In a wide-ranging interview with Joanna Stern, OpenAI president Greg Brockman addressed the company’s recent changes to the ChatGPT desktop app and discussed its plans for a tabless interface. Watch it below.
The function may run immediately within ChatGPT
A few days ago, Joanna Stern published a preview of an upcoming interview with OpenAI president Greg Brockman on her new YouTube channel, New Stuff.
Today, Stern published the full interview, covering topics including the new ChatGPT Voice, OpenAI hardware ambitions, the Apple case, and the latest Hugging Face hack.
At one point, Stern reveals OpenAI’s recent decision to integrate the ChatGPT desktop applications with Codex while introducing Work, a new mode for ChatGPT.
The visual effect proved to be confusing, especially for users who already wanted to continue using ChatGPT but struggled to access their chat history.
OpenAI later updated the app, adding separate Activity and Chat tabs to the top of the interface, as well as a drop-down menu in the left panel to switch between ChatGPT and Codex. Although the app is now more difficult to navigate, it remains confusing.
When asked about the wrong move, Brockman agreed with Stern’s description that the new UI is “kind of a mess,” adding that it represents “continuous progress toward a future,” where the Activity tab will eventually disappear and its functionality will “seamlessly mold to ChatGPT.”
Here is Brockman’s full quote:
It’s kind of chaotic. We agree. And so what you see is incremental progress toward the future. We were hoping to get to zero, but this… I think the way we look at it is that we need to feed again and again, right? We need to get this out there, get feedback, so this is the current state of where things are. But I think at the end of the year, there should be no Job tab. You know, that this is going to be something that will just flow seamlessly into ChatGPT.
Brockman also said that despite the confusing rollout of integrated apps, OpenAI is still seeing the results it expected, with Codex going from 5 to 10 million users in just a few days.
When pressed that that growth was simply the result of “shoeing” Codex into the ChatGPT app, Brockman again agreed, while arguing that this was the point:
There are certainly more people coming in, but the point is that there are more people who could potentially get a lot more value from AI. And my idea, the way we’re thinking about this, is that we want to help bring those people who rely on AI to get more value and to really be able to experience agents, to have agents become something that comes to scale for more consumers.
Every interview is interesting and worth watching. It also included an attempt by the likes of Joanna Stern to include ChatGPT Voice in the conversation, and that went about as well as you can imagine.
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