What are the new ChatGPT plugins and what are they for

“Hi ChatGPT, I need to book a hotel in Rome, maximum budget 100 euros per night. And then I would like to eat in a typical trattoria, close to my accommodation: you can fix a table for 8.30pm”.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last few months, it’s that ChatGPT, OpenAI’s language model, it is very good at generating text but not very effective at other types of tasks. For example, it cannot search for information on the Internet (there is Bing for this), nor can it perform concrete actions online or make mathematical calculations reliably.

Here, at the same time however, artificial intelligence has accustomed us to rapid changes and evolutions. And, on time, a new OpenAI announcement has arrived to change the landscape of generative AI again.

The San Francisco startup led by Sam Altman, in fact, communicated the arrival of the plugins for ChatGPT on the company’s blog: in other words, app that will be able to be used within the language model. Currently, the feature is available through a waiting list and for a limited number of developers e ChatGPT Plus users, i.e. the premium version of ChatGpt for which you pay $20 a month.

“Plugins – reads the official blog post – can be the eyes and ears of the AI ​​and provide access to information that is too recent, personal or specific to include training data. They also allow language models to perform actions in a safe way, increasing the utility of the system”.

Thanks to the plugins, in short, ChatGPT will be able to leave the digital fence that was built around it and, then, perform a series of concrete actions in the real world. As seen in some videos made available on Twitter, just install the application you want to use – a bit like it is done on Google Chrome, among others – to enable that specific ability.

Thanks to Kayak or Expedia you can book flights or hotels or fix a table at a restaurant with OpenTable or go shopping thanks to Instacart or Klarna. Or, again, intervene on Google Docs with Zapier. It will also be able, thanks to two apps developed by OpenAI itself, to search the Internet, to interpret code and to search for information within documents uploaded by the user.

But it’s not just the ability to perform actions in the real world. In the intentions of Open AI, the plugins should help improve the accuracy of the information provided by ChatGPT. An example is that of Wolfram|Alpha, which takes care of one of the new applications integrated by ChatGpt. Thanks to the computational model of knowledge created by Stephen Wolfram, the OpenAI system will be able to obtain information, real-time data and verified answers, especially on mathematical operations.

There’s a blog post by Stephen Wolfram that explains it pretty well the functioning of the plugins. “Last January – explains the English mathematician – I underlined how, from a linguistic model like ChatGPT, it was not possible to expect reliable answers, especially in the case of mathematical operations. But the Wolfram plugin changes everything”.

This is because, Wolfram continues, when ChatGPT installed the application, the output is not direct text generation. “Under the surface, the model makes a request for Wolfram|Alpha, which performs the calculation and returns the result. Based on this output, the model provides an answer.”

The procedure is more or less the same for any other plugin: the language created by ChatGPT is used to perform an action on the webfrom a mathematical operation to a restaurant reservation, up to online shopping.

“If ChatGPT’s debut was an iPhone moment, the news of plugins is an App Store moment,” Jim Fan commented on Twitter, AI Scientist at NVIDIA and PhD candidate at Stanford. And, in fact, external applications increasingly make ChatGPT a platform, an environment within which, on the one hand, developers will be able to build applications and services; on the other, users will be able to run an ever-increasing number of different actions, beyond language.

A step forward that brings generative artificial intelligence closer to one of the predictions that Bill Gates did in his recent article on the topic: “We will be able to use natural language to have a personal agent help us with planning, communications and e-commerce. Thanks to recent advances in artificial intelligence, that’s now a realistic goal.”