[HN Gopher] Apps SDK
___________________________________________________________________
Apps SDK
Author : alvis
Score : 201 points
Date : 2025-10-06 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (developers.openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (developers.openai.com)
| compacct27 wrote:
| "Build our platform for us!"
| naiv wrote:
| Remember "GPTs" and the thing before it which I don't even
| remember now. I think this will go the same route .. to nowhere
| elpakal wrote:
| Are they still expecting us to get paid based on "revenue
| sharing"?
| minimaxir wrote:
| The GPT App Store (which is technically now obsolete with this
| SDK) was funny.
| jasonsb wrote:
| They promised AGI and delivered SDKs. I think I'm gonna skip this
| one..
| jsheard wrote:
| Hey don't sell them short, they also delivered a TikTok clone
| with vertically integrated slop generation. It's the 5D Chess
| path to AGI, they just need to rot the average human brain
| until the bar for super-human intelligence is reduced to an
| attainable level.
| Narciss wrote:
| This was funny
| alvis wrote:
| So it's take 2 for Open AI's App Store moment. But this time
| surfing Anthropic's MCP wave. Smart interop.. or just chasing the
| cool kids?
| apwell23 wrote:
| mcp was a dud
| consumer451 wrote:
| What is the superior way for an LLM to interact with your
| product?
| apwell23 wrote:
| llm can call my existing apis fine. curious what kind of
| problems you are running to with your existing apis?
| rushingcreek wrote:
| 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. What if you want to use more advanced
| filters with Zillow? Or perhaps cross-reference with StreetEasy?
| If those features aren't supported by the widget's hard-coded
| schema, you're out of luck as a user.
|
| What I think it much more exciting is the ability to completely
| create generative UI answers on the fly. We'll have more to say
| on this soon from Phind (I'm the founder).
| chatmasta wrote:
| Phind is awesome. I often forget to use it until legacy search
| engines fail to surface what I'm looking for after a dozen
| searches. Phind usually finds it.
|
| That said, I used it a lot more a year ago. Lately I've been
| using regular LLMs since they've gotten better at searching.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. I think that our main differentiator
| going forward will be this generative UI on the fly for
| answering questions as opposed to search alone.
| dleeftink wrote:
| In a similar boat, but have been increasingly returning to
| for its quick notebook/charting capabilities. Would be
| awesome to somehow be able to select between different UI
| modes offering search, ranking, graphing or else depending
| on user needs.
| alvis wrote:
| Given there is already a MCP-UI project, I'm not surprised it
| can be done. But even that I'm not very convinced that it's the
| right approach. After all, it's still far too slow for real
| usage...
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Totally agree that it's too slow with conventional
| approaches, which is why we're training custom models for
| this that we can run fast
| babyshake wrote:
| I know that AG-UI from copilot kit is in this space. But it
| hasn't worked well with the MCP model AFAIK
| esafak wrote:
| 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
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Yep, this is a big problem as well. If the user doesn't know
| what features will or won't work, they lose confidence
| overall.
| beefnugs wrote:
| 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
| stavros wrote:
| They don't lack affordances, you can do stuff. They lack
| signifiers, ie it's not easy to discover the stuff you can
| do.
| esafak wrote:
| Affordance is not what it can do, it is what it _signals_
| that it can do. It needs to be perceptible, by the
| definition I use (Norman 's). I see others go by different
| definitions that even admit hidden affordances. I do not.
| stavros wrote:
| From _The Design of Everyday Things_ :
|
| > Affordances represent the possibilities in the world
| for how an agent (a person, animal, or machine) can
| interact with something. Some affordances are
| perceivable, others are invisible. Signifiers are
| signals. Some signifiers are signs, labels, and drawings
| placed in the world, such as the signs labeled "push,"
| "pull," or "exit" on doors, or arrows and diagrams
| indicating what is to be acted upon or in which direction
| to gesture, or other instructions. Some signifiers are
| simply the perceived affordances, such as the handle of a
| door or the physical structure of a switch. Note that
| some perceived affordances may not be real: they may look
| like doors or places to push, or an impediment to entry,
| when in fact they are not.
|
| With Norman's definition, if a conversational interface
| _can_ perform an action, it _affords_ that action. The
| fact that you don 't know that it affords that action
| means there's a lack of a signifier.
|
| As you say, this is a matter of definition, I'm just
| commenting on Norman's specific definition from the book.
| 9dev wrote:
| Ah, that's interesting. I'm considering building something
| similar for our product, and my solution to the schema
| constraints you mentioned thus far is breaking my widgets into
| blocks as universal as possible, as to still be useful. All of
| this is just ideas yet mind you, but my thinking was--maybe I
| can get the model to pick from a range of composable widgets
| depending on the task that are interoperable?
|
| For a concrete example, think a search result listing that can
| be broken down into a single result or a matrix to compare
| results, as well as a filter section. So you could ask for
| different facets of your current context, to iterate over a
| search session and interact with the results. Dunno, I'm still
| researching.
|
| Have you written somewhere about your experience with Phind in
| this area?
| irrationalfab wrote:
| > If those features aren't supported by the widget's hard-coded
| schema, you're out of luck as a user.
|
| Chat paired to the pre-built and on-demand widgets address this
| limitation.
|
| For example, in the keynote demo, they showed how the chat
| interface lets you perform advanced filtering that pulls
| together information from multiple sources, like filtering only
| Zillow housers near a dog park.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Chat paired to the pre-built and on-demand widgets address
| this limitation_
|
| The only place I can see this working is if the LLM is
| generating a rich UI on the fly. Otherwise, you're arguing
| that a text-based UX is going to beat flashy, colourful
| things.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Yes, because it seems that Zillow exposes those specific
| filters as a part of the input schema. As long as it's a part
| of the schema, then ChatGPT can generate a useful input to
| the widget. But my point is that is very brittle.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Does anyone think small players (like an independent developer)
| will be accepted ? Sounds like it will only for the big whales
| chvid wrote:
| Discovery, monetization. What is in it for developers?
