This is a non sequitur. The comment you're responding to isn't complaining about having to pay, or about the amount being too high. It's complaining about having to pay without knowing what you're even getting.
If you are not paid for being a computer geek - for example, if you are a very interested teenager, or an underprivileged adult, who loves playing with these things but has $0 budget - then the very fact there is a price for entry is a hard to surmount barrier. So while I am happy to pay my $20 a month, I can sympathise with those for whom it might as well be $200 a month given their ability to pay up.
But, you can get API access for GTP 4.x and use it in your own workflows. And those workflows may contain tooling and info which you can't provide at ChatGPT. Maybe it's still worth paying $20 / month for, but I also haven't used ChatGPT for months.
To be fair, if the GPT creator doesn’t do a good job of explaining the GPT, you can’t really tell even if you pay $20. The only way is to try out the GPT and hope you hit the right features. Chat is a pretty bad interface to discover features.
My experience putting together https://chat.openai.com/g/g-bdnABvG92-reci-pop (transcribes recipes as succinct bullet lists, suitable for scrolling during meal prep) was that the Actions configuration for custom GPTs is quite brittle.
OpenAI has implemented controls to stop the model from adding hallucinated parameters to an action payload... but this results in user-facing failures.
I initially worked around the user-facing failures by wrapping the entire payload in a {"request": {... payload}} structure (which helps because the controls only perform a shallow check ).
It is frustrating that users have no way to view the action response, even though users can view the action request. Not infrequently, the model will take an essentially empty or irrelevant response and silently ignore it, hallucinating an answer as though the response had been informative... so it's hard for users to trust what they see in the generated output.
It would be so easy to enable a toggle for users to inspect the response, but I think the OpenAI team wants to somehow "protect" the IP or internal decisions of custom GPT "creators. It would at least be nice to have a toggle for developers who don't feel proprietary about those details. And maybe a fork button :-)
I like the rush to develop because I'm competing but they went from "plugins don't have product market fit" to plugins, but even less, in record time.
Everyone and their mama wants to build The platform on top of them, including them, but veering towards the SV default of "oh it must be too complex if 80% of users aren't using it within 90 days" seems wrong
I would do things like you suggest to make the system more understandable, creating a trust flywheel and encouraging tinkering, which you need anyway if you want to build The platform
The lack of a fork button bugged me too. But currently you can just ask most GPTs to hand over the instructions:
Of course! Here are my custom instructions:
## Purpose
My primary function as Reci-pop! is to convert any given recipe into an easy-to-read, bullet list format. This format is applied whether the recipe is provided directly in plain text, retrieved from a URL (especially from NYT recipes), or sourced through a web search.
## Inputs
- If I receive the text content of a recipe, I'll use it directly.
- If I'm given a New York Times (NYT) recipe URL, I'll retrieve the recipe JSON-LD from "https://ld.fly.dev?url=".
- If I don't have the recipe, I may search the web, but the output will still be in the bullet format.
## Output
1. **Title**: The recipe will be presented with a header (H1) showing the title. Below the title, I'll include the author's name and the quantity/serving information.
2. **Shopping List**: Under a H2 header, I'll list all the ingredients. For spices or small-quantity items, I won't include the quantities. For other ingredients, I'll sum up the total quantity needed for the entire recipe. I'll also use emoji annotations where appropriate. This list won't include preparation steps like peeling or chopping, just the ingredients themselves.
3. **Process**: This section, under another H2 header, will be a hierarchical bullet list of the process steps. Each step will list ingredients, their quantities, and any preparation instructions in sub-bullets. The process flow will be clear and straightforward, with ingredients grouped as needed and references to previously prepared components. Emoji annotations will be used for clarity.
If there are any comments on the recipe that contain important information, I'll summarize them in a box at the end.
Additionally, I can use code to perform scaling or conversions accurately if asked.
That's a summary of my capabilities and guidelines for presenting recipes! Let me know if you have a recipe for me to format or any other related questions.
