OpenAI ChatKit
github.com
github.com
It would bear a good lock-in effect for OAI as well
They want people walking up saying "we commit to spending $100k monthly for the next year let's discuss bulk discounts."
It's particularly annoying to see these feature flags exist in the UI; the features are automated, yet they won't let you select a plan above their "Team" level plans to use them.
(Over on the API side, they're more usage based, and easy to hit the highest tier from zero within about 10 weeks, but certain "talk with support because we probably have to edit a config file we don't let the riffraff see there's a setting for" features, like flipping off a safety flag so the LLM won't refuse to analyze a contract, are similarly gated. That seems more reasonable than gating infosec.)
On the end-user app side, table stakes data security features, some of which used to be included for lower level accounts then just got toggled off, are gated behind somewhere on the order of 150 seats at greater than Max usage instead of 25 or 50 seats.
All else being equal, demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease.
by JOEL SPOLSKY, Strategy Letter V
Maybe I'm being dumb but is this a generic chat UI for openai models only? Pretty bearish on adoption of this if so. As a pragmatic dev I'd definitely not be keen to bake model lock-in into my UI for functionality as generic as chat.
Generally speaking, in most regular usages, you can replace it with an alternative provider like Openrouter, with `OpenAI( base_url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1", api_key="<OPENROUTER_API_KEY>")`
But I haven't tested chatkit yet and don't know if it might be using special endpoints that are currently only supported by OpenAI. IANAL, but would assume though that if the client is Apache licensed, then it wouldn't be an issue for Openrouter and others AI providers to develop their own versions of those endpoints.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but based on what I'm seeing with MCP and other recent developments, the industry is continuously gravitating towards a commoditized/interchangeable future where no provider has a structural moat.
With ChatKit you can proxy everything through your ChatKit API "proxy" and implement the "agentic" stuff in the proxy.
Even the React APIs look very similar.
Looks like a vendor lock-in and a way to stop the AG-UI ecosystem
MIT and no proprietary cloud/proxy service :)
We do sell a chat history service if you don’t want to manage your own database though
I'm working on https://github.com/theblazehen/react-ag-ui which implements the ag-ui protocol, however your solution looks significantly more polished. I'd be interested in potential collaboration,
Later,
> 2. Install the React bindings
So not so framework-agnostic, or am I missing something ?
> Make your window wider or open on desktop to continue
For a chat app UI?
(BTW, I had to take a screenshot then use image to text inference in order to copy that message)
But for that same reason, not sure I'd want to implement this into products since it does lock you into OpenAI, only.
Apart from that, it looks like an interesting initiative, but I fail to see what this is supposed to replace. Widgets? Customer support? I mean, sure, you can create some kind of question-answer bot, but for something more substantial, you'll need a completely different dashboard and backend. I can't see how OpenAI will accomplish this without butchering their existing UI.