A deeper dive on OpenAI Plug-ins
with less news this week, lets take a deeper look at yesterday's Chat GPT Plug-in announcement
The big news of the week was the OpenAI announcement of ChatGPT Plug-ins. The feature is called "plugins," and it enables ChatGPT to interact with third-party applications via APIs defined by developers.OpenAI had their ears to the ecosystem on this one even citing four projects that achieve similar results outside the ChatGPT environment as inspiration:
Users have been asking for plugins since we launched ChatGPT (and many developers are experimenting with similar ideas)
Read the full announcement here with key details outlined below.
What are plugins?
Plugins are third-party applications that connect to ChatGPT and allow it to interact with APIs defined by developers. Plugins enhance ChatGPT's capabilities and enable it to perform a wide range of actions, such as retrieving real-time information, retrieving knowledge-base information, and performing actions on behalf of the user.
This solves a lot of challenges with ChatGPT including:
Lack of recent information
Lack of mathematical reasoning
Lack of anything that needs private information accessible via API
How do they work?
Plugin developers expose one or more API endpoints, accompanied by a standardized manifest file and an OpenAPI specification. These define the plugin's functionality, allowing ChatGPT to consume the files and make calls to the developer-defined APIs. The AI model acts as an intelligent API caller. Given an API spec and a natural-language description of when to use the API, the model proactively calls the API to perform actions.
What this means about ChatGPT plans
The release of plugins is a significant development for ChatGPT, as it greatly enhances its capabilities and opens up a vast range of possible use cases.
For a while it seemed like ChatGPT was mostly a showcase for users to explore the underlying language models - but with the addition of ChatGPT Pro (and gating of GPT4 to paid users) along with the plug ins, it seems like OpenAI is committed to ChatGPT being a revenue generating product.
The system is currently in a limited alpha, and during this phase, OpenAI will be working closely with users and developers to iterate on the plugin system, which may evolve significantly over time. We anticipate that the system will evolve to accommodate more advanced use cases, and we are excited to build a community that shapes the future of the human-AI interaction paradigm.
How do people monetize plug-ins?
The monetization of plugins depends on the individual plugin developer. There is no marketplace or access fees via OpenAI (at least not yet). The plug-ins can reference external Auth providers so vendors can control plug-in/API access on their own domains in order to monetize. Some may offer their plugins for free, while others may charge a fee.
I would expect consumer companies like Expedia and Kayak to make the plug-in free while enterprise companies to use it as a lever to drive higher subscription levels that include API access or raise API usage (like with Zapier).
Excited to see what plug-ins emerge over the next few weeks!
Generative Post produced by Gen AI Partners