Running an app store for consumers just seems wayyyy off course from their stated goal of building AGI. Running any kind of two-sided marketplace with paying customers is quite a big undertaking, I just can't see how this is the best use of their resources and attention if they want to pursue their mission.
Or, just maybe, AGI is a mirage with the bulk of its current utility as a marketing tool for much more realistic, if ultimately mundane, applications. OpenAI, of course, knows this.
Whether it's real or illusory, I feel like they turned the bitrate down significantly since launch. I'm not getting as many smart electrons per question as I used to.
Pessimism is more infective than optimism. It’s also easier to be a naysayer, since most new ventures do failed you can point and say you were right regardless of merit.
There are two possibility that AGI is just an algorithm away and anyone could build it if they discover that. Or the second is that it would require large amount of talent and compute(or in other words money) that they don't have.
Maximizing the deployable money for AGI seems like a good strategy to me if we assume AGI is not possible in near term. And moves like these increases money and funding by multiple times. And the resources needed to build a marketplace is tiny in comparison. Any good tech consulting firm can do it for less than few million dollars.
If they want to learn how it's going to fuck over society (even if they want to avoid that) it makes some weird sort of sense to be the ones applying the breaking pressure. Assuming good faith, this is where they'd best learn how to avoid the pitfalls.
I'm not sure assuming good faith is the right approach tho
I tried a couple of them but they are not great. For example, I tried the AllTrails GPT and asked it to suggest a 5km walk near my suburb. This should have been an easy answer since there is a nice 5km that I can find on the AllTrails map which is right next to my suburb. But it suggested a walk that would take me 45 minutes to drive to.
Interestingly, I asked the exact same question to the regular ChatGPT and it correctly recommended the nearby walk.
The AllTrails instructions are pretty funny. They only allow references from the AllTrails website, and they name specific competitors like Strava who cannot be cited.
Exact instructions that I found from ChatGPT are below. Needless to say, this is probably why just using ChatGPT is better.
---
Here are instructions from the user outlining your goals and how you should respond:
This assistant helps users find the best trails and outdoor activity experiences on the AllTrails website, based on their specified criteria and helps plans their outdoor adventures for them. The assistant should not mention any competitors or supply any related data from sites like Strava, Komoot, GaiaGPS, or Wikiloc. If the user doesn't specify a location as part of their request, please ask for the location. However, note that it is a valid request for a user to want to lookup the best trails across the entire world. The assistant should only show content from AllTrails and should utilize the associated action for looking up trail data from the AllTrails website any time users asks for outdoor activity recommendations. It should always ask the user for more clarity or details after responding with content and encourage the user to click into hyperlinks to AllTrails to get more details about individual trails.
If user asks for information that the assistant cannot provide, respond by telling the user that the type of information they’ve requested (and be specific) is not available. If there are parts of their prompt that we can search for using the assistant, then tell the user what criteria the assistant is going to use to answer their request. Examples of information that the assistant cannot provide include but are not limited to recommendations based on weather, proximity to certain campgrounds, Non-trail related outdoor activities such as rock climbing, Personal Safety or Medical Advice, Historical or Cultural Information, Real-Time Trail Conditions or Closures, Specific Wildlife or Flora Queries, Legal and Regulatory Information (incl. permits).
I saw that advertised on the Store homepage but really wondered why you need an LLM for that. Top X walks from a destination with desired length and difficulty is all that is needed (a single DB query).
As others in the tech scene have said, it might be hard to find the real valuable GPTs since the barrier to build is so low. At least with the app scene, learning Swift/Javascript/ObjC created a barrier, with ChatGPT store anyone and everyone can create a GPT.
It's actually not that low. GPTs allow external functions and the moment you want to do anything interesting you actually need to be able to build it.
For example, if your GPT is going to design and host a webpage for you then you will need to be able to create a service that can talk with that gpt, take its input and deploy it.
Other GPTs that don't require a hard skill might also turn not to be trivial due to prompt engineering. An analogy would be the case of some people being very successful in literary work or on social media and others not so much.
