“We’ve implemented initial support for plugins in ChatGPT” This is how OpenAI introduced Plugins addition to ChatGPT. To implement its iterative deployment philosophy, ChatGPT is slowly introducing plugins to study their practical usage, impact, and potential risks. The successful management of these factors is crucial to accomplish its mission.
How Plugins Can Enhance Language Models
Language models today, while useful for a variety of tasks, are still limited. The only information they can learn from is their training data. This information can be out-of-date and is one-size-fits-all across applications. Furthermore, the only thing language models can do out-of-the-box is to emit text. This text can contain useful instructions, but to actually follow these instructions you need another process.
In this blog post, we introduce the concept of plugins, which are external services that can provide language models with additional information and capabilities. Plugins can be “eyes and ears” for language models, giving them access to information that is too recent, too personal, or too specific to be included in the training data. In response to a user’s explicit request, plugins can also enable language models to perform safe, constrained actions on their behalf, increasing the usefulness of the system overall.
For example, a plugin could allow a language model to access the current weather, the user’s calendar, or the latest news headlines. A plugin could also allow a language model to send an email, book a flight, or order a pizza. Plugins are not meant to replace language models but to complement them and extend their functionality.
We expect that open standards will emerge to unify the ways in which applications expose an AI-facing interface. We are working on an early attempt at what such a standard might look like, and we’re looking for feedback from developers interested in building with us.
Today, we’re beginning to gradually enable existing plugins from our early collaborators for ChatGPT users, beginning with ChatGPT Plus subscribers. We’re also beginning to roll out the ability for developers to create their own plugins for ChatGPT.
In the coming months, as we learn from deployment and continue to improve our safety systems, we’ll iterate on this protocol, and we plan to enable developers using OpenAI models to integrate plugins into their own applications beyond ChatGPT.