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Apps SDK

developers.openai.com

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Re: Apps SDK

#71
post #58

This feels like a fever dream. As a developer everything changes every week. A new model, a new tool, a new sdk, paradigm we have to learn. I'm getting tired of all that shit.

Welcome to technology

Re: Apps SDK

#73

This conception makes sense iff you believe in ChatGPT as the universal user interface of the future. If anything the agentic wave is showing that the chat interfaces are better off hidden behind stricter user interface paradigms.

The apps can send any arbitrary HTML / interface back though.

e.g. Coursera can send back a video player

Re: Apps SDK

#74
Why does everyone think chat is better UX than traditional interfaces? I get the AI hype, but so many products are not a fit for chat interfaces.

Why would I use a chat to do what could be done quicker with a simple and intuitive button/input UX (e.g. Booking or Zillow search/filter)? Chat also has really poor discoverability of what I can actually do with it.

Re: Apps SDK

#75

This conception makes sense iff you believe in ChatGPT as the universal user interface of the future. If anything the agentic wave is showing that the chat interfaces are better off hidden behind stricter user interface paradigms.

It's not just as ChatGPT as the interface. It's that Chat with AI will now be the universal interface and every tech company will have their version of it. Everything you want to do will happen in one place. Cards will provide predefined and interactive experience. Over time you'll see entirely dynamic content get generated on the fly. The user experience is going to be one where we've shrunk websites to apps and apps to cards or widgets. Effectively any action you need to take can be done like this and then agents can operate more complex workflow in the background. This is probably the interface for the next 10 years and what replaces the mobile app experience and stronghold that Apple or Google have. This lasts until fully immersive AR/VR become a more mainstream thing. At that point these cards are on a heads up display but we'll be looking at something totally different. Like agents roaming the earth...

Re: Apps SDK

#76
It's poetic that Google attempted to pursue apps within Google Assistant years ago, but the vision of apps within an AI assistant is more feasible now with LLMs that (whether actually or not) understand arbitrary user intents and more flexible connectors to third party apps via MCP (and a viral platform with 700+ million weekly active users).

Custom GPTs (and Gemini gems) didn't really work because they didn't have any utility outside the chat window. They were really just bundled prompt workflows that relied on the inherent abilities of the model. But now with MCP, agent-based apps are way more useful.

I believe there's a fundamentally different shift going on here: in the endgame that OpenAI, Anthropic et al. are racing toward, there will be little need for developers for the kinds of consumer-facing apps that OpenAI appears to be targeting.

OpenAI hinted at this idea at the end of their Codex demo: the future will be built from software built on demand, tailored to each user's specific needs.

Even if one doesn't believe that AI will completely automate software development, it's not unreasonable to think that we can build deterministic tooling to wrap LLMs and provide functionality that's good enough for a wide range of consumer experiences. And when pumping out code and architecting software becomes easy to automate with little additional marginal cost, some of the only moats other companies have are user trust (e.g. knowing that Coursera's content is at least made by real humans grounded in reality), the ability to coordinate markets and transform capital (e.g. dealing with three-sided marketplaces on DoorDash), switching costs, or ability to handle regulatory burdens.

The cynic in me says that today's announcements are really just a stopgap measure to: - Further increase the utility of ChatGPT for users, turning it into the de facto way of accessing the internet for younger users à la how Facebook was (is?) in developing countries - Pave the way for by commoditizing OpenAI's complements (traditional SaaS apps) as ChatGPT becomes more capable as a platform with first-party experiences - Increase the value of the company to acquire more clout with enterprises and other business deals

But cynicism aside, this is pretty cool. I think there's a solid foundation here for the kind of intent-based, action-oriented computing that I think will benefit non-technical people immensely.

Re: Apps SDK

#77
post #58

This feels like a fever dream. As a developer everything changes every week. A new model, a new tool, a new sdk, paradigm we have to learn. I'm getting tired of all that shit.

Specialize, escape, or accept.

Re: Apps SDK

#78
post #62

I see a lot of negative comments here but to me, it was obvious this is where OAI should land. They want to be the platform in which you tell what you want, and OAI does it for you. It's gonna connect to your inbox, calendar, payment methods, and you'll just ask it to do something and it will, using those apps. This means OAI won't need ads. Just rev share.

A platform requires a user moat or unfair advantage. Having a better quality model is neither

How's having the best model not a most?

Re: Apps SDK

#79
Yeah... no. I'm going to pass. The premise is bad from any angle. In the case of businesses, why "create" another "Amazon" and compete with other brands when the focus should be on getting customers through my sales funnel? For developers is much worse since they are going to copy Amazon's model with brands that found a niche: Amazon Basics. In this case, it'll be OpenAI "core" (or something like that), where you do all the work, and when your "app" is somewhat famous enough or getting traction, they'll copy it, rebrand it, and bombard all old and new customers to use it instead of yours.

I'mma call it now just for the fun of it: This will go the way of their "GPT" store.

Re: Apps SDK

#80
post #55

I think this is very interesting, but it is reminiscent of what we built with Phind 2 where the answer could include dynamic, pre-built widgets. The problem with this approach is precisely that these apps/widgets have hard-coded input and output schema. They can work quite well when the user asks something within the widget's capabilities, but the brittleness of this approach starts showing quickly in real-world use.…

The problem is not the limitations of the capabilities per se but their discoverability ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverability ). The user doesn't know what the capabilities are, as they are added and -- infuriatingly -- removed. Google Assistant is a perfect example of this. Conservational user interfaces are opaque; they lack affordances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

Thank you for this word. I have felt it my whole life and never learned the exact word.

I immediately knew the last generation of voice assistants was dead garbage when there was no way to know what it could do, they just expected you to try 100 things, until it worked randomly

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