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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

The point is that the interface to Bloop (or whatever 3rd party SaaS product) is just plain text. In programming parlance I would call this a facade [1] on top of GPT-4. The benefit is that you, the end user, can just continue typing things like "Where do we create our database pool?" in a search box, but under the covers Bloop can use GPT-4, but then eventually upgrade to GPT-5, GPT-6, or some other much better currently-super secret competitor version.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facade_pattern

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Agreed that may be the case but all OpenAI needs to do is release a nice UI for GPT and they've suddenly pushed these SaaS out of the market. Why fund miners over the companies making pickaxes?

That takes time and money on OpenAI's behalf. Alternatively they can aquire Bloop after Bloop does all the leg work of integrating their niche with chat GPT. But I agree its a tenuous place to be in as an investor / employee / cofounder of a startup that is at OpenAI's mercy. This model of relying on another vendor's product to base your own saas product on has worked in the past, and it has also failed in the past.

That will probably happen. But it will take some time. Twitter did that. At first they were super open let everyone build apps, then they started blocking and copying the most popular ones, or acquiring them.

However, the companies will probably soon be able to switch out the LLM they are using, so potentially they could use Google’s PaLM, or Facebook’s Llama, or some open source LLM, who knows.

They can also fine-tune the models for just-your-data, so that the responses for you are better than just using a general LLM.

I think the key is that OpenAI wants to focus on building AGI and not waste time appeasing users requests for UX shortcuts for GPT powered code search. Sure, they can hire an extra team to manage the user's requests for UX, but at that point they're moving away from their target goal.

or a few iteration down ChatGPT will create that UI too. In the future it will not be a "boring" text chat but an interface that always morphs into the specific task you are asking it about.

Except in the case of GPT-x, the facade builder must take extra pains to sanitize the inputs, so it doesn't become just a free GPT account for the user to interact with on unrelated topics. That's much more challenging due to the open nature of the prompts (the selling feature). One really lame solution is to ask the user to use their own openai API key.

I don't think that is a lame solution, it would work pretty well if OpenAI had better key management, especially spending limits per key.

If you're forcing your user to get their own OpenAI account, you're pushing them away from your product, at least somewhat. IMO the integration needs to be seamless for the illusion of "we're providing value here, not just wrapping GPT" to hold.

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