OpenAI should build Slack
latent.space
latent.space
For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space.
Source: I use google chat everyday, so its not just a "UI looks ugly thing". Literally nothing you think should work works. Ex: inviting outside collaborators to a shared channel, converting a private DM group into a channel, having public channels for community & private channels for internal work. Goes on and on.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-... (2021, as the URL says)
And it's not just messaging. Google has a decades-long history of abandoning apps that don't make them billions, which means no-one with memory trusts them. Especially in their current "AI-everything or bust!" incarnation.
The praise for this monopoly is misdirected. Every single one of you, unless you're a significant GOOG shareholder, should be wanting for antitrust breakup of Google. They're putting pressure on your wages and other investments, and they're contributing to a ceiling for other startups and companies.
Google engineers are brilliant, but the corporation itself needs to be horizontally dismantled into several Googles that all compete with one another. (Not simply a vertical breakup along product lines, but rather the old-school "Ma Bell" style breakup that creates companies that then have to compete on the same offerings.)
A breakup would be good for GOOG investors too, because there's far more value locked up in the company and far too many opportunities left by the wayside.
Besides, if one does break up google, you wouldnt have those divisions running.
If there are far more opportunities left by the wayside, some one is going to out compete them, ie Slack and Teams
With the benefit of hindsight, the break up was performed in the most ineffective way you could possibly imagine.
Take a national monopoly, and convert it into seven regional monopolies, which don't compete on price or service? Then let those monopolies merge back into three companies?
Countries that addressed national telecoms monopolies with local loop unbundling and similar policies seem to have ended up with much more competitive markets.
Bell had one good side, that was Bell Labs. How was it funded? By overcharging the whole country for communications, pocketing 90% of the profit, and using the last 10% to find ways to lower costs to provide the service — cost decreases that would not be passed onto customers.
It was even worse than it is right now with the regional internet monopolies.
That was entirely accidental. There's absolutely no guarantee that any given monopoly will produce anything remotely like Bell Labs, and I don't believe that a monopoly was required to do what Bell Labs did.
This comment is as if "Attention is all you need" was never written and never funded by Google, and the cascade of related research that it inspired inside Google alone isn't considered either. The other Google accomplishments mentioned seem to be filtered to earlier than 2018 as well.
Depends of how you see it. At the moment, if you want a good productivity suit of tools, you have Microsoft or Microsoft because Google is hampered by their lackluster chat client.
People would like some competition.
This article never fails to crack me up! Arstechnica.com at its best.
https://support.google.com/meet/answer/15226472?hl=en
Google Duo was upgraded and rebranded to Google Meet in 2022. However, the legacy calling experience (previously known as Duo) was still available. Now, these legacy calls are being upgraded to Meet calls, which contain expanded features like cloud encryption, live captions, in-call chat, stackable effects, and more. To use the new Meet calling experience, update your app to the latest version. As users move over to Meet calling, some of the legacy calling features will no longer be available. In addition, any reference to what was formerly known as Duo will now show “legacy.” From September 2025, legacy calling will be replaced with Meet calling.
To me, Google Sheets is 10% of Excel on desktop (Mac), Slides are 5% of PowerPoint on desktop (Mac), and the integration between the two (copying and pasting linked charts from Excel to Powerpoint with formatting) makes it a completely non-starter to consider the Google alternatives as primary drivers.
I'm probably a power-user of both, granted, but I took for granted Sheets/Slides are still just toys compared to the real stuff, so curious if I'm missing something.
For 99% of people (sometimes we let Finance folks have an Excel license), it's more than enough. Google Apps Script is also reasonably useful, and the newer Smart Chips are a nice addition.
Even I, a definite though intermittent power user, am fine with the Google versions most of the time.
Collaboration also just feels faster in Google.
As for Slides, it's pure junk compared to the Keynote, but iCloud has it's own problems so I use this offline-only.
With the web version of Word 365 or whatever it's called, we've had so many problems syncing with OneDrive and sharing and whether it's showing the right version of the document that I'd be happy to never see it again, but their foothold in education means I'm forced to deal with it and provide technical support.
