Yesterday morning, ChatGPT opened the beta access of its plugin system for many of its Plus members who applied earlier. These users now should be able to experience the latest plugins from the system.
To make things even more exciting, OpenAI has announced today that all Plus members starting next week will be able to use two ChatGPT’s official plugins: Browsing and Code Interpreter.
Not only that, the third-party plugin system will gradually be opened up to users, which means they will be able to experience a variety of feature-rich plugins right away.
Let’s review the two plugins and see how good they are.
1. Browsing (Web browsing plugin)
One of ChatGPT’s biggest problems is often its training data model, which is still using 2021 data.
In an era of information explosion like today, information can quickly become outdated within hours, let alone two years.
The “Web Browsing” plugin developed by ChatGPT is mainly designed to address this problem.
This plugin will use the New Bing API to search for relevant information about the question on the Internet and then provide specific answers.
The video below demonstrates several features:
ChatGPT retrieves the latest information about the Oscars; it jumps to a details link for an answer; ChatGPT determines whether to call the Bing API based on the question.
One point to note is that this plugin only supports GET requests and not POST requests, which means it can only be used to retrieve data and not to send it.
This is also a security measure that OpenAI has taken into account.
In addition, OpenAI will also comply with the conventions and avoid crawling content that is prohibited by those with crawler restrictions or robots.txt files.
Therefore, if you encounter the following error when using the plugin, it’s normal:
Currently, many users regard Web Browsing as a killer plugin that can give Google Bard a run for its money.
2. Code Interpreter (code interpreter)
Previously, GitHub launched GitHub Copilot X, and its programming ability has been widely recognized. In the field of technical programming, the potential for AI to provide code assistance and applications is unlimited.
Therefore, OpenAI has also opened up a powerful programming plugin: “Code Interpreter,” which uses ChatGPT, a still experimental model.
The model is placed in a sandbox protected by a firewall and will be allocated a small amount of temporary disk space.
During the conversational exchange, the code will be saved in a persistent session and can be called up at any time without interrupting the conversation.
The video below presents three parts:
Generating and modifying charts through functions; parsing CSV file content, obtaining and analyzing table data, generating visual charts; uploading images, dynamically adjusting image size, grayscale, hue, and generating download links.
In OpenAI’s initial research, it was found that this code interpreter has several useful features:
Solving quantitative and qualitative mathematical problems; conducting data analysis and visualization; quickly converting file formats.
As the user base grows, more use cases for this code interpreter will gradually be discovered.
In conclusion,
With the launch of the new plugin system, the functionality of ChatGPT will become even more rich, and users will no longer need to switch between multiple apps.
For developers, if future ChatGPT plugins enable payment options, it may also be a good monetization channel.
From a broad perspective, the launch of the ChatGPT plugin system is like the early days of the iPhone opening the App Store, and OpenAI is quietly building its own AI ecosystem.
In the future, I will introduce some practical plugins and specific gameplay in the community.