Canvas
openai.com
openai.com
Due to medical reasons, I’m on daily medications that heavily impact my cognitive abilities. This is combined with chronic pain, which affects every aspect of my life. Thinking, energy, stress etc. This has made everything harder. In fact it was suspected/suggested at one point, that I would never return to the workforce, though luckily this did not come to pass.
While I still retain my knowledge and can learn new skills, brain fog and exhaustion from my physical symptoms have made it difficult to communicate as effectively as I once did, which is particularly frustrating since communication was prior to these issues, my biggest strength. Now, I often struggle to express my ideas in a clear, digestible manner. It's very difficult to gather all my thoughts in the one place coherently for complex topics.
To assist with this, I use ChatGPT with Canvas as I guess a structured editing tool. I input my content and research, organise it to the best of my ability, and ask for feedback to refine the presentation. Clarifying structure, reducing redundancy, and improving flow. I don’t ask or let it insert data about the topic itself, I ask only that it modify how my data is communicated.
It’s a bittersweet solution, but I would say that it's helped me remain employed, which is important, because I have a lot of ongoing medical costs.
Difference appears to be it's now available for free users.
sama announcement here:
https://x.com/sama/status/1866555731149045990
canvas is now available to all chatgpt users
Canvas is a new way to write and code with ChatGPT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732634 - Oct 2024 (679 comments)
(Edit: submitted title was "OpenAI releases Canvas" - forgot to mention that we reverted that)
On that vein, it seems like every time OpenAI launches something it becomes table stakes for all the other players. I have no idea how Mixtral or any of the smaller companies will compete long term.
They know that the UX wrapper is likely going to be their only differentiator and want to build the walls of their garden as fast as possible.
If Google/Microsoft adds these features to Docs/Word— why would you use Canvas to write documents instead of the proven office software you and everyone you work with already uses? The biggest differentiator for OpenAI becomes again in this case the quality of the AI.
EDIT: on this note, Apple's approach of commoditizing AI writing tools to the OS-level is also interesting. If AI writing tools are available on every text-box, there's no new product in building a new AI-powered text-editor.
Admittedly, I also remember it being how you described before so it could be new.
Better link: https://openai.com/index/introducing-canvas/
Think "here's a schema for some internal API, write me a tool that lets me put in a product ID and see the number of purchases, chargebacks and returns for that product over time, on graphs, also provide sortable by-country tables for these stats".
With artifacts, software goes from something you make once and use for a long time, to something you make at need, to do exactly what you need and no more, and then immediately throw away once it has served its purpose.
Don't ask it how to solve a problem for you, instead write out the solution in plain English, provide an API for it to fill in, and let it write out the solution with unit tests.
This guy [https://x.com/PrajwalTomar_] has been exploring workflows that involve using ChatGPT to assist in creating a Product Requirement Document (PRD), then using V0 by Vercel for mockups and bringing it all together using Cursor, maintaining continuity with markdown documents (.md) of the PRD and relevant database schemas etc inside the project to maintain continuity.
However, I do use copilot+vscode with claude 3.5 and the "Edit with Copilot feature" where it takes my open files, plus any other context I want to give it, to drive changes to my files, has been surprisingly good. It's not really a time saver in that the amount of time I spend verifying and fixing or enhancing the result isn't really faster than me just writing it myself, but I still find benefits for brainstorming, quickly iterating on alternate ideas and smaller refactors, and overcoming the "get started" hesitation on a seemingly complex change. I'm to the point where it can absolutely add tests to files using my existing patterns that are well done and rarely need feedback from me. I have been surprised to the see the progress because for most of the history of LLM I didn't find it useful.
It also helps that I work in a nodejs/react/etc codebase where the models have a ton of information and examples to work with.
There's a checkbox you can toggle so that Openai doesn't use your code to train their models.
And I find the "chatbot" experience different and better than aider/copilot. It forces me to refocus on the really useful interfaces instead of just sending everything, and makes it better to verify everything instead of just accepting a bunch of changes that might even be correct, but not what I exactly want. For me, the time spent verifying is actually a bonus, because I read faster than I can type. I think of it as a peer programmer who just happens to be able to type much, much faster and doesn't mind writing unit tests or rewriting the same thing over and over.
In the edit experience I am using, the LLM provides a git style changelog where I can easily compare before/after with a really detailed diff. I find that much more useful than giant "blobs" of code where minor differences crop up that I don't notice.
The other massive drawback to the out-of-codebase chatbot experience (and the Edit With Copilot experience IS a chatbot, it's just integrated into the editor, changes files with diffs, and has a UI for managing file context) is context. I can effortlessly load all my open files into the LLM context with 1 click. The out-of-editor chatbox requires either a totally custom LLM with various layers to handle your codebase context, or you have to manually paste in a lot of context. It's nonsense to waste time pasting proprietary code into OpenAI (with no business agreement other than a privacy policy and a checkbox) when I can get Copilot to sign a BA with strict rules about privacy and storage, and then 1-click add my open files to my context.
Folks should give these new experiences a try. Having claude chatbot integrated into your editor with the ability to see and modify your open files in a collaborative chat experience is very nice.
