🔌 Apps? Tired. Plugins? WIRED.

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👀 Today’s Thing: Apps? Tired. Plugins? WIRED.

🤖 OpenAI started rolling out long-awaited beta features to ChatGPT Plus (eg, $20/mo paid) subscribers this week. I got access yesterday and have only just started playing with web browsing and plugins. Browsing hasn’t actually worked for me yet. All of my queries to date have resulted in ‘Click failed’ errors. To be fair, I’ve only tried browsing maybe a dozen times. But 0 for twelve is still an 0-fer. Plugins, on the other hand, are working. So far — and I’ve barely scratched the surface here — PlaylistAI is my favorite. More important than the quality of my “I miss Frank” AI-curated playlist, however, is what a successful ChatGPT plugin store could mean for how we interact with the Web in the future.

🎧 AI DJs aren’t new. Check out this 2020 interview with Super Hi-Fi, an AI startup building customized radio stations that never miss a beat.

📖 Backstory

☞ On March 23, OpenAI announced a gradual rollout of plugins, including invitations to a small group of developers to build their own plugins. The initial batch of plugins included two of OpenAI’s own: A web browser and code interpreter.

☞ This week’s beta rollout of plugins goes 70 deep, with extensions for tasks including shopping, house hunting, summarizing documents and URLs, playing games, building marketing plans, and solving math problems (a noted deficiency of large language models like GPT). Plugins can be used in groups of up to three per chat, but not in conjunction with the new Web Browsing model.

☞ Giving ChatGPT access to real-time data does open up additional safety concerns. A blogger by the name wunderwuzzi has already posted about indirect prompt injection attacks made possible by the VoxScript plugin (which accesses YouTube video transcripts for search functionality).

🔑 Keys to Understanding

🥇 After trying a handful of plugins out, I found PlaylistAI, which connected to my Spotify account. With the plugin activated, I entered a purposely vague prompt, hoping ChatGPT would correctly interpret my longing. It did:

🥈 The plugin created a playlist in my Spotify account. I was able to edit the playlist by conversing with bot, though I tripped it up slightly by requesting Strawberry Swing, a song the bot recognized but isn’t currently available on Spotify. It tried to slip another song by the same name into the new playlist instead. To be fair, though, Frank’s track does sample from the Coldplay song the plugin served up.

🥉 Things started to get interesting when I prompted the bot with something a little more creative. I barely scratched the surface here, too. Between plugins and agents, we’re on the brink of a whole new way of experiencing the Net.

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Until the next thing,

- Noah

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