Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mikeknoop 1183 days ago
(Zapier cofounder)

Super excited for this. Tool use for LLMs goes way beyond just search. Zapier is a launch partner here -- you can access any of the 5k+ apps / 20k+ actions on Zapier directly from within ChatGPT. We are eager to see how folks leverage this composability.

Some new example capabilities are retrieving data from any app, draft and send messages/emails, and complex multi step reasoning like look up data or create if doesn't exist. Some demos here: https://twitter.com/mikeknoop/status/1638949805862047744

(Also our plugin uses the same free public API we announced yesterday, so devs can add this same capability into your own products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263542)

4 comments

Also, isn't OpenAPI going to eat your business model?

Don't get me wrong alot of platforms seem like they go bye, bye.

Hey, ChatGPT I need to sell my baseball card. Ok I see there's 30 people that have listed an interested in buying card like yours, would you like me to contact them?

20 on facebook marketplace, 9 on craiglist and some guy mentioned something about looking for one on his nest cam.

by the way remember what happened the last time you sold something on craigslist.

The problem with Zapier is zaps are to expensive at scale.
And Zapier are unwilling to work with you to reduce that cost even at a scale of 1 billion requests per month.
Email your use case: wade at zapier dot com. Happy to take a look.
Too late, we spoke with someone on the team three years ago who told us he couldn’t help and we’ve moved on.
Well, that and you trust Zapier with a lot of stuff.
To echo sharemywin, bluntly I think OpenAI just demolished your business model.

I think I'm probably going to be advising people to move off Zapier pretty soon because it won't be worth the overhead.

I saw a startup recently that's working to automate interactions with applications that are either not web apps (in which case you'd run a local instance of it) or a web app that doesn't provide an API to do certain (or any) actions. Is this something Zapier is looking at, too? It would really expand what's possible with the OpenAI integration and save people a tremendous amount of time to not be forced to jump through hoops interacting with often crappy software.
Can you share the name of the startup?
I don't recall unfortunately, but IBM is also doing this: https://research.ibm.com/publications/blueshift-automated-ap...
I believe it was adept.ai that he is talking about.