ChatGPT Plugins: The Battle for the Chatbox Begins

OpenAI just announced the availability of plugins inside ChatGPT. Well, sort of — they’re rolling them out to paid ChatGPT Plus users first, using a waitlist, then gradually making them available more widely over time.

What Are ChatGPT Plugins?

Plugins are extensions that install and run inside ChatGPT, allowing the large language model to access and work with proprietary data sets from the plugin developers or access real-time information to provide more relevant responses. The first plugins have been created by Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier. Short videos on OpenAI’s site demonstrate specific use cases (booking a restaurant reservation through OpenTable, selecting a recipe, and populating an Instacart shopping list) that seem to bridge access to information with actions based on that information.

In addition to these third-party integrations, OpenAI is rolling out its own browser plugin that knows when to access the live internet for current information — overcoming an ongoing challenge and common complaint given that the underlying GPT models are only trained through September 2021.

Why Are ChatGPT Plugins Interesting?

To this point, announcements from partners like Hubspot, Salesforce, Kahn Academy, and so on have emphasized the integration of ChatGPT or the underlying GPT models into the partners’ own platforms. Plugins flip this model on its head — to be clear, this is an “and,” rather than an “or” — by bringing new use cases into the ChatGPT conversational interface.

Now, with third-party integrations available via ChatGPT’s Plugin Store, OpenAI seems to have taken a page out of Apple’s playbook. Thinking longer term, this leads me to wonder: If the future of human-machine interactions will be conversational, is OpenAI moving to turn ChatGPT into the new operating system? As the ecosystem of plugin developers grows, giving end users access to more and more access and functionality from inside the conversational UI, does ChatGPT become essentially a new browser or a 21st-century take on the old-school web portal? Does this make ChatGPT itself a more suitable search engine that, curiously enough, could compete head-to-head with Microsoft’s GPT-4-powered Bing?

Is the race on for brands and media companies to build their own plugins — in much the same way they built websites and mobile apps (or for that matter Second Life islands and more recent metaverse activations) — to embed their data sets and unique value inside ChatGPT?

Practically speaking, putting the chatbot in the third-party services or putting the third-party services in the chatbot may amount to essentially the same thing: making a given service accessible via a conversational UI. That said, the ability for a user to access, engage, and switch between multiple services from within a single “box” represents a potentially significant upgrade to the user experience.

The Battle of the Chatboxes

Ultimately, we may be looking at the first volley in a battle to control the chatbox as the interface layer between consumers and companies. And as we’ve seen before, the company that controls the interface layer between consumers and companies (whether we’re talking about Facebook’s social network, Amazon’s store, Uber’s marketplace, Apple’s iOS, or — now – OpenAI’s ChatGPT) often reaps an outsized share of the rewards.

While this may be a boon for OpenAI (or really, any Big AI company that is quick to seize on this opportunity), there’s a certain level of risk to brands when a third party has so much control over the customer experience. Facebook’s shifting relationship with brands and media may prove to be a telling parallel.

Time will tell how this all turns out. For now, though, my sense is that the introduction of plugins to ChatGPT marks a significant step forward in the evolution of conversational interfaces and the integration of human-machine interactions. As more and more third-party integrations become available through the ChatGPT Plugin Store, ChatGPT could become the go-to platform for companies looking to embed their data sets and deliver unique value inside a conversational UI. As the ecosystem of plugin developers grows, it will be fascinating to see what new use cases emerge and how businesses capitalize on this new frontier.

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