I use the tab auto-complete and the composer functionality very often.
I am using windsurf which is similar, they have a two week trial which can give you an idea if it would be useful to you or not.
Maybe I’m old fashioned but I loathe video updates without a companion text version.
It seems to boil down to:
- You go to where the AI is (which is what this is, and the other web/app interfaces)
- The AI comes to you (Cursor is a good example of this, everything from Microsoft is probably a bad example of this, Apple...i haven't tried yet)
I'm not sure if there is one clear winner, and certainly I tend to switch between the 2, depending very much on the context of what I'm doing.
One area that appears to be less advanced than I expected is search. We have Gemini mixed into the Google search page, and an explosion of AI generated content on webpages, making the traditional search experience even worse. I haven't even touched openAI's search, Im not sure why, is it good?
Where's my utopian dream of AI providing me with the exact information I'm after, and can trust, without having to fall back to ad infested websites and needing to open 1000 browser tabs to piece together the information I want.
ChatGpt and Claude are already on your desktop and working on connecting directly with your computer. Those features are in beta though, they will be coming to compete with AI Code Editors.
You can use it for improving documents. You interact with ChatGPT on the left panel. You see the document on the right panel including the editorial comments by ChatGPT.
You can also use it for running and debugging Python code. You interact with ChatGPT on the left panel. You see the code and the console messages/errors/output on the right.
Demo video url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ0ImE41pVs
On the flipside, it only shows formatted text, it won’t render anything if you’re working with code.
Not limited to Python code.
Ostensibly they could add other platforms/languages that have wasm implementations.
Obviously this is a lot more refined than the rather simple playground interface of GPT3.5 that they eventually discontinued. But it feels a lot like going back to the roots, with the benefit of many of the lessons learned over the last two years.
Using chatGPT's iPhone app I am able to have an entire back n forth full conversation with it and able to get things done. Soon GPT will have vision AI and can discuss/work with what it sees or I show it. Apple Intelligence and Siri won't offer what I discuss here til Spring 2026. That gives competitors time to create and release an awesome new phone experience!
I'd drop iPhone for a GPT (Microsoft) phone/ device quickly!
*Slightly off topic but hoping it's one of Open AI's announcements ;-)
> Review code: ChatGPT provides inline suggestions to improve your code.
The minute they switch to API is the time their userbase realizes that OpenAI neither has the best model nor the most cost-effective one nor the fastest one.
So, their business strategy is subscription and bundle a bunch of products and market it to the mass.
They have a brand "chatGPT" recognition and they'll milk that.
Sam is more of a Steve Jobs than a Bill Gates personality or at least wannabe
As for model's quality they are both impressive. I haven't run meaningful comparison tests.
I would suggest this may be the case.
> The difference is they don't create free accounts for personal emails.
I'm using a personal account for free just fine, as are many in my circle.
I am running unlock origin and privacy badger, but they don't block much of anything there.
I haven't noticed it lately, but that's because I've switched to almost exclusively Claude usage as of late.
PopOS, 22.04 Firefox Also 64GB of total RAM.
Is this because Github mostly uses OpenAI models under the hood anyway?
I was trying to write a technical document.
Very clunky user experience. The AI felt like an annoying collaborator who took control when I was trying to do my job and didn’t obey when I asked it to do stuff and the basic markdown editing options were missing.
Switched to another non AI editor and got the job done quick.
Having said that, I like the idea and would use, but I do not want to ask AI to do find and replace. If they can flesh this out and improve it and make it "writer first, AI second" instead of "AI first" then it might be worth using.
I tried it out a few weeks ago and it was extremely buggy. I'm curious how it has been for others.
That said, it only worked for me maybe 70% of the time. It would either have trouble finding things, or it would just arbitrarily rewrite the entire document, even when it was supposed to be focused on a certain part of it.
my attention instead is focused entirely on open source models and its competitors which are already pulling ahead without the need for fancy announcements.
Lastly, I really despise Sam for trying to cash out his non-profit RSUs and Elon Musk will most certainly prevent that from happening. While I'm not a grok simp or pay for X, I can already see OpenAI losing relevance.
For example announcement from Deepmind vs Sam's expressionless interviews has different energy.
It's simply incredibly good.
I couldn't care less about no profit.
They came out with a revolutionary chatbot that provides actual value. A few months later, every single company starts pushing their AI offerings (Gemini, Apple Intelligence, Grok, AI this and AI that). Sam and Co needs to compete.
> abusing the charity laws while making billion-dollar for-profit deals with Microsoft and defense contractors.
Who cares? Compute costs aren’t going to pay for themselves and money doesn’t grow on trees.
If they become ClosedAI, so be it. I’m still buying their stuff.
Who cares that a 501(c)(3) formed a shadow corp that's making multi-billion dollar deals with Microsoft and defense contractors, put a former NSA chief on its board, has stopped releasing all weights, and is scraping the entire Internet (and probably all your PII) to train its models in direct contravention of their mission statement to only do things that benefit humanity? Well, intelligent people care about that. The question you should be asking yourself is why don't you care?
You can access intelligence for free, isnt that open?