Most of my use is incredibly simple and used for project planning, inventory counting, lists of things that are split up into status/to-dos among multiple people, etc.
I've also never had a use for "Advanced" powerpoint, so the simplicity of google slides is a breath of fresh are as I only ever use the 10% most common feature set.
I actually get a bit of anxiety when someone sends me an excel sheet these days. It's usually going to be overly complex using clever methods, and that person is going to be a real pain to work with on iterating anything most of the time.
I've noted some very rare and specific times Excel is warranted though - such as our CFO creating complex financial modeling. For those uses I totally get that Google Sheets would be like working with handcuffs on.
Of course the uses of serious spreadsheets are often in finance and serious documents are in law.
How does the tracking works in Word? I've never seen this proper setup so I'm just ignorant when it comes to this. If I hear "Word" and versioning in the same sentence, I'd just assume we're talking about the doc_v1_3_final_really_final_public_feb_2024.docx naming.
Google Dou, Google Chat, Google Wave, Google this, Google that. Seemingly because someone needed a promotion and the way to do that was to create a new chat app or lead the effort for the same.
Wave was fine, I liked it for the short time it lived and I am happy that google docs carry some of its collaboration legacy.
I can’t transfer results into docs, it can’t manipulate existing docs.
I can’t even rule out that I’m doing something wrong somehow.
But it’s just frustrating to see that the teams inside of Google don’t work well together.
Why wouldn’t you ground it in knowledge and your product?
either a hello world example or an autogenerated class list with no explanations /rant
It is not ironic whatsoever that much smaller startups in much more precarious positions relative to the incumbent move very quickly to integrate with the incumbent.
Plenty of corporations much larger than Google operate out of Slack.
Google is the third largest company by market cap in the world. I suppose by "much larger" you mean number of employees? Walmart maybe?
I doubt there's many out there using slack
Company size when you're talking about tools for humans makes no sense in terms of market cap.
Plenty of companies with many more employees than Google use slack.
It's why they've been failing with GCP, Google Tables (shutdown now I guess), Analytics or any product that aims for enterprise consumption. Note: they are really good at making consumer softwares though (take the success of Google Photos or Gsearch)
They have some good people working on some good projects. If you look at the relation between software-quality of their average product and number of developers they have... yeah I don't know. Maybe hiring tons of new-grads that are good at leetcode and then forcing them to use golang... is not what actually makes high quality software.
I could believe that they are good at doing research though.
I wish these services would be rewritten in Go!
That’s where a lot of the development time goes: trying to make incredibly small changes that cause cascading bugs and regressions a massive 2000s C++ codebase that doesn’t even use smart pointers half the time.
Also, I think the outside world has a very skewed view on Go and how development happens at Google. It’s still a rather bottom up, or at least distributed company. It’s hard to make hundreds of teams to actually do something. Most teams just ignored those top-down “write new code in Go” directives and continued using C++, Python, and Java.
Rewriting a codebase in another language that has no good interop is rarely a good idea. The need to replicate multiple versions of each internal library can become incredibly taxing. Migrations need to be low risk at Google scale and if you can't do it piecewise it's often not worth attempting either. Also worth noting that java is just as prevelant if not moreso in core products.
was
While they sucked at bringing products to market and sustaining them, they indeed used to have a good reputation at software engineering. However they are burning that up in the AI pivot, though it's not yet very visible externally.
Not impossible, but it's not like they haven't tried before in the past.
It's the same with Inbox which remains the best email client I ever used but weirdly Gmail never got the core UX ideas which made it works so well. I would like to say Google doesn't get UX but clearly they have great UX designers on board. It's just that they probably never get final say and are not first class citizen.
For me, it's an issue of discipline. A lot of Google products seems to be built like R&D projects with the mindset which goes with it. They don't have the discipline to do the boring refining work that great UX requires.
1. They did the same “invite” thing they had done with gmail so you couldn’t get an account (even if you had a gmail account). They repeated this mistake with google+ also (a social network for people who work at google).
