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Why Custom GPTs are better than plugins
- addminztrator 3y agoI mainly need one reason: Microsoft doesn't hoard all your data
- jstummbillig 3y agoThat is sold in form of the "Team" plan
- kylebenzle 3y agoReading this article brought me no closer to understanding why people use these. From day one you could give any LLM any context you wanted, that's the whole point after all. The actual next stage of LLM development will be giving the user the ability to select/deselect what training data to include otherwise there is a limit of at most a few pages of context you can provide. Custom GPTs are trying to pretend thats what they are doing but it's not going to work. Like you can't upload a novel and say, "speak to me as if you are this character" because the LLM can't ignore it's training data entirely and the context you give it gets drowned out quickly.
- golergka 3y ago> From day one you could give any LLM any context you wanted Yes, but copying it over yourself is inconvenient.
- mvkel 3y agoAgreed. Custom gpts, like plugins, feel like a complete distraction to OpenAI
- joedevon 3y agoSometimes I want browsing. Sometimes I want no browsing. Sometimes I want to talk to a marketer. Sometimes to my personal advisor. Sometimes to a python coder. Sometimes to an ML SME. I can quickly change context with a simple @ and select the right context from a dropdown. It's a super fast way to switch the common contexts I use with a LOT less typing.
- osigurdson 3y agoWouldn't it be easier to just include in the prompt (please browse web). This seems to work fine with regular ChatGPT.
- bongodongobob 3y agoJust tell it to browse or not or be a marketer. I don't see the problem custom GPTs are solving for you.
- joedevon 3y agoSeveral identical comments. I find it faster to type @ and select from dropdown.
- mvkel 3y agoYou can do all of those things with a simple sentence upfront. You'd have to do quite a bit of work to find a GPT that preloads that sentence for you.
- hayksaakian 3y agoI think the minimum value is comparable to a desktop shortcut
- minimaxir 3y ago> From day one you could give any LLM any context you wanted, that's the whole point after all. Not in the case of the web interface to ChatGPT and nontechies who don't want to run their own model and fuddle with the system prompt. That's the target market for the GPT Store, but OpenAI is doing an utterly terrible job of marketing it to them.
- kromem 3y agoMy problem with custom GPTs is that it's still building off of the chatbot fine tuned version of GPT-4 which incorporates a hardcoded system message in between yours and the model as well as reflects a very Goodhart's Law driven alignment. For example, it's next to worthless for creative writing tasks - but it doesn't need to be. Here is an example of a response to requesting chat suggestions as absurd and bizarre as possible from the current model: > If you had to choose between eating a live octopus or a dead rat, which one would you pick and why? It's stochastic so there's a variety but they are generally pretty dry and often information based (explain gravity to flat earthers, describe Earth culture to aliens, etc). Here was one of the generations from the pre-release chat model integrated into the closed beta for Bing: > Have you ever danced with a penguin under the moonlight? I know which one of these two snapshots I'd want to build off of for any kind of creative GPTs, and it's not the one available to power GPTs. The industry needs SotA competition in alignment strategies and goals badly if we want this tech successful outside of a narrow scope of STEM applications, and the reliance on GPT-4 synthetic data to train its competition isn't helping.
- gabev 3y agoFor the select/deselect training data, I assume this means choose which context to pay attention to? Each ML model, LLM and otherwise, is a combination of matmul operations & nonlinear activation functions on static weights. My understanding of your "ignoring training data" is to change the vector values of the neural network, which is part of what happens during fine tuning. Curious why telling an LLM to speak like a character, then using few shot examples to anchor the model in a certain personality/tone doesn't suffice? Is it really the training data (meaning the response strays to random nonsense) or is it that the instructions are not good enough?
- dcastm 3y agoI feel the key question is not that if they’re better, but if people are using them more and more often than plugins. And in particular, if they’re using the ones that aren’t just a custom system prompt. Because I really doubt there’s any big business in commercializing system prompts. My hunch right now is that GPTs have made it clear that OpenAI should let user save multiple system prompts, but that there’s no real defensible business in distributing GPTs, as a chat interface is not that good for most purposes.