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| deploying an app to 700M people?
| artisin wrote:
| Not only do you get to deploy your app to 700M users; you
| also get to provide responsive support for every single one
| of them!
|
| Per the docs: 'Every app comes from a verified developer who
| stands behind their work and provides responsive support'
|
| That's thinly veiled corporate speak for, Fortune 500 or GTFO
| saberience wrote:
| That's like saying making a website is like deploying an app
| for 7B people.
|
| Sure, but deploying a website or app doesn't mean anyone's
| going to use it, does it?
|
| I could make an iOS app, I could make a website, I could make
| a ChatGPT app... if no one uses it, it doesn't matter how big
| the userbase of iOS, the internet, or ChatGPT is...
| benatkin wrote:
| They're looking like Facebook did with their phone project and
| later the metaverse - too big for their britches.
| MaxPock wrote:
| Lmfao..you've reminded me of the phone they made with HTC that
| had a Facebook button .
| sieep wrote:
| We've already _sorta_ come full circle with the Meta glasses
| having a physical button to interact with the Facebook AI
| markab21 wrote:
| The skepticism is understandable given the trajectory of GPTs and
| custom instructions, but there's a meaningful technical
| difference here: the Apps SDK is built on the Model Context
| Protocol (MCP), which is an open specification rather than a
| proprietary format.
|
| MCP standardizes how LLM clients connect to external tools--
| defining wire formats, authentication flows, and metadata
| schemas. This means apps you build aren't inherently ChatGPT-
| specific; they're MCP servers that could work with any MCP-
| compatible client. The protocol is transport-agnostic and self-
| describing, with official Python and TypeScript SDKs already
| available.
|
| That said, the "build our platform" criticism isn't entirely off
| base. While the protocol is open, practical adoption still
| depends heavily on ChatGPT's distribution and whether other LLM
| providers actually implement MCP clients. The real test will be
| whether this becomes a genuine cross-platform standard or just
| another way to contribute to OpenAI's ecosystem.
|
| The technical primitives (tool discovery, structured content
| return, embedded UI resources) are solid and address real
| integration problems. Whether it succeeds likely depends more on
| ecosystem dynamics than technical merit.
| mhl47 wrote:
| There was a recent post here about how deeply ingrained the chat
| interface is in OpenAIs organization. This really doubles down on
| that, but does anyone really like to interact with so much
| language instead of visual elements? Also feels horrible that you
| are supposed to remember a bunch of app names like "zillow" and
| punch them in the chat. And like an opportunity for them to
| slowly introduce ads for this apps or "preferential discovery",
| if you will, as monetization strategy.
|
| Personally I don't hope thats the future.
| p0seidon wrote:
| Which post was that?
| mhl47 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44573195 (in the
| article, search for:"Chat runs really deep")
| agentcoops wrote:
| Very much agreed. I think the dominance of the chat interface
| to LLMs has materially impaired the general usefulness of these
| tools -- the sooner it goes away the better. It's almost
| impossible to explain to a non-engineer how the illusion of a
| continuous conversation is crafted through context management
| and why past moments in a conversation might fall out of
| memory. My general advice to non-technical friends is to create
| a new conversation for each prompt so that they can get a more
| deterministic sense of how to formulate instructions and which
| are successful.
|
| I was really hoping Apple would make some innovations on the UX
| side, but they certainly haven't yet.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| I feel like we're rehashing the debate around whether or not a
| GUI or terminal is more powerful.
|
| For a large number of tasks that cleanly generalize into a
| stream of tokens, command line or chat is probably superior.
| We'll get some affordances like tab auto completion to help
| remember the name of certain bots or mCP endpoints that can be
| brought in as needed...
|
| But for anything that involves discovery, graphical interaction
| feels more intuitive and we'll probably get bespoke interfaces
| relevant to that particular task at hand with some sort of
| partially hidden layers to abstract away the token stream?
| drdrey wrote:
| counterpoint: a lot of people around me just type "zillow" in
| google to access it, so maybe it's not absurd to refer to it by
| name in a chat interface
| Handy-Man wrote:
| This is them trying to build ChatGPT into platform, from which
| they will take some portion of revenue generated by these
| apps...hmm where have I seen this before.
| spullara wrote:
| We have been building MCP servers and this looks very good
| directionally. Fills a bunch of holes in the protocol and gives
| meaning to something that were kind of like placeholders. Being
| able to return UI to the client is fantastic and will make lots
| of things possible. We have been working on these kinds of things
| assuming that the clients would improve to meet us.
|
| https://lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?2122
| cefboud wrote:
| This is an interesting branding exercise. Presenting MCP as
| 'Apps' makes it sound more accessible, while tools and MCP server
| sound very technical. Add a demo with Expedia and Spotify and you
| have an MCP that's end-user ready.
| lossolo wrote:
| Ye, that's basically an MCP server, that can be used by
| ChatGPT.
| disiplus wrote:
| Honestly I see how somebody like kayak.com would build a "app"
| they work through commission, they don't care from where is the
| booking coming from. But they will sort the flight tickets based
| where do they earn the best commission. What's in there for me as
| a user ?. Also will openai let different providers pay for the
| top placement when somebody tries to buy ticket on chatgpt ?
| testfrequency wrote:
| Wow.
|
| "CEO" Fidji Simo must really need something to do.
|
| Maybe I'm cynical about all of this, but it feels like a whole
| lot of marketing spin for an MCP standard.
| MaxPock wrote:
| Tencent already has this with WeChat.Good to see it on chatgpt
| finally
| emilsedgh wrote:
| 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.
| nicce wrote:
| > This means OAI won't need ads.
