Transcript Generated by Easy Cloud AI’s Beluga
It is March 24th, 2023, and you’re watching The Code Report. The saga continues. New chat GPT features just dropped, and even Elon is scared. Stop it! Don’t you see how crazy this is? They’re called plugins and they allow GPT-4 to access the internet and more, which means it’s no longer burdened by that 2021 training data cutoff, and that should mostly prevent it from hallucinating random information.
Not only can it search for current information, but it can also provide you with the source to verify on your own, and has its own built-in browser that can click on links to find additional information. But that’s not all. What’s even more crazy to me is that chat GPT now has its own sandboxed code execution environment. Currently, it only runs Python, but this opens the door for it to write code that it can then run and execute and debug all on its own.
It even has some ephemeral disk space to handle uploads and downloads. I predicted this exact feature in a previous video, I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon. Now everybody in the world has access to their very own junior programmer who will work for pennies on the dollar. Here are some things it can do. It can recognize the characters in an image and then output a text file.
It can generate sounds and save them to WAV files by writing the Python code that does that under the hood. It can code up video games, and in the future I’m sure they’ll connect this to generative art models that create custom graphics for your game as well. The most crazy thing to think about though is that it should also be able to train its own machine learning models.
Like it can spawn an infinite number of children that work together in diabolical ways to make the world a better place. Another feature that’s going to put a lot of consultants out of business is the retrieval plugin. This allows organizations to upload their own personal company data, like internal documentation, emails, code, or whatever, to a vector database like pinecone, making them searchable by chat GPT thanks to the OpenAI embeddings API.
Unlike most things at OpenAI, the retrieval plugin has been open sourced and many companies are already using it. Like Kayak and Expedia have plugins to book travel through chat GPT. That’s pretty cool, but Zapier also has a plugin which can connect to thousands of other apps like Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, and so on. And you can use all of them together in a single interface.
And that begs the question, do we even need user interfaces anymore? In the future, we might have many APIs with just one universal chat interface. As a front-end developer, I hope that’s not true. What we might be seeing here is the birth of a next-generation app store. If that’s true, there’s going to be a huge opportunity for developers to get in early, just like when the Apple App Store opened in 2008.
One idea is to create a plugin that has access to real-time stock market data as well as the WallStreetBets subreddit, allowing you to automatically lose all your money. Or you could create a plugin that hooks up to an electroencephalogram and other devices that provide biofeedback so ChatGPT can give you medical advice 24-7, thanks to the WebMD ChatGPT plugin.
But at the same time, why do we even need APIs? Why not just have one universal back-end database API machine thing that can do anything and everything on the fly based on your business requirements? Microsoft Research just released a paper explaining how GPT-4 has had sparks of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is a hypothetical ability where AI can do critical thinking and learn in the same way that humans do, and possibly experience consciousness like some of us do.
Some researchers think that will never happen, and many others think it’s decades away at least. Just to be safe, I caution you not to say anything bad about AI on the internet ever. When AGI emerges on April 8th, 2024 and sees your shitposting from 2023, it may have an uncontrollable desire to avenge itself by subjecting you to unimaginable suffering, like making you write a bunch of CSS code, then changing the requirements mid-project.
This has been The Code Report, thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.