2. They basically had a working CRDT and said “you can use this for all sorts of things” (which is true) and a thin UX on it that implemented a sort of bizzaro threaded chat with document sharing and said “this will replace email” (which is blatantly untrue) and everyone was just confused.
The original gmail-integrated gchat/google-talk first released in 2005 was fabulous. If they had just kept developing it instead of repeatedly creating a new one, they would easily be the undisputed leaders in this space.
when they wanted to create new chat apps, they had a choice. do we force all of our users to move to the new app or do we figure out a way to bridge the apps. They chose to force users to move.
The problem is, when you force people to move, you also give them the chance to leave and try new things. Instead of figuring out how to make the new chat app more valuable to users it was meant to appeal to by giving them access to google's entire chat userbase without forcing anything on those users, they killed their existing user base on the hope of forcing them to move to the new app. They didn't and now google's an afterthought in the chat space.
They did the same thing with google+ in general. They had a community of committed users sharing data with each other and commenting on stories on google reader. Instead of figuring out how to leverage that user base to contribute "content" to google+ and users that would prefer to use this new interface, and thereby make that new interface more valuable, they killed google reader in an attempt to force those users to migrate to google+. They didn't and went elsewhere.
Google has repeatedly made the mistake of forcing their users to migrate from what they were used to, and every time they do they open the gates for those users to migrate outside of google.
Facebook has learned this lesson relatively well. They don't force users to migrate to Instagram/facebook or whatsapp/messenger. In the Instagram / facebook case they seem to be improving the ability of users to use their Instagram account to add content to facebook (though not in the reverse). While in the whatsapp/messenger case, they haven't forced anyone to migrate, but they also haven't had any interoperability. One would think the apps would have even more value if they could communicate with each other.
The insistence on choosing who shows up where by algorithm and "intelligence" made it impossible to create muscle memory, you had to look and/or search every time.
Google has been stuck in exactly this loop for over a decade without going all-in on a single application. They seem to launch a new chat app every couple of years with not quite as many features as the prior chat application, and slowly add features until it's time for it to be replaced by newer one still.
What exactly does Slack do that other chats don’t?
If you had to boil it down to 10 main features what is the point of this? Realtime chat seems to me to be distracting, and I much prefer threaded forums and issue trackers. But I’m willing to listen.
It was a little too early to market. Common PCs weren't quite good enough, and common Internet was very not good enough.
The UI also didn't quite help shape normal user workflows enough so it was hard for an average user to just pick it up and be productive.
---
I think I'd like to see some merger of 'checklists', 'events' (calendar / etc), and 'conversations' much more like Slack channels where each new topic is a thread / email chain.
It was a huge surprise when the whole company suddenly got notifications about chat messages in various meetings they were invited to (but wasn't participating in) as well as messages sent after the meeting was closed.
That said, I think they are on to something here and I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to make some inroads. It will take a long time though given how much of an organization's operations are running on Slack.
Eventually the culture will come around to: a) build new sh-- quickly with AI b) build a new productivity stack
Google tried to build chat/video conferencing software like 5 times now. Some of attempts were even decent. They just decided that because they instantly didn't win 100% of the market they need to close it.
> For the life of me I cannot understand why they after a decade, has let slack and teams become basically a duopoly in this space.
The only reason Teams is even in the running is it's because it is (was) added for free to the O365 suite so many execs just went "well, since we already have it..."
As a piece of software for voice chats it's okay but as piece of software for text chats it is absolutely atrocious piece of shit that learned zero lessons from anything else and refused to fix anything users actually want
We're migrating off Slack because they jacked our prices by 40% this year. Our team used Google Chat for one week and revolted.
It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack without years of investment. Even if you do, it's still an uphill battle.