|
| Ads are defenitely there. Just hidden so deeply in the black
| box which is generating the useful tips :)
| thebigkick wrote:
| If you ask it to build a headless frontend web app, it
| immediately starts generating code with Next.js. I've always
| wondered how it was trained to default to that choice, given
| the smorgasbord of web frameworks out there. Next.js is
| solid, but it's also platform-ware, tightly coupled to
| commercial interests. I wish there were more bias toward
| genuinely open-source technologies.
| jerojero wrote:
| There's probably different ways the LLM converged to it.
|
| One could be for example: from people asking online which
| tools they should use to build something and being
| constantly recommended to do it with Next.js
|
| Another could be: how many of the code that was used to
| train the LLM is done in Next.js
|
| Generally, the answer is probably something along the lines
| of "next.js is kind of the most popular choice at the time
| of training".
| b_e_n_t_o_n wrote:
| To me it feels like the default choice in the industry,
| perhaps it's not and I'm wrong but if I could have that
| feeling I can see how the AI can as well.
| nicce wrote:
| It is a trap. But once you realise that you are already
| too deeply invested.
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| Because the AI labs are just hovering up all internet text
| that they can, I've been seeing more and more marketing
| pilots that deliberately seed marketing material in thousands
| of fake, AI-generated blogs and tutorials. The intention here
| is to get new LLMs to train on these huge numbers of
| associations between specific use cases and the company's
| product. All in a way that gets their marketing information
| into the final weights.
|
| You may have started seeing this when LLMs seem to promote
| things based entirely on marketing claims and not on real-
| world functionality.
|
| More or less, SEO spam V2.
| dewitt wrote:
| > _This means OAI won 't need ads. Just rev share_
|
| If OpenAI thinks there's sweet, sweet revenue in email and
| calendar apps, just waiting to be shared, their investors are
| in for a big surprise.
| seydor wrote:
| A platform requires a user moat or unfair advantage. Having a
| better quality model is neither
| typpilol wrote:
| How's having the best model not a most?
| zackangelo wrote:
| Because it depends on how much better "best" is. If it's
| only incrementally better than open source models that have
| other advantages, why would you bother?
|
| OpenAI's moat will only come from the products they built
| on top. Theoretically their products will be better because
| they'll be more vertically integrated with the underlying
| models. It's not unlike Apple's playbook with regard to
| hardwares and software integration.
| maleldil wrote:
| Because it changes all the time. A few weeks ago, it was
| Gemini 2.5 Pro, then Claude Opus 4.1, GPT-5 Thinking, now
| maybe Claude Sonnet 4.5, etc[1]. Having a good model isn't
| enough when they're basically interchangeable now. You need
| something else.
|
| [1] This is an example. Which model was the best when is
| not important.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Consumer LLM apps have moat. As it is, ChatGPT (the app)
| spends most of its compute on Personal Non work messages
| (approx 1.9B per day vs 716 for Work)[0]. First, from ongoing
| conversations that users would return to, then to the pushing
| of specific and past chat memories, these conversations have
| become increasingly personalized. Suddenly, there is a lot of
| personal data that you rely on it having, that make the
| product better. You cannot just plop over to Gemini and
| replicate this.
|
| [0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34255/w
| 342...
| jimmydoe wrote:
| > This means OAI won't need ads. Just rev share.
|
| They obviously want both. In fact they are already building an
| ad team.
|
| They have money they have to burn, so it makes sense to throw
| all the scalable business models in the history, eg app store,
| algo feed, etc, to the wall and see what stick.
| danjl wrote:
| If only this somehow resulted in fewer, better apps. <sigh>
| ttoinou wrote:
| That's a great idea and Im wondering if Telegram can follow this
| path too, since they're so advanced in mobile UX / UI, constantly
| updating their app and have some kind of crypto payments support.
| fny wrote:
| It's remarkable that will inevitably rush to build free apps that
| only reinforce OpenAI's moat while cannibilizing their own
| opportunities.
| tantalor wrote:
| When the iPhone came out, there were like 6 apps, and no app
| store.
|
| In 2024, iOS App Store generated $1.3T in revenue, 85% of which
| went to developers.
| hmate9 wrote:
| That figure sounds way too high
|
| Edit: yes I understand it is correct, but still it _sounds_
| like an insane amount
| moralestapia wrote:
| It's true, though.
|
| It is now evident why Flash was murdered.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Because it was buggy, known for security holes and the
| single biggest source of application crashes in all
| software in the late 90's through early 00's.
| moralestapia wrote:
| We get it, you drank the kool-aid.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Drank the kool-aid?!? I worked in the eLearning space, I
| was a prominent user and developer for Flash/Flex
| content... there was some interesting tooling for sure, I
| also completely disabled it on my home computers as a
| result of working with it.
|
| I had a lot of hopes after the Adobe buyout that Flash
| would morph into something based around ActionScript
| (ES4) and SVG. That didn't happen. MS's Silverlight/XAML
| was close, but I wasn't going to even consider it without
| several cross-platform version releases.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >I was a prominent user and developer for Flash/Flex
| content
|
| I was as well. It wasn't as bad as people describe it. It
| was an amazing platform, HTML5 just recently caught up.
|
| In retrospective, Adobe should have open sourced it.
|
| >MS's Silverlight/XAML was close
|
| Hahahahahha, yeah sure! That tells me everything I need
| to know.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I agree it should have been open-sourced (at least the
| player portion)...
|
| As for Silverlight, I mean the technology itself was
| closer to where I wanted to see Flash go. I'm not sure
| why you're laughing at that.
|
| edit: as for not being as bad as people describe it...
| you could literally read any file on the filesystem...
