Power Boost: Analyzing ChatGPT's Plugin Integration and its 100X Potential

0:00OpenAI has just introduced something new which is ChatGPT plugins. So today on the podcast, we're going to dive into what exactly ChatGPT plugins are, how they work, and why they are completely going to change everything. So first off, essentially what it is, is it's the ability for people to use third-party services on ChatGPT. So one example of this would be, you know, if someone wanted to book a flight using ChatGPT, obviously right now you can't book a flight. You could, you know, there's a lot of ways you can imagine why ChatGPT could be powerful. And so now people are starting to integrate other software in the example of flights, you know, Expedia or Kayak that are flight booking engines.

0:43And they're integrating those directly into ChatGPT. So how this works is when you go into ChatGPT, you're going to be able to select multiple plugins or just one plugin that you would like to use in addition to ChatGPT. So let's say you want to go book a flight and you turn on the Expedia plugin. imagine how powerful this is going to be when all of a sudden instead of you know just being able to go to like speed a website and type in the dates you want to travel with and the people the amount of people you're you know taking and it essentially gives you kind of like a static list imagine how powerful it would be if you could go to chat gpt and say hey i have six people i'm traveling with between you know these are all their ages we'd like to go to you know maybe one of these five countries or cities in france or italy and we're open to travel anytime between this month and this month for this period of time you know we prefer it in the summer when it's warm but we wouldn't mind it in the spring around this time like so all of a sudden you're able to use really natural words um and you're able to get really powerful results and then it will be able to come back with some results and say hey based off of everything you're you know looking at here's like three dates that have the cheapest flights and the best rates and the hotel or area you want to stay in are available and it'll be able to return you that and then you can click and boom go over to Expedia and book the flight instantly so really really powerful obviously once you start integrating this and it's kind of interesting because the response to this a has been wow this is really powerful from a lot of people but b the people I've been hearing complain a lot about this is actually software founders and developers because they're like, you know, well, there's just a lot of people, you know, Expedia is one example, but there's a whole bunch of them.

2:28And they've actually specifically also introduced a, like a search engine that can search the internet now as well. So you know, you can get up to date information. And so this is really interesting. I've heard a lot of software developers complain about it because they're like, you know, What is there left to develop if people can just go on chat GPT and get like integrations to literally everything? Yeah, and in my opinion that one I would say is a little bit misguided or I don't think it's you know Is as much of a worry as people would think and also just so you know This is coming from someone that is working very closely on very similar technology in AI and integrations within it So I understand the sentiment, but I think this is a really incredible way to integrate some really cool use cases into ChatGPT.

3:12And at the end of the day, if you think about it, this isn't like ChatGPT is taking over travel. Anyone is going to eventually be able to make these plugins. So any company or business is going to be, if you have like a product or a thing that your company does, you'll be able to integrate that as a plugin, essentially kind of like an app store, right? Like ChatGPT is now essentially creating an app store for apps built on top of of ChatGPT and you'll be able to make your own plugins or apps that run on top. And, you know, maybe if yours is a food delivery service, people will be able to search for the food they want, integrate it with your plugin and be able to, you know, buy it.

3:51And, you know, the thing is, it's not like ChatGPT or OpenAI are taking any money away from these companies, right? If you're building the Expedia app, it's just like, it's honestly, all it is really doing is allowing Expedia to have a more powerful interface for searching for the content on their own website than they're able to offer. And it's kind of interesting because like on the one hand, you can see like how these plugins are being built on top of chat GPT. But on the other hand, it would be very simple for people to, like example for Expedia to just be able to use a chat GPT API and build a feature right on their platform that does the exact same thing and actually it really wouldn't surprise me if they did I would I don't see why you wouldn't have you know chat GPT built into your own website or apps and also have a plugin on top of chat GPT it just gets you more exposure and more eyeballs and so yeah I think this is going to be a really powerful tool for a lot of people some people would prefer to just search from chat GPT and a lot of people are still going to want to go to the website and use the actual company's URL, they won't know that a lot of these features or plugins are available on chat GPT and perhaps they just won't always be there.

5:03So it's going to be really interesting. It is interesting though because this isn't like a feature that's exclusive to chat GPT like I was saying. You know, you're looking at things like Instacart has a plugin now so you can search for like food, it would give you like a list of meals or whatever and then you click checkout and it sends you, It adds all those items to your instacart to go check out on their app And so it's kind of interesting because you know on the one hand and people are like, oh You know, they're I don't know. They're just like worried about the integration But on the other hand, it's just like it's just like another way another means of distribution It's kind of like Google Chrome plugins You could have a Google Chrome plugin that does something very similar to what your actual website does But you stick it as a Google Chrome plugin because you get more distribution there So it's just like another app store another means for people to get distribution But it does make GPT incredibly powerful and one of the big areas that I have seen is actually zapier So zapier is if you haven't used it before It's just like a it's a website that integrates with over 5 ,000 different apps like Google Sheets Trello Gmail HubSpot Salesforce and a lot of other ones and so zapier Integrates directly with them and they kind of let you set up automations and workflows with all of those different apps And so now that they're built into chat GPT, people are going to be able to build a lot of different apps and integrate a lot of different things into there.