Yes. For example Discord originated as a side-project for a team who were supposed to be building an MOBA. That’s why if you try to build a discord chatbot or custom command or whatever, the servers are called “guilds” etc.[1]
Slack was also developed by a team who were supposed to be developing a video game.[2]
They have the iOS Safari problem with the keyboard and body scroll, tiny icons, super busy UI. I was hoping to help some folks move off Discord to something else and Zulip is not what I would volunteer to do support for when the users are not techies. Heck, as a techie my eyes glaze over looking at it. I really wish it was slicker and more usable but it simply isn’t.
E.g. it takes a minute to open a chat on mobile, but only few seconds on the web. No idea how it's possible if they use same underlying DB.
In fact a full text search over years worth of communication is faster than loading latest DM from a specific person in a mobile app!
And not much improvement over years: few things became nicer. But mobile app was always dogshit.
There's also Discord of course, but they've recently announced their impending implosion.
> A lot of success relies on network effects and familiarity, and the product looks deceptively simple. It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack
i agree that you and i can't build one. openai can. article argues that because it can, it should.
The argument that OpenAI has the critical mass to dethrone Slack can be made for just about any other product with an 800-pound gorilla market leader. Windows, Office, Photoshop/Premier, Search, GMail, Figma, etc. Thus far, we have yet to see OpenAI build anything like these at scale, and there's no reason to assume their successes in the LLM space will translate.
I agree that they should build killer apps like these, because they are at extreme risk of being commoditized by smaller, better, faster genAI systems, but I don't think anything they do currently shows that they can.
The chain of logic in the article is explicitly spelled out as: Sam Altman said OpenAI will grow into new products -> Altman says to tell them what these products should be -> You say: Slack sucks so.... how about Slack?
I think most people, engineers or otherwise, reading the article have an understandable reaction of mostly bafflement as to why we are even talking about this, specifically, to begin with?
Mattermost team here. Agree we could have done a better job communicating. The change started in 2023 and we had made a lot of effort to work with the largest unsupported deployments early.
They were very aware of the direction ahead of the August 2025 announce. From then, there was still over a year of support during the transition: https://forum.mattermost.com/t/mattermost-v11-changes-in-fre...
Our understanding is that the organizations most impacted were those using the unsupported Mattermost commercial version, not the open source version. The commercial version of Mattermost is offered in Docker, K8, etc.
If you look into the license of the Mattermost instance you ran, what is the "Enterprise Edition" (i.e. commercial version that upgrades into paid offering) or under MIT license (open source licensed offering, bundled with GitLab omnibus)?
Slack doesn't have one "main thing" it's doing perfect. They have just all around great product, with some weaknesses here and there.
- Solid mobile app
- very good API with good SDKs
- easy to build very rich slack bots, with good building blocks
- Good notification management
- Workflows for non technical people that make automation easy
- Good level of customization
- Good enough performance
- Video/Audio calls are good enough
So when a company is questioning what tool to use Slack is an easy go-to. "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" type of tool.
Can you live without it? yeah. But do you really wanna focus on what chat platform your company should be using or just focus on your product?
So for me, we're getting tremendous value out of Slack and not once have they bothered to ask us to pay.
Their MacOS app really sucks. For months now, it's been eating up 100% CPU with some zombie process occasionally, their helpful global shortcut layover often doesn't autofocus, and their UX has never felt like it gets a lot of attention.
They lack user obsession. Altman talks a lot about going above and beyond RLHFing to get the tone just right. But it's never felt right to me.
Google Chat in the early years worked with Jabber clients. Maybe with Wave they changed the protocol? That killed any interest in Google's chat technologies for me.
Still haven't ever used Slack. My office uses Teams now. It works but it's pretty unpleasant. Gets the basic task done I guess.
We’re embarrassingly early and haven’t “launched” yet but I guess there’s some value in sharing with an audience who might be interested!
We call it “Superuser” [0], the social hub for agent tools. There’s more of a focus on the developer platform, but warning: major WIP! We are shipping huge changes and our docs are out of date...
All their integrations kinda suck though, and its not uncommon for integrations to randomly break with no discernible changes elsewhere.
Surely we can raise the bar for team chat out of hell....
And you're asking a company famously burning money building a tool that is used for vibe-coding (aka unreliable software development) to build a replacement?
