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Comment by person3 | Hacker News Reader

This is new to me, so I might be wrong, but I don't get why they share revenue with the creators of these GPTs. They are basically just prompts that consist of a few sentences. There's no value add, and the more ChatGPT improves the less prompting will be required. These GPTs feel closer to bookmarks than an actual program.

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GPTs are apps. They are a prompt, files (up to 10 files, 200 MB each, automatically indexed into a vector DB) a Linux VM that can run code based on prompts or code you attach, can call any web API—-I made a gmail one for myself—and have access to GPT-4V, DALL-E, and Bing Search. You can mash all that up in really creative ways, then press one button to publish and get a link you can share.

The VM can easily do things like image and audio processing, ffmpeg, generate Office docs, etc.

You don’t have to run a server or pay any operating costs for them, just the $20/month ChatGPT Plus subscription.

What does your “Gmail” GPT do and what do you use it for?

I haven’t done much with it yet but it’s fun to play with.

So far one thing that was nice is “look up the tracking number for the thing I just bought”

I’ll probably play around with Bard’s gmail integration to find more use cases.

Is that the sort of thing they would actually let you publish? Seems like inexperienced users might wind up really screwing up their inbox.

You pass an open api spec on creation. You can remove all methods you fear may be risky, and leave it enough so that he can read your emails or calendar, if you feel comfortable with that

OpenAI would probably let you publish it (they have no review process today) but Google probably wouldn’t.

I don’t care though because I’m making these for myself.

mind sharing the code? just for curiosity. keen to improve my email productivity.

The crazy thing is there is no code! The instructions are just “you are a helpful email assistant. You search the user’s gmail in response to their questions” and you just paste in the OpenAPI spec and OAuth details for gmail into the GPT maker form. I asked GPT-4 to write the OpenAPI spec for the gmail API’s necessary to search my inbox.

ahhh i assumed there was some custom coding required for the OpenAPI spec

How did you give it access to your inbox? Does it use the Code Interpreter with the Gmail API, and ask for your credentials, or something?

GPTs support OAuth and tokens, it just asks you to sign in the first time you use it.

Why do you need gpt to find the tracking number? Gmail has pulled out tracking numbers in emails for years.

You can use it as part of a larger query. Like “look up my tracking numbers and render them in a table with delivery date and current location” or “plot them on a map” or whatever.

What does your integration with gmail do?

> They are basically just prompts that consist of a few sentences. There's no value add, and the more ChatGPT improves the less prompting will be required. These GPTs feel closer to bookmarks than an actual program.

So basically every ChatGPT wrapper startup

Exactly why the existential panic those startups experienced when this was announced

Not all GPTs are just prompts. You can create GPTs that include uploaded content or code.

A GPT I created for my own use invokes a Python function to do something GPT-4 cannot do itself.

Other GPTs include knowledge bases.

Can you share your use case with the Python function?

The first line of my prompt is:

  Create a diagram in mermaid syntax based on what the user asked. Pass the code to the create_mermaid_link function below to get a link to Mermaid Live. Display the clickable link to the user.

The prompt has more detail that tells it what types of diagrams to prefer, what types of escaping to use, how to order lines etc.

The file I uploaded contains the create_mermaid_link() function, which relies on being able to base64 encode a string.

These people are able to find customers that OpenAI might not have found and bring that revenue to OpenAI. Looking at the ads I see for these products on twitter, I suspect the average user of these products is so non-technical as to be unaware that they could just use ChatGPT.

Whether something is worth paying money for isn’t just about how technically difficult it is. Time is money. If it takes me a day to figure out how to configure a thing, that’s time I could’ve spent on something else.

As for why OpenAI would pay people to create them, it’s simple: expand the ecosystem.

For a counterexample, see Cauldron in the above repo. It looks like a lot of work and refinement went into that.

GPTs have:

1. Custom prompts 2. Knowledge 3. Actions

You are talking about only 1) here.

> there’s no value add

That’s for the customer to decide. They increase overall revenue, that’s why revenue is being shared.

There's a huge opportunity here for a rugpull - Give people a small revenue-share to do your market research for you, swoop in with your own app and better tuned model when you figure out what applications are possible.

That's like arguing there's "no value" in a business that sells pizza.

I mean, anyone can just make their own pizza. Where's the value in someone else doing it for you?

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