| that's a pretty bad "sandbox" ... It was fixed later, but
| there were different holes along the way, multiple times.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| you missed the "it drained battery like there was no
| tomorrow" argument.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I never really used it detached from a wall... mostly
| from work projects.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _We now know why Flash was murdered_
|
| This is a stupid conspiracy given Apple decided not to
| support Flash on iPhone since before Jobs came around on
| third-party apps. (The iPhone was launched with a vision
| of Apple-only native apps and HTML5 web apps. The
| latter's performance forced Cupertino's hand into
| launching the App Store. Then they saw the golden goose.)
| moralestapia wrote:
| You ignore the state of things back then.
|
| HTML5 was new and not widely supported, the web was WAY
| more fragmented back then, to put things in perspective,
| Internet Explorer still had the largest market share, by
| far. The only thing that could provide the user with a
| rich interactive experience was Flash, it was also
| ubiquitous.
|
| Flash was the biggest threat to Apple's App Store; this
| wasn't a conspiracy, it was evident back then but I can
| see why it is not evident to you in 2025. Jobs open
| letter was just a formal declaration of war.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _HTML5 was new and not widely supported_
|
| Yes. It was a bad bet on the open web by Apple. But it
| was the one they took when they decided not to support
| Flash with the original iPhone's launch.
|
| > _Flash was the biggest threat to Apple 's App Store_
|
| Flash was not supported since before there was an App
| Store. Since before Apple deigned to tolerate third-party
| native apps.
|
| You can argue that following the App Store's launch,
| Apple's choice to not start supporting Flash was
| influenced by pecuinary interests. But it's ahistoric to
| suggest the reason for the original decision was based on
| interests Cupertino had ruled out at the time.
| mikestew wrote:
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apples-app-store-generated-
| ne...
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| They're confusing "sales facilitates by the app store" with
| sales from the app store itself.
|
| That 1T figure is real, but it includes things like if you
| buy a refrigerator using the Amazon iOS app.
| bangaladore wrote:
| Yeah, the article itself even lists the reality at about
| 20% of the 1.3T.
| codybontecou wrote:
| Will this have a revenue share / marketplace built into it?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Will this have a revenue share / marketplace built into
| it?_
|
| I'm genuinely surprised these companies went with usage-
| based versus royalty pricing.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| what's their moat that you refer to?
| mrcwinn wrote:
| This is nonsense. Why would they destroy the incentive to get
| real-time, live data and MCP actions that help their users?
|
| Connecting these apps will, at times, require authentication.
| Where it does not require payment, it's a fantastic
| distribution channel.
| MaxPock wrote:
| This is honestly useful.
|
| "Find me hotels in Capetown that have a pool by the beach .Should
| cost between 200 dollars to 800 dollars a night "
| pphysch wrote:
| [injected with guerilla ads]
|
| I don't see how this is a significant upgrade over the many
| existing hotel-finder tools. At best it slightly augments them
| as a first pass, but I would still rather look at an actual map
| of options than trust a stream of generated, ad-augmented text.
| elpakal wrote:
| The benefit I see is that it meets users where they
| presumable already are (GPT). As other comments allude to
| here, it's clear they see themselves as a staple of the
| user's online experience.
| b_e_n_t_o_n wrote:
| I think the end game is that rather than spitting out text
| back, the LLM transforms your plaintext request to something
| processable, and then chooses some relevant widgets to
| display the results.
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| In 2018, I founded a startup specializing in chatbot for events.
| At the time the platforms were Alexa Skills, Actions on Google,
| and Messenger Platform (and LINE Bot, for people in Asia). I
| guess what's old is new again, but with fancier tech.
|
| This time will be different?
| jerf wrote:
| We've actually got systems that can understand English now.
| Chatbots don't have to be glorified regular expression matches
| or based on inferior NLP. I've thought more than once that the
| true value of LLMs could well be that they essentially solve
| the language comprehension problem and that their ability to
| consume language is relatively underutilized compared to our
| attempts to get them to produce language. Under all the
| generative bling their language comprehension and ability to
| package that into something that conventional computing can
| understand is pretty impressive. They've even got a certain
| amount of common sense built in.
| b_e_n_t_o_n wrote:
| Yeah this seems accurate to me. All the talk of a bubble etc,
| but LLMs see genuinely useful at tasks like this and I'm sure
| we'll find more uses as time goes on.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Do people even want chatbots for events?
|
| I personally prefer well curated information.
| irrationalfab wrote:
| This feels like the death of the app, and the rise of the micro-
| app.
| fidotron wrote:
| 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.
| nextworddev wrote:
| The apps can send any arbitrary HTML / interface back though.
|
| e.g. Coursera can send back a video player
| asim wrote:
| 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...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| This has been the pitched playbook for decades. (Metamates!)
| I'm increasingly convinced its driven by a specific
| generation of tech entrepreneurs who cut their teeth while
| reading ca. 1980s science fiction.
|
| I could see chat apps becoming dominant in Slack-oriented
| workplaces. But, like, chatting with an AI to play a song is
| objectively worse than using Spotify. Dynamically-created
| music sounds nice until one considers the social context in
| which non-filler music is heard.
| fidotron wrote:
| The thing it reminds me of is those old Silicon Graphics
| greybeards that were smug about how they were creating
| tools for people that created wealth when those other
| system providers "just" created tools for people tracking
| wealth.
|
| There's a whole bizarre subculture in computing that fails
| to recognize what it is about computers that people
| actually find valuable.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Chatting with an AI to play a song whose title you know,
| sure.
|
| Getting an AI to play "that song that goes hmm hmmm hmmm
| hmmm ... uh, it was in some commercials when I was a kid"
| tho
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Getting an AI to play "that song that goes hmm hmmm
| hmmm hmmm ... uh, it was in some commercials when I was a
| kid" tho_
|
| Absolutely. The point is this is a specialised and
| occasional use case. You don't want to have to go through
| a chat bot every time you want to play a particular song
| just because sometimes you might hum at it.
