ChatGPT’s ‘iPhone Moment’ Poses a New Threat to Google

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Just as we were getting used to the idea of ChatGPT writing emails and conducting research, OpenAI has upgraded it with capabilities that make it even more of a threat to big tech companies such as Google. ChatGPT's new plugins, released last week with relatively little fanfare, are a major leap forward for the technology.

In a nutshell, it is going from merely generating text to taking action on the web, turning it into the type of powerful virtual assistant that Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Apple Inc. have been trying to build for years.

ChatGPT's plugins allow businesses to essentially plug the tool into their own systems so that it can do things like search proprietary datasets or even carry out tasks like booking a restaurant, or writing and executing code. There are serious potential risks from this, but in the corporate game of technological one-upmanship, OpenAI has created a daunting new front against the incumbents.

That's because for the plugins to work, users have to visit the website of ChatGPT itself, according to demos of the new system. For instance, American users of ChatGPT will soon be able to go to the tool's main page and select the plugin for Klarna Bank AB, a payments facilitator for thousands of brands like Nike Inc. and Gucci. Once they select Klarna, they could ask ChatGPT to make product recommendations for a gift for their sister. Thanks to the powerful language model underpinning ChatGPT, known as GPT-4, they can give the kind of detail they'd share with a human retail employee, laying out at length how their sister loves movies and kayaking and is in their 30s, for instance. ChatGPT can then make the recommendation.

“We have a proprietary database of tons of products that ChatGPT can structure,”