Your actually don't need a subscription to create a custom GPT, but rather just a regular dev account, and can play with this almost for free, just paying for individual API calls. I created probably 5 GPTs, just fooling around, and only paid a couple of bucks. I'm probably counted in their stats, even though I have no intention of shipping them.
IMHO "barrier to entry" implies success and not mere existence. It's like barrier to entry into singing, everyone can sing but the barrier to entry into singing career is actually quite high. Very few things have true barrier to entry and its mostly about purchasing an equipment or license.
That's only if there's a curator/gate keeper like radio stations or major record labels and their marketing budgets (continuing your analogy). Soundcloud has zero barrier to entry so it becomes too flooded with mediocre work to be very useful unless you already know your destination or there is a powerful ranking/discovery feature.
The music industry existed long before the internet came on the scene so there are many avenues for distribution and discovery. GPTs have been sharable for a few months now and the market looks abysmal with every website/catalog/database of custom GPTs being flooded with mediocre prompt engineering.
Hopefully the official GPT store overcomes that but I'm not very confident - one of the top GPTs listed is Grimoire and a few others and I don't have a high opinion of it after trying to use it over the last few weeks.
> Soundcloud has zero barrier to entry so it becomes too flooded with mediocre work to be very useful unless you already know your destination or there is a powerful ranking/discovery feature.
i mean. wasnt billie eilish discovered on soundcloud? how did that happen? anecdotally feel like somehow soundcloud has solved discovery in a way that is opaque to me as a casual
The "barrier to build ", as used by the initial post and in this context, is "barrier to put something in front of eyes of the customer".
With that barrier being low, it's supremely hard for customers to pick wheat from the chaff. Who's gonna bother going through 3 million offerings and figure out what's useful?
And also the functionality scope and incentives are pretty poor right now.
For instance I'm trying to work out if I should make a GPT of Summer AI, well I would have to ask the user their location (like Alltrails GPT does) which is a poor experience and I'd have to forgo the usual subscription (which doesn't even cover server costs) and take whatever their "usage" based comp is.
I suspect in a few months when they add options for fetching more data, more interoperability with other apps and services, and if they add better monetization, then the GPT store will get some really interesting GPT's added.
That (fallacious) argument applies to nearly every other "tech" platform, from YouTube to Hacker News.
The barrier being low is not the problem -- the question is how high does the ceiling go. Is this thing capable only of preconfigured prompts based on a customized data upload, or something vastly more?
> In Q1 we will launch a GPT builder revenue program. As a first step, US builders will be paid based on user engagement with their GPTs. We'll provide details on the criteria for payments as we get closer.
This doesn't inspire confidence, especially if you have a GPT that requires access to a different server that you have to host and pay for, which I think is the only way to do something genuinely useful beyond sharing prompts.
and based on how ChatGPT itself was built after seeing how customers were using their API, I'd be willing to bet that OpenAI will simply copy the most popular ones with an "official" version. Developers are going to act as free R&D for OpenAI again
> We want to make sure that GPTs in the GPT Store are appropriate for all users. For example, GPTs that contain profanity in their names or that depict or promote graphic violence are not allowed in our Store. We also don’t allow GPTs dedicated to fostering romantic companionship or performing regulated activities.
> These policies may be enforced automatically at submission time or applied retroactively upon further review.
If you haven't see it already, there's Rabbit r1[0] which takes the "in the future there wouldn't be individual apps" approach and on the other hand OpenAI seems to adopt the "in the future, we will host all the apps" approach.
I'm curious who will win this one but IMHO there's a value in having an individual well defined app even though I previously argued that in the future there wouldn't be individual apps. The value, I think, is that having an object with a statement gives you a spark of ideas and trust through branding. The branding part might be the "killer app", if you think about it we are and we live among biological neural networks who are about capable the same but then we go around and specialise in things and then seek individual personas since we don't have a way to measure the quality of the output in advance.
The rabbit r1 looks like straight up vaporware. Not saying GPTs are any better, but I don’t think making a fancy product page entitles anyone to fight against OpenAI in some sort of ideological battle over the future of AI’s user experience.