Idk man.
- Reliable, both in terms of "service uptime" and in terms of "Slack isn't going to rugpull your features" - Secure. Slack don't have a history of major breaches or data exposure.
Both of these means that people feel comfortable relying on it. Who would possibly trust OpenAI with data security, or that their app will still be around in 3 years.
So, workspaces, channels, threads, voice and video calls, screen sharing, file sharing, polls/reactions to messages.
Especially given the current situation with Discord. If such a thing could even be built with any tools and mostly/partially vibe coded, then it'd reflect really positively on the state of the tools!
The problem is that if they'd try that and mess up, it'd be like Unity's own Gigaya project, which was really bad PR: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/vz1b43/gigaya_has_...
A prompt ran through a Wiggum loop over the course of a week/month and viola
Just let the agents spin. But it's not that easy, is it.
Someone that will tackle this will be competing against B dollar companies and extravagant level of features and integration. It's not as simple as a chatroom with people in it.
Google should build Windows.
Microsoft should just die.
Why it uses 400mb I have no idea.
(And of course, way back then there was an official IRC interface, too)
My comment was a response to
> Slack would be a lot better if they supported clients via rest api or similar.
Yes, this is an important detail as well.
Make a Slack clone, but have it perform way better than the original (less RAM, CPU usage), with a smaller storage footprint.
Also deliver on features faster than the original. And have those features be more tailored to what the users both want and need - and things they didn’t even know they needed as well.
This is, after all, what’s being promised, no?
If it can’t produce an executable that minimizes RAM and storage for something like Slack, are we supposed to believe it can for something more traditionally power-hungry (browsers), or storage hungry (Call of Duty, iPhone apps)?
Shouldn’t AI be on the forefront for reducing resource usage in general (not just digital resources), or is just a giant exercise in induced demand / Braess’ paradox?
Which they do because it means they can ship the same thing in many places (actual browser, cross platform OS and mobile if they're lucky).
And the 'start a thread' nazis are just too much to bear. Prediction: they will add subthreads within 3 years.
Social issues can't be solved by technical means. Just slightly incentivised in some direction (like discord's "this is the third reply, would you like a thread instead?")
But for the resource usage, ripcord https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ already proved you can have a capable client which is super light and fast if you care. This was made by a single person and in many ways is better than the official client.
Well, this was my prediction pre-easy-to-use LLMs, anyway.
Along with syntax highlighting.
I use Google Chat, only because my clients use it. Network effects matter. Personally I think it's terrible, but I wasn't a fan of Slack either but I'm not entirely sure why as it's pretty much just sending text. Maybe the opportunity to innovate in this space is UI/UX, and performance/reliability (Signal has been slow/flaky recently for us).
At the same time, I would be very surprised if companies are lining up to hand over all of their internal comms to OpenAI. Would need really strong privacy guarantees, and I’m not sure OpenAI has the goodwill to be convincing on that front.
Also, doesn’t MS still nominally have some stake in OpenAI? Would be surprised if they were chill with another competitor to Teams getting built.
Also, from the sounds of it the Ms OAI deal is in its last days.
Not sure if the author has used Teams.
But otherwise, I agree we need an actual good, adorable Slack clone. I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack, but I'm not hearing anything about their solution.
Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability.
The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support and do yet another rewrite are inane. Don't expect features you use today in Teams to work in 2 years...
You could do it with other software hosted outside the office though. There are definitely options here.
Slack has more mindshare
Yeah great for in person and email companies.
It's messier to set and maintain but it works as intended and also you can add more things to the workflow.
If you just want a URL to send json to, the new way is awful. But if you want to have more control, now you can.
Sometimes I like the PowerAutomate way, sometimes I hate it...
Slack should be emails that have been arranged into different folders - it just doesn't vibe with me for much otherwise (oo look you have 200 channels on unread - or, if you are the reverse, ooo look 200 channels with people chatting and I have to check every single one of them :(
Slack is easy to replace with something cheaper and better on a product or technical level. The network effects are strong of course, but they won't sustain it forever
Building something like Slack or Teams to the level that a F500 company would make it their primary videoconferencing solution is a multi-thousand-employee project. It's not a little skunkworks project for 15-20 people in some corner of the office.
