4 ms·

Plugins strike me as a fascinating business strategy move from OpenAI. My guess is that they want them as a way to try to own the user, to make them have the "

Plugins strike me as a fascinating business strategy move from OpenAI. My guess is that they want them as a way to try to own the user, to make them have the "app store owner" role and have users go through them to get stuff done. Otherwise, if users were just using tools that used OpenAI behind the scenes, they're more vulnerable to the makers of those tools swapping vendors. However... that results in them owning the user experience and the responsibility for keeping the user from being surprised in a bad way. The complaint from the user here was framed as being a GPT-4 problem, not a plugin problem, in a way that exposes OpenAI directly to more frustration than if they were interacting directly with someone else's product.

ebalit 3y ago
I wrote about that "platform play" a few month ago with a different take [0]. They could have made a "Connect with OpenAI" scheme so that developers can use the user OpenAI API directly. That way developers could focus on the UX, they could focus on the LLM, and users would get a centralized discovery / billing for their LLM based tools. I'm probably missing something that would have prevented that strategy but I think that would have been much stronger than the plugins. And I'm really not sure that it would still be possible 5 month later. [0] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/etienne-balit_ceo-at-open-aichat-gpt-saying-that-they-activity-7029055779714301953-wDS6 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/etienne-balit_ceo-at-open-aic...
intelVISA 3y ago
Exactly, platform is a safe long-term bet -- apps are too cheap to make, easily disrupted, and offer less of a moat than loads of data mined from the users of your platform.
babyshake 3y ago
It would seem that with functions support, they are hedging their bets. It seems that plugins is an end-user, chat.openai.com focused strategy whereas functions is a third-party developer focused strategy, if I understand correctly. In fact, I'd assume that under the hood there is a lot of overlap in the implementations.

ebalit 3y ago

I wrote about that "platform play" a few month ago with a different take [0]. They could have made a "Connect with OpenAI" scheme so that developers can use the user OpenAI API directly. That way developers could focus on the UX, they could focus on the LLM, and users would get a centralized discovery / billing for their LLM based tools. I'm probably missing something that would have prevented that strategy but I think that would have been much stronger than the plugins. And I'm really not sure that it would still be possible 5 month later. [0] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/etienne-balit_ceo-at-open-aichat-gpt-saying-that-they-activity-7029055779714301953-wDS6 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/etienne-balit_ceo-at-open-aic...

intelVISA 3y ago

Exactly, platform is a safe long-term bet -- apps are too cheap to make, easily disrupted, and offer less of a moat than loads of data mined from the users of your platform.

babyshake 3y ago

It would seem that with functions support, they are hedging their bets. It seems that plugins is an end-user, chat.openai.com focused strategy whereas functions is a third-party developer focused strategy, if I understand correctly. In fact, I'd assume that under the hood there is a lot of overlap in the implementations.