|
| The closest we've come to a widely-adopted AR interface
| are AirPods. Critically, however, they work by mimicing
| how someone would speak to a real human by them.
| fragmede wrote:
| more abstract than that, "I'm throwing a
| wedding/funeral/startup IPO/Halloween/birthday party for
| a whatever year old and need appropriate music". Or,
| without knowing specific bands, "I want to hear some 80's
| metal music". "more cowbell!"
| echelon wrote:
| It's because Zuck can't own a pane of glass. He's locked
| out of the smartphone duopoly.
|
| Everyone wants the next device category. They covet it.
| Every other company tries to will it into existence.
| cube2222 wrote:
| Is it? Honestly, most agents and/or ai apps I interact with
| that are actually useful present some form of chat-like
| interface.
|
| I'm not very bullish on people wanting to live in the ChatGPT
| UI, specifically, but the concept of dynamic apps embedded into
| a chat-experience I think is a reasonable direction.
|
| I'm mostly curious about if and when we get an open standard
| for this, similar to MCP.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Yes, I certainly prefer "chatting with Claude Code" to
| "Copilot taking forever to hallucinate all over my IDE,
| displacing the much-more-useful previous-generation semantic
| autocomplete."
|
| The former is like a Waymo, the latter is like my car
| suddenly and autonomously deciding that now is a good time to
| turn into a Dollar Tree to get a COVID vaccine when I'm on my
| way to drop my kid off at a playdate.
| fidotron wrote:
| The whole value of an actual executive assistant is them
| solving problems and you not micromanaging them.
|
| What users want, which various entities religiously avoid
| providing to us, is a fair price comparison and discovery
| mechanism for essentially everything. A huge part of the
| value of LLMs to date is in bypassing much of the obfuscation
| that exists to perpetuate this, and that's completely
| counteracted by much of what they're demonstrating here.
| derekcheng08 wrote:
| I suspect there are many, many things for which chat is a great
| interface. And by positioning ChatGPT as the distributor for
| all these things, they get to be the new Google. But you're
| also right that many domains for which a purpose-built
| interface is the right approach, and if the domain is valuable
| enough, it'll have someone coming after it to build that.
| munk-a wrote:
| I have yet to see a chat agent deployed that is more popular
| than tailored browsing methods. The most charitable way to
| explain this is that the tailored browsing methods already in
| place are the results of years of careful design and battle
| testing and that the chat agent is providing most of the
| value that a tailored browsing method would but without any
| of the investment required to bring a traditional UX to
| fruition - that may be the case and if it is then allowing
| them the same time to be refined and improved would be fair.
| I am skeptical of that being the only difference though, I
| think that chatbots are a way to, essentially, outsource the
| difficult work of locating data within a corpus onto the user
| and that users will always have a disadvantage compared to
| the (hopefully) subject matter experts building the system.
|
| So perhaps chatbots are an excellent method for building out
| a prototype in a new field while you collect usage statistics
| to build a more refined UX - but it is bizarre that so many
| businesses seem to be discarding battle tested UXes for
| chatbots.
| peab wrote:
| agree.
|
| Thing is, for those who paid attention to the last chatBot
| hype cycle, we already knew this. Look at how Google
| Assistant was portrayed back in 2016. People thought you'd
| be buying starbucks via the chat. Turns out the starbucks
| app has a better UX
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, I don't want to sit there at my computer, which can
| handle lots of different input methods, like keyboard,
| mouse, clicking, dragging, or my phone which can handle
| gestures, pinching, swiping... and try to articulate what
| I need it to do in English language conversation. This is
| actually a step backwards in human-computer interaction.
| To use an extreme example: imagine instead of a knob on
| my stereo for volume, I had a chat box where I had to
| type in "Volume up to 35". Most other "chatbot solved"
| HCI problems are just like this volume control example,
| but less extreme.
| potatolicious wrote:
| It's also a matter of incentives. Starbucks wants you in
| their app instead of as a widget in somebody else's - it
| lets them tell you about new products, cross-sell/up-
| sell, create habits, etc.
|
| This general concept (embedding third parties as widgets
| in a larger product) has been tried many times before.
| Google themselves have done this - by my count - at least
| three separate times (Search, Maps, and Assistant).
|
| None have been successful in large part because the third
| party being integrated benefits only marginally from such
| an integration. The amount of additional traffic these
| integrations drive generally isn't seen as being worth
| the loss of UX control and the intermediation in the
| customer relationship.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > the tailored browsing methods already in place are the
| results of years of careful design and battle testing
|
| Have you ever worked in a corporation? Do you really think
| that Windows 8 UI was the fruit of years of careful design?
| What about Workday?
|
| > but it is bizarre that so many businesses seem to be
| discarding battle tested UXes for chatbots
|
| Not really. If the chatbot is smart enough then chatbot is
| the more natural interface. I've seen people who prefer to
| say "hey siri set alarm clock for 10 AM" rather than use
| the UI. Which makes sense, because language is the way
| people literally have evolved specialized organs for. If
| anything, language is the "battle tested UX", and the other
| stuff is temporary fad.
|
| Of course the problem is that most chatbots aren't smart.
| But this is a purely technical problem that can be solved
| within foreseeable future.
| freehorse wrote:
| In an alarm, there is only one parameter to set. In more
| complex tasks, chat is a bad ui because it does not scale
| well and it does not offer good ways to arrange
| information. Eg if I want to buy something and I have a
| bunch of constraints, I would rather use a search-based
| UI where i can fast tweak these constraints and decide.
| Chathpt being smart or not here is irrelevant, it would
| just be bad ui for the task.
| glenstein wrote:
| There's a lot of appropriate blowback against stupid AI hype
| and I'm all for it. But I do think in many respects it's a
| better interface than (1) bad search results, (2) cluttered
| websites, (3) freemium apps with upgrade nags, as well as the
| collective search cost of sorting through all those things.
