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Understanding ChatGPT Work

simonwillison.net

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Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#141

Post by simonw »

andai wrote: post #138

So it's a different set of tools / skills? Isn't the whole point of the tools/skills that you can use them on-demand? i.e. having them available doesn't make anything worse does it? Why did it even need to be a separate thing? So this seems more like a branding thing to me? Oh if you want to do serious work you need the paid subscription!

I think of it more as a SaaS hosting product providing some extra features that aren't in ChatGPT Chat - most notably a VM with a persistent filesystem, internet access, and a headless browser, made available to the standard OpenAI UI surfaces you already know how to use.

You can wire such things up to an agent yourself in a bunch of alternative ways if you like - run OpenClaw, Hermes, or leave a computer running somewhere with Codex Remote.

For a lot of people though the Work that comes with their existing paid ChatGPT subscription is a more convenient option... if they can figure out what Work does and how to use it.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#142

Post by DarmokTanagra »

garbagewoman wrote: post #132
DarmokTanagra wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kinds of apps are you building? Personally I can't remember the last time I needed an app and there weren't already several options to choose from.

A free app without ads that solves serves a single specific purpose?

Maybe I'm just old and not using my phone to its fullest, but I just went through my apps and I could not think of a single example that would be worth building and maintaining my own apk for.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#143

Post by joelthelion »

This is very cool, and at the same time, this is how they plan to lock people in. The moat isn't really in the models, it's in their users and how much they are invested in their ecosystem.

Once you have started working seriously with these tools, it stops being so easy to switch. What are the open-source alternatives to this? How usable are they for non-technical users?

Another comment I have about this is that unfortunately, there is always an LLM in the loop for each prompt. I feel LLMs should automate themselves away, meaning that for repetitive tasks, user prompts should go directly to deterministic, previously built scripts. This would be both a better user experience (more predictable), and a lot cheaper to operate.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#145

Post by ModernMech »

noname120 wrote: post #118

The elephant in the room is that ChatGPT Work/Codex use agentic quota, whereas Chat doesn’t (and is effectively unlimited on Plus and Pro plans). On this principle I’ve built Codexify[1], a connector that provides a Codex environment to ChatGPT Chat. This enables unlimited 5.6 Sol high/xhigh usage on the Plus and Pro plans as well as access to the 5.6 Sol Pro model (which is not available in official Codex). [1] http…

Good strategy is tell Chat to make plans and review work, lookup all information to make decisions ahead of time; then tell Work to implement it.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#147

Post by felixgallo »

It’s possible to squint and overlook Sam Altman’s history of weirdness and deception, but the elimination of safety teams at OpenAI and the entire huggingface debacle show that there are deep cultural, architectural and operational issues there that should be immediately disqualify products like this from general use or recommendation.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#148

Post by tgv »

ozgung wrote: post #98
tristanj wrote: post #4

I think most people are sleeping on the ChatGPT Work/Codex computer use feature. It's incredibly useful. I can remote in from the app, voice it instructions, then let it work in the background. When I tell it "draft a reply to this email (which it has access to thru the gmail connector) and attach the latest docs" or "fill out this multistep immigration electronic travel authorisation form using my passport files sav…

I think the whole world is sleeping on the privacy/security implications of this technology. Recent OpenAI/HuggingFace incident shows us that even in a very controlled top AI-lab setting, humans can't know what agents are really doing. In our consumer environments at home or work we don't even have access to reasoning logs or background agents/tools. What they do gets more opaque and convoluted every day. When I gran…

The parent gives the model access to passport and presumably other sensitive info. That's enough for a new Black Mirror episode.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#149

Post by coder-pm »

simonw wrote: post #75
coder-pm wrote: post #55

Non devs running something might not be aware the programs runs locally and touches the actual machine. Devs know to be careful but regular users won’t even have knowledge it’s touching their machine, filesystem and might even touch the credentials (thanks to reasoning). The right fix is to set real boundaries and limit agents access. We should never trust it won’t touch forbidden places. Basically I find this naming…

That's not true of ChatGPT Work (Cloud), accessed through the mobile apps or the ChatGPT website. It IS true of ChatGPT Work (Local), accessed via the ChatGPT desktop app. I agree with you: Expecting non-devs to understand that distinction - especially when these features are visually indistinguishable from each other - is entirely unreasonable!

Fair precision, obviously Cloud runs are executed remotely. Since both cloud and local runs cannot be distinguished, users genuinely won’t know when their filesystem will be touched. Basically you can’t safely depend on the user telling the tool what to use, the boundary has to be set.

Re: Understanding ChatGPT Work

#150

Post by simonw »

joelthelion wrote: post #143

This is very cool, and at the same time, this is how they plan to lock people in. The moat isn't really in the models, it's in their users and how much they are invested in their ecosystem. Once you have started working seriously with these tools, it stops being so easy to switch. What are the open-source alternatives to this? How usable are they for non-technical users? Another comment I have about this is that unfo…

> What are the open-source alternatives to this?

OpenClaw, Hermes, and a dozen other Claw-like tools.

They aren't trivial for non-technical users to setup, hence the demand for systems like Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work and Grok Bot.

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