OpenAI launches plugins for ChatGPT, a major change for the chatbot 🤖

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When you read the title of the article, you probably said to yourself, « ChatGPT again? « . Yes, again. Not a week goes by without OpenAI’s chatbot making the news. After recently announcing a new version of its core, GPT-4, OpenAI wants to increase its functionality through plugins.

But why does ChatGPT need plugins?🧐

To answer this question, we must first understand roughly how ChatGPT works. It is a conversational AI that will draw its information not from the internet directly, but from what is called a language model, in this case GPT-4 for ChatGPT. The language model is a gigantic set of different information filtered and classified, in order to have only « clean » data to feed the AI. We remember in particular the scandal around the Kenyan workers, that you can read by clicking here, who were in charge of processing these data. And as OpenAI has clarified, the GPT-4 data goes until September 2021. So if you ask ChatGPT for information from after September 2021, it will be unable to answer you. So that’s where the plugins come in. To use the analogy used by ChatGPT,

plugins can be “eyes and ears” for language models, giving them access to information that is too recent, too personal, or too specific to be included in the training data.

The answers provided will then be updated and personalized.

A store system reminiscent of the iPhone App Store🛒

Application stores are so much a part of our daily lives that we almost forgot that they were not always as obvious as they are today. Indeed, the App Store was THE revolution brought by the iPhone, and that allowed it to create a whole new industry. When we look at the AI revolution that is taking place before our eyes, we can’t help but draw a parallel between ChatGPT’s plugin store and the iPhone’s app store.

To open the ball, OpenAI unveiled 3 self-developed plugins: a web browser, a code interpreter and a personal and organizational information access plugin. With the web browser, you will be able to ask to search the web, for example. It relies on Bing to return the results you need. In the example below, it searches for the latest Oscar winners, and in addition it provides its sources.

Source : OpenAI

OpenAI has not only developed its own plugins, but also 12 external plugins: Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram and Zapier. In an example provided by OpenAI, ChatGPT is asked in a single request to:

• suggest ideas for restaurants to eat Vegan in San Francisco on the weekend of the demo,
• suggest ingredients for a simple recipe for Sunday,
• calculate the calories of the recipe thanks to Wolfram,
• order the ingredients on Instacart.

Thanks to various plugins, ChatGPT manages to respond correctly to the user’s request.

An Alpha test version before a global deployment 🔬

Artificial Intelligence connected directly to the Internet has often been a bad idea. Facebook with BlenderBot and Microsoft with Tay have already tried the experiment in the past, and the least we can say is that it did not go well. On the OpenAI side, they know that opening ChatGPT to the internet is not without risk.

« Plugins could increase safety challenges by taking harmful or unintended actions, increasing the capabilities of bad actors who would defraud, mislead, or abuse others. By increasing the range of possible applications, plugins may raise the risk of negative consequences from mistaken or misaligned actions taken by the model in new domains. « 

This is the reason why the plugins are not available for all users and developers. A waiting list has been set up to allow registration. ChatGPT Plus users are of course given priority. By moving forward with caution, OpenAI hopes to learn as many lessons as possible that will then allow them to deploy the plugins in a smooth manner.