|
| I remember reading some not-Neuromancer book by William Gibson
| where one of his near-future predictions was print magazines
| but with custom printed articles curated to fit your interests.
| Which is cool! In a world where print magazines were still
| dominant, you could see it as a forward iteration from the
| magazine status quo, potentially predictive of a future to
| come. But what happened in reality was a wholesale leapfrogging
| of magazines.
|
| So I think you sometimes get leapfrogging rather than
| iteration, which I suspect is in play as a possibility with AI
| driven apps. I don't think apps will ever literally be replaced
| but I think there's a real chance they get displaced by AI
| everything-interfaces. I think the mitigating factor is not
| some foundational limit to AI's usefulness but
| enshittification, which I don't think used to consume good
| services so voraciously in the 00s or 2010s as it does today.
| Something tells me we might look back at the current chat based
| interfaces as the good old days.
| dylan604 wrote:
| at least with bad search results, you had to look at them to
| know they were bad or become used to certain domains that you
| could prejudge the result and move to the next one. LLMs
| confidently tell you false/made up information as fact. If
| you fail to follow up with any references and just accept
| result, you are very susceptible to getting fooled by the
| machine. Getting outside of the tech bubble echo chamber that
| is HN, a large number of GPT app users have never heard of
| hallucinations or any of the issues inherit with LLMs.
| jerojero wrote:
| I think you need to be careful here because you shouldn't be
| comparing chat apps to the current state of search results.
| Instead you compare it to the ideal or to the state of them
| before companies decided that instead of providing what
| people are looking for it was more profitable to provide them
| with related content that they're paid to show.
|
| We are at a moment where we're trying to figure out how to
| design good interfaces, but very soon after that the moment
| of "okay, now let's start selling with them" will come and
| that's really what we're going to be left with.
|
| In that regard, things like adblockers which now a days can
| be used to mitigate some of these defects you talk about are
| probably going to be much more difficult to implement in a
| chat-app interface. What are we going to do when we ask an
| agent for something and it responds with an ad rather than
| the relevant information we're seeking? It seems to me like
| it's going to be even more difficult to be in control for the
| user.
| artursapek wrote:
| Once it's efficient enough, you will be able to just vocally
| talk to your computer to do all of this. Text chat is just the
| simplest form of a natural language interface, which is
| obviously the future of computing.
| AlphaAndOmega0 wrote:
| >If anything the agentic wave is showing that the chat
| interfaces are better off hidden behind stricter user interface
| paradigms.
|
| I'm not sure that claim is justified. The primary agentic use
| case _today_ is code generation, and the target demographic is
| used to IDEs /code editors.
|
| While that's probably a good chunk of total token usage, it's
| not representative of the _average_ user 's needs or desires. I
| strongly doubt that the chat interface would have become so
| ubiquitous if it didn't have merit.
|
| Even for more general agentic use, a chat interface allows the
| user the convenience of typing or dictating messages. And it's
| trivially bundled with audio-to-audio or video-to-video, the
| former already being common.
|
| I expect that even in the future, if/when richer modalities
| become standard (and the models can produce video in real-
| time), most people will be consuming their outputs as text.
| It's simply more convenient for most use-cases.
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| Having already seen this explored late '24, what ends up
| happening is that the end user generates apps that have lots
| of jank, quirks, and logical errors that they lack the
| ability to troubleshoot or resolve. Like the fast forward
| button corrupting their settings config, the cloud sync
| feature causing 100% CPU load, icons gradually drifting away
| from their original positions on each window resize event, or
| the GUI tutorial activating every time they switch views in
| the app. Even worse, because their app is the only one of its
| kind, there is no other human to turn to for advice.
| notatoad wrote:
| i can't imagine that users will be interested in asking chatGPT
| to ask zillow things, or ask chatGPT to ask canva to do things.
| that's a clunky interface. i can see users asking chatGPT to
| look up house prices, or to generate graphics, but they're not
| going to ask for zillow or canva specifically.
|
| and if the apps are trusting ChatGPT to send them users based
| on those sort of queries, it's only a matter of time before
| ChatGPT brings the functionality first-party and cuts out the
| apps - any app who believes chat is the universal interface of
| the future _and_ exposes their functionality as a ChatGPT app
| is signing their own death warrant.
| echelon wrote:
| Every company should see OpenAi as a threat. They absolutely
| will come for you when the time comes.
|
| It's just like Google and websites, but much more insidious.
| If they can get your data, they'll subsume your function (and
| revenue stream).
| gapeslape wrote:
| I agree with what you are saying.
|
| I'm building a tool that helps you solve any type of
| questionnaire (https://requestf.com) and I just can't imagine
| how I could leverage Apps.
|
| It would be awesome to get the distribution, but it has to also
| make sense from the UX perspective.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _conception makes sense iff you believe in ChatGPT as the
| universal user interface of the future_
|
| Out of curiosity, why iff?
| siva7 wrote:
| 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.
| nlarew wrote:
| Who says you have to learn this? You are free to ignore it if
| it's overwhelming.
|
| I'd much rather see a thriving ecosystem full of competition
| and innovation than a more stagnant alternative.
| throwacct wrote:
| With what exactly? They are desperately trying to create a
| "marketplace" and become gatekeepers on the backs of
| developers and businesses alike. There's no innovation here.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I guess what's implied is that developers and businesses
| would innovate, not OpenAI directly.
| throwacct wrote:
| Knowing OAI's history, only big whales could survive
| being copied by the platform's owner--case in point:
| Amazon Basics. They're so big that most of the time, SMBs
| can't escape them and don't have a choice but to cave to
| Amazon's demands. Is your product successful? Great, I'll
| copy you, add the "Amazon basics" label, and start
| bombarding users with my "product".