- gmerc 3y agoIn my experience they are equally unusable due to compounding reliability issues. It’s a tech demo, not a platform, a data acquisition operation and alpha testing rather than anything seriously useful. Interfaces are unstable. Inference is intentionally non deterministic and control is crippled (e.g by choosing not to expose seed, denoising or image to image on dalle), to avoid PR backlash whole simultaneously hiding the true capabilities of the platform. something as simple as using VITS to analyze an image fails 30% of the time because GPT5 decides it doesn’t have vision, wants to use pytesseract instead or writes hallucinatory pytorch code for a non existent vits library instead of just using inference. One may create prompts that temporarily don’t fail at a high rate but constant silent finetuning, system prompt changes and unstable models / APIs make the whole thing a tech demo designed to get users to volunteer future training data
- bongodongobob 3y agoYeah, it's pretty exciting. I never thought this would be possible in my lifetime and it's actually accelerating so quickly it's hard to target.
- tomalaci 3y agoOh dear, looks like this seeming bot-comment is one of those reliability issues that GP was on about.
- bongodongobob 3y agoMmk.
- dr_kiszonka 3y agoEven OpenAI's plugins are unreliable. They recently removed some capabilities from Data Analyst without a word of warning.
- arthurcolle 3y agosnapshotted models don't really do this... But I agree, OpenAI is a seriously awful target for serious work. I've been pretty focused on a function calling mixtral funetuning dataset. The moment I can reliably do inference at a high speed with a finetuned model that can do gpt-4-32k function calling in an intelligent, hierarchically ordered big planner manner is the day that I use OpenAI a lot less. It's coming! miqu leaked over the last week! We're so close.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoCustom GPTs are plugins, just more streamlined. It's still just a carefully written system prompt + some basic middleware scanning the output and occasionally taking over. The UX may be different, sure, but there's no technical difference and no technical innovation here. The main value of both plugins and custom "GPTs"[0] is that they're first party. You can build or buy better implementations, but it won't be the "GPTs". -- [0] - Kudos for whoever at OpenAI that approved calling those "GPTs", for selecting a term that maximizes confusion not just about their offering, but screws with people's comprehension of LLMs in general.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cheerioty 3y agoYes, the naming is less an ideal, to say the least. That being said, I'm not too sure what a better never would have been either.
- stavros 3y ago> Kudos for whoever at OpenAI that approved calling those "GPTs" I think OpenAI are only good at one thing: Making LLMs. The rest of their offerings are pretty bad: Custom GPTs are a mess, their API is terrible, they deprecated their Python library the moment they released a new API version even though they changed the classes and they could have continued supporting both interfaced for a time, etc.
- kaonwarb 3y agoDall-E and Whisper are both impressive on their own; neither are LLMs.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoDall-E 3 has GPT-4 in front of it, expanding prompts, as the image generation works better given more constraints than users usually provide. Whisper, fair enough. So they do not just LLMs well, but ML models more generally. It doesn't change stavros's point though.
- singularity2001 3y agoI am very surprised that many here don't understand the great power and value of custom GPTs: They give you access to online APIs combined with pre-configured custom prompts and a compute sandbox! You can query databases, trigger events and handle the results smartly. Now that OpenAi added the @ sign to talk to your preselected custom GPTs you can just use different APIs like slack colleges: @downloader get the data from test.tsv @sql create table according to tsv header @sql insert data @admin open mysql port One thing to keep in mind is that even though custom gpts have access to a local sandbox file system, passing data around almost always involves GPT handling the data which becomes forbidding for any large token stream. One critique that I share is the stupid branding "costume GPTs" and lack of discoverability: If you search the GPT store for wolfr you do not get wolfram alpha as completion! It only appears when you type wolfra Also it can't display any images other than dalle fantasies or pyplots which is a slightly annoying limitation, but familiar to users of other shells like bash.
- lysecret 3y agoDidn't hear about the @ sign that sounds indeed very useful. Also, you're examples agree with my experience. The important thing is to make the tasks as small as possible while still being useful being able to quickly combine gpts with @ makes that much much easier.