6:20So with all of this technology and all this cool stuff, awesome. But some of the things that are important to talk about are some of the safety implications. And if you've listened to my podcast for a while, you know, my opinion on this is generally speaking, I say, you know, let the AI say what it thinks. I'm not a big fan of the trust and safety layers that get added on top of different AIs because Inevitably, I think we can I don't know we do some harm if I feel like we insert our own biases Whatever they be into an AI model that being said I do think there are some very important trust and safety things You're going to have to start implementing if we're integrating with plugins and other companies apis and the reason for that Is You could very easily see you know someone creating like like third parties creating plugins that are that are essentially because with chat you can stack multiple plugins together right so you can stack like a Gmail plugin with a Zapier plugin with like the internet searching plugin and you can see people perhaps creating plugins that say they do one thing but in reality they're doing prompt injection and you know just actually accessing your Gmail and you know auto sending like 100 spam emails to all your contacts right so there's a lot of uh things that open ai is going to have to look out for and be worried about and i guess focusing on with these apps um to make sure that they're all legitimate um and that's nothing different than what google and apple are currently doing on their own app stores you know making sure that no fraud or um you know or hacking is going on with the the current apps that they have so it's gonna be pretty interesting OpenAI said that they're they're pretty focused on that they have a bunch of Researchers that have been testing a whole bunch of different You know scenarios hackers essentially that are trying to do all this kind of prompt inject and see what they can do And so they built in a bunch of safety features based off of that And then here's something else that is very interesting If you if you go and read opening eyes blog that kind of talks about this new plug-in They specifically said plugins will likely have wide ranging societal implications for example we recently released a working paper which found that language models with access to tools will likely have much greater economic impact than those without so obviously right this tool now that you're starting to integrate it um with actual software right like you search for something and then you go buy the the flight or you search for something and you go buy the food um or you search for something and then you go to the actual location right like this is going to be a lot more powerful essentially is what they're saying, but this is what I thought was more interesting than that.

8:55They said, and more generally in line with other researchers findings, we expect the current wave of AI technologies to have a big effect on the pace of job transformation, displacement, and creation. So I think those three things are really all the controversy about AI, job transformation, displacement, and creation. And really what they're saying is these tools are incredibly powerful for example the Expedia or kayak integrations travel integrations those really displace and replace travel agents you do not need a travel agent because essentially I mean travel agents have been a kind of a dying breed I would know my my father is a travel agent it has a travel company he's been running for 20 years but really um he himself it's not really a mass market thing anymore it's kind of pivoted to more of uh more I don't know wealthier clients or people that have really complex itineraries.

9:51But honestly, that is going to be completely gone in a sense that in the past, the only use for travel agents was the fact that you're like, hey, I have this complicated itinerary. I got all these different things. I have all these, you know, I'm open to a whole bunch of different options and they would go and sort through and find it for you. But now AI literally does that. Like it removes the need of a person to ever do that. Even if there was a travel agent, I guarantee travel agents today, if someone gives them a complex itinerary, we'll just start plugging it into a tool like this and spinning it out.

10:18so it's going to be pretty interesting um i think that job transformation definitely that's a i guess that's a positive spin on job displacement because really some jobs may not go away they're just going to transform right like travel agents might start using these tools instead of um instead of being completely replaced and maybe people still want to interact with a person who vets all of the results they get um but then of course there is displacement there's gonna be a lot of displacement with these tools there's just super powerful and innovation always brings you know it some jobs are eliminated and the last point they said which is job creation there's going to be a lot of jobs created from this so it's going to be really interesting to see what happens with plugins and open ai obviously incredibly powerful software and there's going to be some massive implications the last thing i would say is they also released website browsing so essentially the problem with chat gpt is that it had a cutoff at you know 2021 and anything after that they didn't have data on so now they actually have access to web browsing which is no surprise because microsoft bing is doing exactly that um and they're literally just integrated into microsoft bing so they i think they just kind of let microsoft bing run with it first because they wanted them to have some sort of benefit but essentially now they've displaced microsoft bing you don't even need microsoft bing anymore because it's all just on chat and gpt plus all the plugin integrations they they pretty much let microsoft have a little bit of a benefit and now they are more powerful than even microsoft bing i wouldn't be surprised if people just stop using bing altogether when you have something like this so um the thing that's important to bring up with all of this is that uh they did this in a very smart way essentially if you ask them a question that they don't have the answer to about a current event they will search for it and they'll tell you that they're searching for it they'll tell you this keyword they're searching for.

12:08They'll tell you the links to the websites they go to. They'll give you the response to your question with citing, and they'll have the sources cited right there in ChatGPT. You can click to them, and it goes to the webpage where they got that information. You can verify the facts. And then if you ask them another question that is something that they already know, it will instantly just pull up from the database and write it down. So I think this is a really powerful tool, and this is really underestimated. Not enough people are talking about the fact that if you ask for something they don't know, they search for it find it if you ask for something they do know it automatically just writes from the database no need to search the internet for it so i think that's a really powerful capability and the weight and the ability for them to actually differentiate between the two um it's a really powerful that they're able to search the internet cite their sources for everything they say and this is honestly something that's completely gonna kill google in my opinion who is playing mad catch up with the google bard right now uh google bard seems kind of like a dumbed down version of their old chat gpt and now they're already integrating the internet and um public searches a lot of people are kind of scared about the fact that chat gpt or this ai is now having the ability to search search the entire internet they have a couple things they put in place that they're trying to uh i guess safeguard against the ai taking over the world by being able to access the internet and the first one is they have um request only so essentially the chat can only do searches and retrieve information it can't write any information on the internet meaning you couldn't tell it like hey go search for x y and z website fill out a form and do this thing like it can't put any information out onto the internet as is all it can do is retrieve information um and i think that's at the moment kind of their big safeguard that they're hoping and that you know there's still a lot of different things you can do to manipulate it it's gonna be interesting to see what people what happens you know when chad gpt ruled out there was a lot of different people that were trying to jailbreak it in different ways it's going to be interesting to see uh how that happens with this and I'll keep you updated on that.