Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios
The first business ChatGPT will upend is likely to be the very industry that created it, Axios’ Scott Rosenberg writes.
- Programming practitioners and experts are increasingly confident that generative AI will change their world — supercharging the work of the best coders and empowering everyday users to get more done.
Driving the news: New pilot versions of ChatGPT plugins from creator OpenAI allow it to roam the internet at users’ will and connect with other services and data.
- The first batch extends ChatGPT into travel, shopping, dining and more by linking the bot to well-known services such as Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna and OpenTable.
- It’s a move toward turning ChatGPT into a platform other businesses can build upon.
The big picture: The new plugins are also evidence of how radically AI’s new large language models will change the work of coding.
- Visionaries have long promised, and tried to build, natural language programming tools that let people use everyday words and sentences to tell computers what to do.
- Such efforts have never fully delivered — but this time might be different.
- Today’s AI systems based on large language models can take instruction directly from non-programmers (or programmers using human-language shorthand). The results are nowhere near perfect — but they’re far more advanced than experts expected.
Yes, but: Generative AI still pretends to know more than it actually does and makes things up to fill gaps in its knowledge.
- It works best as a “copilot” for developers rather than an independent creator.
The bottom line: Human beings who deeply understand programming’s many dimensions will still be needed — to invent genuinely new kinds of systems, to fix problems that AI can’t, and to shape (and limit) ChatGPT and its successors.
- But there may be much less demand for the routine labor of taking existing software systems and wiring them up to work together.
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