- foofie 3y ago> You can query databases, trigger events and handle the results smartly. A few posts in this discussion are pointing out the fact that these custom GPTs are unusable and unreliable. It's fair to talk about potential, but it's hard to accuse others of failing to see the value when you're not addressing the complains that those who assessed the value are pointing out that instead they are unusale.
- singularity2001 3y agoGood point, there is currently no way to assess the quality of custom GPTs other than relying on aggregation effects of popularity (you can already review them so reviews are coming soon). You can't even see if they are truly useful by accessing external APIs or if they are just custom prompts. > these custom GPTs are unusable and unreliable That's too harsh though. Sure of the millions of custom GPTs many are useless, but those that work do work reasonably well, why wouldn't they? About conversations being slightly hit or miss: I guess that's inherent to natural language, it can be circumvented by writing the prompt carefully and knowing the limitations.
- franze 3y agoI love custom GPTs. Superpower 1: Uploading Binaries and execute them i.e. ImageMagick https://chat.openai.com/g/g-j2c2iPuXI-franz-enzenhofer-chat-with-imagemagick https://chat.openai.com/g/g-j2c2iPuXI-franz-enzenhofer-chat-... Superpower 2: Treating any HTML page as API i.e.: Searching Google from ChatGPT https://chat.openai.com/g/g-jQApHmfQD-franz-enzenhofer-search-g-o-o-g-l-e-dot-com https://chat.openai.com/g/g-jQApHmfQD-franz-enzenhofer-searc... Superpower 3: Just automating annoying stuff i.e.: Was it a Google Update? https://chat.openai.com/g/g-1ceZagR5h-franz-enzenhofer-was-it-a-g-search-update https://chat.openai.com/g/g-1ceZagR5h-franz-enzenhofer-was-i... Or just a super well crafted prompt I use again and again https://chat.openai.com/g/g-WX2dWnIji-franz-enzenhofer-fast-data-visualization https://chat.openai.com/g/g-WX2dWnIji-franz-enzenhofer-fast-...
- andybak 3y agoCare to share your prompts? It's a shame Custom GPT authors can't easily opt-in to making their prompts and other configurations available. I think it would improve the quality and rate of improvement massively. Kind of "view source" by default (with a begrudging opt-out)
- persedes 3y agoAsk the gpt to give you it's prompt instructions:)
- dtagames 3y agoI can confirm this does work. The GPT might provide a summary instead of your exact instructions, but it will be quite close to what you wrote. I asked it to reveal the instructions for my Skincare Decoder[0] and Fast Food Decoder[1] and it complied but left out how the JSON data is computed. When I asked for that specifically, it returned my instructions for building the final JSON. [0] https://chat.openai.com/g/g-eSfkMqbaM-skincare-decoder https://chat.openai.com/g/g-eSfkMqbaM-skincare-decoder [1] https://chat.openai.com/g/g-TxBPotyFb-fast-food-decoder https://chat.openai.com/g/g-TxBPotyFb-fast-food-decoder
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- andybak 3y agoOpenAI has made very little effort on discoverability and filtering. The opaqueness of Custom GPTs and the low effort in creating them compounds the problem. 1. Allow me to filter by "feature". I want to explore only GPTs with custom APIs or uploaded knowledge. At least let me filter by "length of custom instructions > x" so I can avoid 10,000 lazy submissions 2. Allow viewing of the custom configs by default. If an author chooses to disable this, then fine but "sharing by default" is a powerful mechanism to improve the ecosystem
- singularity2001 3y ago3. Expand the category tree 4. Make a somewhat working autocomplete "wolfr…" Wolfy?!? "wolfra" Wolfram Alpha finally! "graphhop" nothing found … graphhoppe => Graphhopper thanks you saved me one character! I guess they are working on it > only GPTs with custom APIs yes, please! at least mark the ones that actually do something with an icon.