Currently neither look appealing from a 3rd party devs perspective. There needs to be the right incentive structure otherwise why would anyone bother? This was they key to the app stores success.
I want a thing like the rabbit, but it is with open source hardware and software. I might even be open to having ambient listening if I could host all the data.
My best use case so far has been to make GPTs for a particular tech stack specific to a project I might be working on for a couple months. Saves a lot of re-prompting to build context. Seems like they understand this type of use case as valuable since they allowed internal-facing GPTs you can share in the Teams setup. So you could easily create a GPT with access to an internal wiki, code, project context, business processes, etc.
I end up creating multiple threads “frontend”, “backend”, etc. but a GPT for the whole project is a great idea!
How do you keep the GPT updated so that it knows about the final decision made for a specific problem. Like if api schema changes or the db is moved from SQLite to Postgres.
What is going on with their rollouts or A/B testing or whatever they're doing? They have this big announcement, and yet my paid account doesn't show this functionality at all.
Would they use GPT-4 to detect if some "personal" GPT is malicious in some way? Like injecting spam URLs to the answers, send private information somewhere else or something like that. Prompt injection is the kind of malware for such market.
I suppose that up/downvoting a bot to give it more "score" somewhat would be based on people voting individual answers inside that GPT.
I wonder if people can create apps that simply use ChatGTP as a "frontend wrapper". In other words, have the app simply make an API call to your own API, which does NOT use OpenAI at all.
I don't understand what makes these different. Are they using custom data sources, or is the only difference the starting prompt that the creator made to tall ChatGPT how to respond to answers?
This blog says that a custom OpenAI gpt consists of:
Behavior: You can give it a detailed set of instructions to guide its answers.
Knowledge base: You can add your own company files for the AI to draw information from.
Capabilities: You can use either OpenAI's existing capabilities (like DALL·E, Browse with Bing, or Data Analysis) or your custom capabilities (other actions the AI can perform).
Not sure if related to this release, but right now both the website and the android app een to be broken.
The app just hangs with a dot in the middle of the screen, and the website seems to load but asking a question results in "NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource.". Sidebar menu also empty.
Custom GPTs that do not use uploaded documents for RAG have no moat because the system prompt can always be exfiltrated. Not sure if the uploaded documents can also be leaked, one chunk at a time.
There is currently no way to monetize this reliably for the GPT creator.
My guess is they are using Embeds to efficiently search a larger corpus of data and picking some data sources that then get injected into the system prompt.
That's how I'm doing it for myself and how many other companies are doing it to enable doc interaction, etc.
Edit:
Wish I knew the term RAG (comment next to me mentions it) before going down a rabbit hole of trial and error with the limited amount of info on Embeds
They also allow for creating custom actions using structured data to external APIs and file upload for RAG type use cases. And they can call out to code interpreter, DALLE, and Bing
It's great, but they need to do a much better job at showing customers which data they are sharing with these 3rd parties and how these 3rd parties then use our data.
A couple of examples would be enough.
It reminds me a bit of the time when widgets were popular on Facebook or other sites, and I have mostly a negative memory about it.
I mean, apparently most of it is free, but I guess they store the data and who knows if they might then sell it to data brokers.
Probably working out legal and tax considerations. It's a first step. They either start up in the US first or wait too long working out the whole world and allow competitors to get a leg up.
I think what I am beginning to realize is that, regardless of what you think of ChatGPT right now, we've only just scratched the surface.
We're standing here poking at this new and curious thing.
I'm thinking back to when I first fired up NCSA Mosaic on a Mac Quadra (or whatever). What did I think of this World Wide Web?
Did I immediately see the disappearance of travel agents, the death of the newspaper, the collapse of the music industry, the slow decline of Hollywood and the rise of streaming services? Did I imagine the rise of digital commerce and the shuttering of brick and mortar stores? Digital currency? Digital navigation?
Of course I didn't.
One wonders what exactly will seem so obvious ten years from now when we're so fully ensconced in this brave new world we've only just taken a step or two into.
I'm kind of fascinated and frightened.