OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company that developed ChatGPT, on Thursday announced support for plug-ins designed to allow companies to more easily embed chatbot functionality into their products.
The first plugins have already been created by Expedia, tax notice, instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, open table, Shopify, Relaxed, Speak, tungstenAnd Zapiersaid OpenAI.
“We’re gradually introducing plugins to ChatGPT so we can study their real-world usage, impact, and security and targeting challenges – all of which we need to get right to achieve our mission,” San Francisco. based on OpenAI said in a blog post.
The OpenAI plugins are tools specially designed for language models that help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, perform calculations or use third-party services.
The plug-ins allows for the first time ChatGPT Plus to access live web data versus information on which the large language model has already been trained.
Users can click on and upload as many of the currently available plug-ins as they like. For example, users of the grocery delivery service Instacart can upload the ChatGPT plugins and start using the natural language processor to ask it for things like restaurant recommendations, recipes, ingredients for a meal, and the total calorie count of that meal.
A sample question might be, “I’m looking for vegan food in San Francisco this weekend. Can you give me a great Saturday restaurant suggestion and also an easy Sunday meal recipe (just the ingredients)? Please calculate the calories for the recipe using WolframAlpha.”
“Users have been asking for plugins since we launched ChatGPT (and Many developers are experimenting with similar ideas) because they unlock a multitude of potential use cases,” OpenAI said.
The generative AI developer said he plans to gradually roll out access at a larger scale as he learns more from plugin developers, ChatGPT users and after an alpha phase.
Arun Chandrasekaran, a distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, said one of the challenges with applications like ChatGPT and the underlying AI models (such as GPT-4) is their static nature; resulting from the gap between corporate training dates and the actual release dates of the application model.
“Through a plug-in ecosystem, ChatGPT can now process more real-time information from a range of curated sources,” said Chandrasekaran. “They are announcing both first-party plug-ins that allow ChatGPT to connect to Internet sources to provide more up-to-date information, as well as third-party sources such as Expedia, OpenTable. On the other hand, this also increases the attack surface and potentially more latency domains in the architecture.”
OpenAI recognized the “significant new risks” associated with enabling external tools via ChatGPT.
“Plugins offer the potential to address various challenges associated with large language models, including ‘hallucinations’, keeping up with recent events, and (with permission) accessing proprietary information sources,” OpenAI said.
The company said it only allowed a limited number of plug-in developers to be turned on a waiting list to have access documentation You could use to create a plugin for ChatGPT. This allows OpenAI to monitor any adverse effects of the plug-ins.
Cybersecurity company GreyNoise.io, for example, warned of a known vulnerability related to MinIO’s object storage platform in a blog post Friday.
Developers using MinIO and wanting to integrate their plugins are encouraged to update to a patched version of MinIO, as the blog recommends. “Your endpoint will eventually get popped if you don’t update the tier to the latest MinIO,” the company said.
While application developers could already use ChatGPT’s API to customize it for use with products, plugins will greatly simplify the task, said Chirag Shah, a professor of data science and machine learning at the University of Washington.
“APIs require technical know-how. Just like social media, there are other ways to access services through subscriptions. Plugins make it easy for people to deploy ChatGPT without much hassle,” Shah said. “They won’t work for every company. They are aimed at a specific audience.”
OpenAI admitted that its GPT Large Language Model (LLM) is limited in what it can do today because it hasn’t been trained with the latest information for the myriad applications on the web. For example, the LLM computer algorithm it was trained on has billions of parameters, but they are not specific to what Expedia, for example, wants to make available to its users.
Currently, the only way for GPT-4 to learn is through the input of training data from a user organization. For example, if a bank wanted to use ChatGPT for their internal employees and external customers, they would need to include information about the company so users could provide bank-specific answers when users asked questions of the chatbot.
The plugins make it easier for ChatGPT’s LLM to access product-specific company information, details that might otherwise be too recent, personal or specific to include in the training data.
“In response to a user’s explicit request, plug-ins can also allow language models to perform safe, restricted actions on their behalf, increasing the overall usefulness of the system,” OpenAI said. “We anticipate that open standards will emerge to unify the way applications provide an AI-facing interface. We are working on an early attempt at what such a standard might look like and we are looking for feedback from developers interested in building with us.”
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