[NameError]

The release of plugins was underwhelming for a lot of users, I wonder if they're worried about the same thing happening again. I had fun making a plugin when they were first announced but the developer experience was clunky and frustrating, and there was a lot of confusion around how the plugin store actually worked.

I haven't made the time to convert my plugin into a GPT but I'm planning to, hopefully it'll be a bit of a smoother experience this go around.

[webappguy]

As far as UX, and a product, chatGPT is terrible!

Astounding and blows my mind for a 80+b dollar company. The model and tech (and team) is that value of course, but how can't they at the very most basic level, clean up the 'sidebar'. Prompts search and GPT labelling. Even when they had the plugins, most ppl didn't know you had to click on the GPT4 button to revial, because why would they...nothing indicated to (like an arrow). Total amateur hr in the UX and DX dept and they treat they're paid customers like trash.

If this is how Sam Altman thought product leaders at YC to build product I'm shocked. Cause OpenAI is way behind where they should be will literally a million dollars thrown at improving this things in a cpl weeks...and they've had a yr

[chatmasta]

This says a lot more about the state of the frontend ecosystem than it does about the OpenAI dev team. The complexity has gotten absurdly out of control.

It's really quite ironic that on one hand, we've got a company on the cusp of developing a superintelligence, and a bunch of open source models lagging not too far behind. But on the other hand, you've gotta install it all with Python - and good luck, because nobody in the ecosystem is pinning dependencies and you're gonna have to re-install the thing every time you run it.

And then on the frontend, you've got the team responsible for creating the interface to the super intelligence. They've actually done a decent job thus far, but it's slow development and disconnected from more ambitious scaling ideas.

[ffgjgf1]

> This says a lot more about the state of the frontend ecosystem than it does about the OpenAI dev team. The complexity has gotten absurdly out of control.

That’s a peculiar way to spin it.. not sure how doesn’t that justify poor UX though (what does this even have to do with python)

> but it's slow development and disconnected

It’s as slow and disconnected as they want it to be

[beezlewax]

Are we calling language models "super intelligences" now?

[faizshah]

I think they will end up buying Cohere, Cohere has a great product team and is an obvious fit.

[Solvency]

And just imagine the outrageously overwrought, self-flagellating, beard-stroking, sophomoric, herculean UX interview process they torture designers with just to make...that.

[azemetre]

Might be underwhelming because the rollout of allowing authors was extremely limited? That’s how I felt.

I pay for ChatGPT and never got off the waitlist when first announced. Killed all hype for me.

[huijzer]

Yes and having to manually toggle the plugins and hope that your requests end up in the right one wasn’t great either. Especially with the 1 action per response limit. The new GPTs look and feel much more, for lack of a better word, natural. I‘ve had an interaction in the main GPT where it first looked up something on the internet and then followed up with generating an image and writing a suitable text. I found it pretty magical.

[karmasimida]

The UX itself isn't good anyway.

I tried to use this is to create a travel itinerary, TBH, it is the wrong interface for this task, it is slow and it is full of useless information. Ain't good.

The most useful one is probably the PDF reader plugin but now that is part of ChatGPT itself.

[brandall10]

I suspect they're a bit like Google... wonderful tech but terrible product company.

Everything outside of the quality of their models is suspect:

- GPTs are super quirky w/ weird limitations... try processing an image file larger than an emoji from base 64 text and watch it render the base64 string in a code window and give up after about 1k tokens. The vast majority of the time it doesn't even try and hallucinates processing what it thinks a file related to the context of the GPT would do.

- The assistants API is a black box of inefficiency and out of control costs due to a propensity to barf huge amounts of context from problematic RAG, etc. Yet it's not obvious in real time because there is no token consumption information like the normal chat API. It's almost like they rolled it out like this to destroy developer trust on the spot by doing a 'gotcha' to anyone naive to roll this out to prod without sufficient testing.

I'm honestly unsure how GPTs will in fact be monetized. Are purchasers required to have a Plus account w/ sellers getting a one time sale? Will sellers have to pay extra usage fees, or a shared subscription type thing split between them and OpenAI?

I think they should just give up on this area of the business. Dev day produced some anxiety by encroaching on the business models of a large segment of newly funded AI startups... then showing the efforts to be half-baked while encouraging more lock-in just is going to erode trust and uptake on API usage in general, possibly having people be relieved when Google Gemini and similar efforts are unveiled in the coming months.

[willsmith72]

> wonderful tech but terrible product company

i couldn't have said it better, something i've been feeling for a long time. they have all the engineering expertise, why not the same for product?

it's even more surprising given Altman's ycom experience, it's not like this is a classic engineer-run corp

[brandall10]

On top of that the CTO has a product, not engineering background. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

[aquajet]

but the president was the CTO of Stripe

[brandall10]

Who I understand has no reports and mostly codes, but yes he is tight with Sam and undoubtedly has a big influence over strategy.

[packetlost]

It really seems like it's there to take any low hanging fruit away from the startup market and continue riding the hype train as long as possible while paradoxically also bringing to light just how useless GPTs are for most serious automation tasks.