OpenAI this week launched the ChatGPT plugins, allowing third-party application and service providers to utilize their custom data sets to improve the predictive power of their language model. This strategic move highlights OpenAI’s commitment to safety and align challenges faced while using large language models (LLMs). It comes with the added benefit of allowing companies to personalize their usage of the platform to suit their needs and concerns, making it a win-win situation for everyone.
OpenAI are looking to broaden their plugin program, with companies like Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier already involved in the initial testing. Plugins can be seen as a sort of, ‘eyes and ears’ for the model, giving it access to the more specific, recent and personal data that could not be found in the normal training data.
If done effectively and efficiently, this chatbot language model could potentially succeed in surpassing the traditional web search. In response to a user’s expressed request, the ChatGPT model would be able to perform certain safe, restricted tasks and thus boosting the value of the entire system. OpenAI has addressed this concern by repeatedly emphasizing the importance of safety and security in their post.
Google’s beliefs they expressed back in 2006, that their on-premises enterprise search capabilities provided access to information beyond indexed corporate documents, like shipment tracking data, world information and weather information, can now be realized in the OpenAI chatbot model and in a very user-friendly way. All the user needs is to enter in text commands either via typing or speech recognition and the ChatGPT model will be able to respond accurately and quickly by using third party data. OpenAI is even providing a browser plugin to access Bing search API in order to retrieve information, while ‘transactional’ operations like form submission have a bigger safety and security surface area.
The ripples of this plugin ecosystem could extend throughout corporations and businesses positively as they discover the better and more efficient ways to use the platform. Companies should be aware of what could be the SEO equivalent of this environment and if it is possible to check if their product or services will be recommended by the ChatGPT model. It is also worth investing the potential of this AI-driven platform to favor digital Ads industry and the business model they come with or if they can cause the redundancy of the third party companies currently involved in the plugin program. OpenAI has promised to learn from this experience and with everyone’s help, create something useful and, of course, safe.