| pkaye wrote:
| Amazon basics is a private label just like Costco and the
| Kirkland Brand. Same thing with Walmart, Target, Trader
| Joes, etc. And if these SMBs don't have to deal with
| Amazon, they will have to deal with a dozen copycats from
| China for anything that becomes a hit.
| throwacct wrote:
| Please check how Amazon Basics works and what SMBs are
| saying.
| 65 wrote:
| For me the most annoying thing is APIs arbitrarily changing
| all the time. Completely change the entire Tailwind, ESLint,
| AWS SDK, etc APIs every 6 months? Why not! Heaven forbid you
| don't touch a project for a few months, blink and all your
| code is outdated.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Welcome to technology
| esafak wrote:
| Specialize, escape, or accept.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Like "Abort, Retry, Fail"? And same as there, what's the
| difference between the first and the third? Is there a way of
| accepting a new sdk every week without specializing?
| garbawarb wrote:
| Just get an LLM to do it for you.
| alvis wrote:
| The question is, whether having UI in chatgpt a game changer,
| fundamentally?
| jampa wrote:
| As a JS developer for over 10 years who has seen multiple hype
| waves, here is my advice: You don't need to ride the first
| wave. You can wait until technology matures and see if it has
| staying power.
|
| For example, React and TypeScript were hard to set up
| initially. I deferred learning them for years until the tooling
| improved and they were clearly here to stay. Likewise, I'm glad
| I didn't dive into tech like LangChain and CoffeeScript, which
| came and went.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| LangChain has gone? I thought it was still around.
| jampa wrote:
| It's still around, but the hype has faded. Users discovered
| numerous issues with the project and began abandoning it. I
| remember one month when everyone was all, "LangChain is the
| future," and another month when the sentiment became:
| "LangChain is terrible."
|
| You can see the hype cycle's timeline in HN's Algolia
| search: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix
| =true&que...
| ajcp wrote:
| It is but I feel it's main value prop as a developer
| friendly abstraction layer has been very well solved for by
| the actual model providers themselves, while LangChain
| itself have become more bloated, clunky, and to under-
| opinionated.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| This is how I feel about Rust.
|
| The big hype wave has finished now (we still have the "how
| dare you criticise our technology bros" roaming around
| though), the tooling is maturing now. It's almost time for me
| to actually get my feet wet with it :)
| cube2222 wrote:
| You just point your AI agent at the docs and have it build the
| integration with your app for you :)
|
| On a more serious note, it remains to be seen if this even
| sticks / is widely embraced.
| apwell23 wrote:
| nothing really changed much here though. re llms nothing really
| has changed either, its mostly just scaling. there is really
| not much to learn as a consumer and app builder.
| darkwater wrote:
| Oh, I guess tomorrow when American HQs come online we will get
| some new shiny thing barely tested that needs to be deployed in
| production ASAP. Or maybe there is already something waiting for
| me in Slack...
| itsnowandnever wrote:
| this seems kinda silly, especially given their previous app store
| flop. but I'm just happy there's some spark and competition in
| tech again. it's felt like the industry has been pretty stagnant
| since web 2.0 (more stagnant than any other time in the last
| 40-50 years, anyway). but this AI stuff feels like another "1977
| Trinity" moment
|
| so, best of luck to OAI. we'll see how this plays out
| nextworddev wrote:
| Your SaaS / Business is my Tool
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| 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.
| throwacct wrote:
| This x100. This is HCI 101. I'm glad I took that class during
| my master's program. It opened my eyes to a new world.
| WillieCubed wrote:
| 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 a 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.
| throwacct wrote:
| 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.
| mirzap wrote:
| Is it just me, or does it seem odd that if you truly believed AGI
| would be achieved within a few years, you wouldn't launch an app
| store for AI apps? I don't think an app store makes any sense in
| a post-AGI world.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| OpenAI launched an App Store in Nov 2023. A 23 month turnaround
| from major feature launch, to deprecation, to relaunch is a
| commitment to product longevity that'd put Google to shame.
| AlphaAndOmega0 wrote:
| I found it genuinely impressive how useless their "GPTs" were.
|
| Of course, part of it was due to the fact that the out-of-the-
| box models became so competent that there was no need for a
| customized model, especially when customization boiled down to
| barely more than some kind of custom system prompt and hidden
| instructions. I get the impression that's the same reason their
| fine-tuning services never took off either, since it was easier
| to just load necessary information into the context window of a
| standard instance.
|
| Edit: In all fairness, this was before most tool use,
| connectors or MCP. I am at least open to the idea that these
| might allow for a reasonable value add, but I'm still
| skeptical.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > I get the impression that's the same reason their fine-
| tuning services never took off either
|
| Also, very few workloads that you'd want to use AI for are
| prime cases for fine-tuning. We had some cases where we used
| fine tuning because the work was repetitive enough that FT
| provided benefits in terms of speed and accuracy, but it was
| a very limited set of workloads.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > fine tuning because the work was repetitive enough that
| FT provided benefits in terms of speed and accuracy,
|
| can you share anymore info on this. i am curious about what
| the usecase was and how it improved speed (of inference?)
| and accuracy.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Very typical e-commerce use cases processing scraped
| content: product categorization, review sentiment, etc.
| where the scope is very limited. We would process tens of
| thousands of these so faster inference with a cheaper
| model with FT was advantageous.
|
| Disclaimer: this was in the 3.5 Turbo "era" so models
| like `nano` now might be cheap enough, good enough, fast
| enough to do this even without FT.
| kbar13 wrote:
| product roadmap was also ai generated
| helloguillecl wrote:
| Chat offers a far better experience than using Google--no more
| searching through spam-filled results, clicking between sponsored
| links, accepting endless cookie banners, and trying to read a
| tiny bit of useful content buried among ads and clutter.
|
| It has the potential to bridge the gap between pure conversation
| and the functionality of a full website.
