ChatGPT’s ‘iPhone moment’ poses a new threat to Google

While we’ve grown accustomed to the idea of ​​ChatGPT writing emails and performing searches, OpenAI has enhanced it with features that make it an even bigger threat to big tech companies like Google. The new ChatGPT plugins, released last week to relatively little fanfare, are a big step forward for the technology.

In a nutshell, it goes from simple text generation to action on the web, turning it into a kind of powerful virtual assistant that Alphabet’s Google and Apple. tried to build for years.

ChatGPT’s plugins allow businesses to essentially connect the tool to their own systems so it can do things like search proprietary datasets or even perform tasks like book a restaurant, or write and run code. There are serious potential risks to this, but in the business game of technological one-upmanship, OpenAI has created a formidable new front against incumbents.

Indeed, for the plugins to work, users need to visit the ChatGPT website itself, according to demos of the new system. For example, US ChatGPT users will soon be able to access the tool’s main page and select the plugin for Klarna Bank AB, a payments facilitator for thousands of brands like Nike and Gucci. Once they have selected Klarna, they can ask ChatGPT to make product recommendations for a gift for their sister. Thanks to the powerful language model that underpins ChatGPT, known as GPT-4, they can give the kind of details they would share with a human retail employee, detailing how their sister likes movies. and kayaking and is in his thirties, for example. ChatGPT can then make the recommendation.

“We have a proprietary database of tons of products that ChatGPT can structure,” Klarna marketing manager David Sandstrom told me. “Instead of you and I searching for products in our product database, we’ll have a conversation with a shopping assistant.”

Technically, companies could have done this already, as OpenAI has made its language models available to third parties since 2020. But the plug-in system is a much easier way to facilitate this, according to Edo Liberty, the former head of Amazon’s AI labs and current CEO of Pinecone, an AI startup that has a technical partnership with OpenAI on its “knowledge retrieval” plugin. (Disclosure: Bloomberg has released its own language model for finance, which will likely compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4.)

Liberty said the recovery plugin, which Klarna also uses, immediately became popular among software developers. One of the reasons for the rush is that as more people use ChatGPT and run into errors on specific issues, organizations can stop the tool from “hallucinating” about their work. by connecting the tool to their own data.

If a researcher wants to quickly draw up a table of major climate mitigation milestones, for example, they can ask ChatGPT to do so using a United Nations plugin, giving them a more reliable summary of official milestones, according to one demo, than if they asked ChatGPT (without plugin) for the same information today. Similarly, automakers could integrate ChatGPT into their user manuals so drivers can get immediate answers to questions about their vehicles, Liberty suggests.

Companies can also use the same technology for internal purposes, much like Morgan Stanley uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 to answer questions from 200 of its wealth advisors when dealing with clients. Morgan Stanley told me that the new system allows them to synthesize proprietary details about an asset class for clients in seconds instead of half an hour.

Of course, the biggest game will be for consumers who use ChatGPT to search, book flights and make purchases. This is a feature that Google has offered for years through its Assistant and Search page. But as more companies latch on to ChatGPT and the tool becomes more popular, becoming a standard for the web, it will take more eyes off Google’s own services.

Google’s own ChatGPT competitor, Bard, has the advantage of a popular ecosystem of products used by hundreds of millions of people it can connect to, from Gmail to Google Docs. Imagine, for example, waking up in the morning to a pre-written email from Bard to your friend, whose birthday you forgot, but which feels oddly personal because the system was trained on your previous interactions. It’s not something that Google announced, but it’s the kind of compelling service you might possibly see it offering with Bard.

OpenAI doesn’t have such popular products that ChatGPT can be integrated into, but it’s a neutral third party that millions of businesses can leverage quickly with few strings attached. And it has proven to be much more nimble than Google.

Some have described ChatGPT’s plugins as the tool’s “iPhone moment,” the milestone when Apple first allowed third-party app developers to build for the iPhone, triggering the explosive popularity of the device. Eventually, every business came to believe that they had to have an app. If OpenAI can handle the demand, we may well see the same sort of benchmark for ChatGPT.

© 2023 Bloomberg LP

---