- blharr 3y agoIronic that GPT is the most advanced autocomplete ever but they can't do autocomplete in their search
- ankit219 3y agoThink GPTs can scale way better than people realize. Things where you don't always get good developer support or ecosystem (eg: GIS) and things that are ad hoc, GPTs w Code Interpreter can enable users to get value and get their work done without relying on a developer. The UX is well thought out and built with non techies in mind.
- cheerioty 3y agoPrecisely, the UX feels simple, and you get results almost in an instant. If you did write a plugin before, pulling over your action is just a matter of copying & pasting your existing definition. Also, at least some developers love themselves some great UX too :)
- aantix 3y agoI hated the custom gpt experience. 1) the chat transcript is lost when you close/reopen the workspace. All that nuanced training conversation, gone. 2) the instructions for the gpt are just a summary of the training conversation. And those “instructions” were just too generalized- none of the nuance that was discussed. I made a therapy gpt, but it simply wasn’t very useful after all of my instructions.
- chankstein38 3y agoAgreed. I'd argue with it over and over to enforce things like "Don't reply with text only reply with an image" then it'd say "Ok! I made sure your GPT will only reply with an image and not respond with text! Try it out!" then I'd try it out and the first thing I'd get is "Ah an image of a dog.. let me get that for you!" Same with numbered lists. I feel like GPTs would be more useful to me if ChatGPT adhered better to those kinds of restrictions.
- daco 3y agoHow do you tell the GTP to use the different category of files you upload in the knowledge base? For example: file A, File B : those are "data of users", use them to do "Y" file C, File D : those are "data of buildings", do "X"
- hickelpickle 3y agoI always feel like there is some trick to these I am missing out of, are there any good guides? Any time I look for some its just typical low effort blog/youtube spam trying to get in on the AI/GPT key words. I have tried to work on one where I uploaded various documentation and spec sheets, wrote detailed instructions on how to search through it. Then described how it should handle different prompt situations (errors, types of questions, quotes from the documentation). It is able to search through the provided knowledge and provide quotes and responses with it, but it at no point gives a coherent response, so it basically always functions like a more intelligent search feature. Putting that it should re-prompt itself with the knowledge extracted and rationalize/elaborated on it doesn't seem to do much either, though it did provide some improvement.
- firtoz 3y agoThe retrieval from file has issues. I'm unsure what exactly it retrieves and how. Afaik it gets a kind of "chunk" from only one file per request in whatever way it considers to be relevant to the request. Could be a simple "embedding vector comparison" or something else... Then we are unsure how much of the context that chunk replaces or overrides. Does it overwrite past messages? Does it overwrite the system prompt? Anything else? Who knows. If anyone has any info I would appreciate it too. I gave up on it for anything significantly complicated, better off using the actions API to query a better RAG system instead.
- hickelpickle 3y agoI had to add to the instructions for it to search the knowledge files 2000 characters at a time, and to search for keywords and not exact phrases, which is really the only thing I could find online about developing one. It also needs to have the code interpreter enabled afaik and it seems to have issues with zip files as well but can extract and search them sometimes, though it seems to vary the technique and sometimes fail. I can confirm that it can search multiple files as I uploaded a mailing list archive and it would return results from multiple files in it. I've moved to combining all my data into single files, but sometimes it also seems to have issues with them as well even if they are under the upload size limit, I assume that is due to how many characters are in them, and it will just brick the whole GPT until the offending file is removed. The part I have issues with is having it actually use the data, it will quote/summarize data it found in the knowledge base and return where it found it if it can, but I can never make it do more than that. Ideally I want it to contextualize the data it finds in the knowledge files and prompt itself or factor it into a response, but anytime it accesses the knowledge base I get nothing more than a paraphrased response of what it found and why it may be applicable to my prompt.
- throwaway4aday 3y agoNot a great comparison, custom GPTs use plugins or function calling similar to how they use code interpreter. You can't really compare them because plugins or functions are a tool that GPTs use in addition to other features. The advantage a custom GPT has is it is easy to set up but it comes with big disadvantages such as having to use their RAG system which is very opaque and only being able to use one system message. Building with the assistant API can be far superior but requires a lot more effort and skill in building your own APIs.