| d4mi3n wrote:
| I'm just worried they we'll go from very obvious advertising to
| advertising that's a lot harder to spot.
|
| I can block adds on a search engine. I cannot prevent an LMM
| from having hidden biases about what the best brand of vodka or
| car is.
| helloguillecl wrote:
| I agree. But Google has gone in that direction long ago: ads
| are now harder to distinguish from genuine search results. In
| many cases, the organic results are buried so deep that they
| don't even appear in the first visible section of the page
| anymore.
| somuchdata wrote:
| Google could also have allowed invisible pay-for-placement
| without marking it as an ad. Presumably they didn't do that
| because undermining the perceived trustworthiness of their
| search results would have been a net loss. I wonder if chat
| will go in that same direction or not.
| jerojero wrote:
| Pretty sure it's illegal to present advertisement and not
| label it as such in some form.
|
| But as with everything, as new technologies emerge, you can
| devise legal loopholes that don't totally apply to you and
| probably need regulation before it's decided that "yeah,
| actually, that does apply to me".
| saberience wrote:
| What is the incentive for developers to build apps for this
| platform? I don't see any way of monetizing them at all.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| fear of missing out, as always, be the first flappy bird in the
| store.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| This is part of the fight regarding whether we will have utility
| apps inside the chat app or chatboxes inside the utility apps.
| Obviously OpenAI would prefer that they are in the driver seat
| and delegate to passive apps, while regular apps like Booking
| would prefer to be the app the user uses and to run an AI chatbox
| nested inside their own app UI, so they can swap it out etc.
|
| Convenience-wise probably this model is more viable, and things
| will get centralized to the AI apps. And the nested utilities
| will be walled gardens on steroids. Using custom software and
| general computing (in the manner of the now discontinued
| sideloading on Android) will get even further away for the
| average person.
| somuchdata wrote:
| They also released ChatKit today for building in-app chat UI
| experiences, so it seems like OpenAI is trying to make sure
| they get a larger slice of the pie no matter which interaction
| model wins.
| whinvik wrote:
| Ads. They created ads. Now (or eventually) they can charge app
| developers to be featured first for a specific use case.
| risyachka wrote:
| How else would the company sell their product? and keep people
| employed.
|
| Of course ads will be there and this is good. A bad thing would
| be if they took a bunch of traffic from google and then gave no
| way to promote your products.
|
| That would lead to companies closing and layoffs and economy
| decline.
| sumedh wrote:
| Ads was always the end goal, they have an opportunity to become
| a bigger player than Google in the ad space.
|
| Instead of the user wasting time, ChatGpt can come up with the
| recommendations.
| nthypes wrote:
| chat is the best interface for information retrieval and REPL-
| like experiences. for all the rest, chat is horrible.
| darajava wrote:
| I don't understand, what could be built with this platform that
| wouldn't be made obsolete by conceivable updates to ChatGPT?
|
| Another commenter suggested a hotel search function:
|
| > Find me hotels in Capetown that have a pool by the beach
| .Should cost between 200 dollars to 800 dollars a night
|
| ChatGPT can _already_ do this. Similarly, their own pizza lookup
| example seems like it would exist or nearly exist with current
| functionality. I can 't think of a single non-trivial app that
| could be built on this platform - and if there are any, I can't
| think of any that would be useful or not in immediate danger of
| being swallowed by advances to ChatGPT.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| There are multiple branches they are exploring. This is a more
| structured one. But they also work on Agents that load the
| website and produce clicks to do the task. Also, this requires
| hand design, but they also work on generating the gui just-in-
| time, based on context.
|
| They also have this new design gui for visual programming of
| agents, with boxes and arrows.
|
| It's going to be a hybrid of all these. Obviously the more
| explicit work done for interoperability, the easier it is, but
| the gaps can be bridged with the common sense of the AI at the
| expense of more time and compute. It's like, a self driving car
| can detect red lights and speed limit signs via cameras but if
| there are structured signals in smart infrastructure, then it's
| simpler and better.
|
| But it's always interesting to see this dance between
| unstructured and structured. Apparently any time one gets big,
| the other is needed. When theres tons of structured code, we
| want AI common sense to cut through it because even if it's
| structured, it's messy and too complicated. So we generate the
| code. Now if we have natural language code generators we want
| to impose structure onto how they work, which we express in
| markup languages, then small scripts, then large scripts that
| are too complex and have too much boilerplate so we need AI to
| generate it from natural language etc etc
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Seems wild to have an App SDK for a technology that's 1. supposed
| to free us from purpose-built APIs and interfaces, and 2.
| comprised entirely of a single textbox. Feels perhaps more like a
| MS-type strategy of standards and formal rules intended to lock
| down the extended ecosystem?
| reed1234 wrote:
| I think they want businesses to be more tightly integrated with
| ChatGPT to open up future opportunities for monetization.
| outlore wrote:
| remember when custom GPTs would just need an OpenAPI spec to be
| compatible with any existing API out there? we've been through
| this app store journey once before, maybe it's different this
| time since we now have agents and MCP
| Illniyar wrote:
| I can't understand the documentation. How are the interactive
| elements embedded in the chat? Are they just iFrames?
|
| The docs mention returning resources, and the example is
| returning a rust file as a resource, which is nonsensical.
|
| This seems similar to MCP UI in result but it's not clear how it
| works internally.
| willtheperson wrote:
| If the connector is enabled by the prompt or via a UI
| interaction, it calls your MCP server. They have created some
| meta fields your tool can respond with, one of which is
| something about producing a widget along with a field for html.
|
| In the current implementation, it makes an iframe (or webview
| on native) that loads a sandboxed environment which then gets
| another iframe with your html injected. Your html can include
| meta field whitelisted remote resources.
| spullara wrote:
| Do the examples work for any else?
|
| https://github.com/openai/openai-apps-sdk-examples/issues/1
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