That's why TFA is hilariously flawed. When Altman says "tell us what we should build, we'll probably build it!", he's talking about driveways and backyard pools, not the Golden Gate Bridge. It's like asking mall Santa for a summer home in the Hamptons.
Business instant messaging is electric shoulder tapping and that makes me want to punch people.
I literally feel Slack drains me every day.
They did: Google Chat. It’s bundled with Google Workspace.
It works well and there’s nothing I can think of that I want in it. It’s just a video and chat app.
On basic chat: it will sometimes scroll up when I get a new message, while I'm actively participating in that chat, so I need to scroll back down to read the new messages. Occasionally it flickers, for bonus points. It will not mark the chat as read if I'm on it without clicking on a different chat and coming back. It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy. Don't even get me started on its handling of copy/paste. I'm also pretty sure there's some joke I just don't get around the search function.
For calls: it refuses to pick the correct microphone, and will sometimes mute it completely somehow (I lose the feedback in the headphones – I have a jabra headset that does this). This will even happen when I hang up a call and start another one right away. Other times it works well. My default mic is always my wired, always connected, headset mic. I don't use BT headsets that switch from music to communications or whatever depending on what I do, which could confuse the available / selected mics.
It drains my laptop's and iphone's battery like no tomorrow, even if I turn off video and only do voice chat, even if nobody has the camera on or shares a screen. Also, on Windows, for some reason it doesn't use the native notifications, but implements its own crappy ones – but this isn't that big of an issue, since I mostly disable them anyway.
All this is happening on both the "heavy" (heh) Windows client, and on chrome on Linux, both running on a fairly beefy new PC with gobs of RAM. Fun fact: the experience was exactly the same on my 5-year-old laptop with a U-series Intel CPU, so I don't think it's a resources problem.
Use Teams in Firefox with ublock for battery issues, somehow it consumes much less.
> It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy.
That's because the typed letters appear with a large (often even ~1 s) delay. Close your eyes while typing and you'll be back on you track.
Like mate - I'm on Mac, I use CMD+n for new tabs, not windows-like shortcuts...
Does this matter? Yes, I think so for a chat first culture.
Slack started with an aggressive "bottom up" approach, they made something actually good and got to worrying about the sales part later. You don't need sales as much when companies come to you, begging you for an actual contract that fulfills their enterprise requirements, knowing that rooting you out is almost impossible.
Teams went the other way, in typical Microsoft style. Microsoft sells it bundled with all the other Microsoft things it sells. Most companies want a Microsoft contract anyway, and have an established sales relationship with MS, so adopting Teams is a lot less compliance, integration and procurement work than adopting anything else. You don't need good UI if your sales strategy isn't predicated on users choosing you for UI.
And then there's Discord, which really isn't a bad work comms app if you're small enough not to need the compliance stuff. It gives you almost everything the big apps do for free, including unlimited calls, an advanced RBAC system, as many channels / messages as you want, a decent bot API (including media streaming), good notification management, multi-server / cross-organization support etc. They're actively disinterested in selling to businesses (which is what makes them so good, the features they paywall are the features needed by gamers, not serious professionals), but that also means you'll need to eventually migrate off of it when compliance requirements set in.
Yes I understand sometimes something is better than nothing but teams is _so_ bad it causes user communities to fracture when they would previously congregate on the same platform.
Sure if deployed correctly and not by ape sysadmins with a thump of "deny everything in terms of security" I'm sure teams is a reasonable product, but in the real world, no, it's a nightmare.
https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/01/13/sl...
It's extremely against company interests to federate.
it doesn't work irl, and if you don't understand that then keep asking this question in 10 years, or even 100 years.
I can think of a few reasons that Slack could be improved upon. But a lack of AI features is not on that list. Slack is effective for async communication between humans. We don't need AI features to accomplish that, and most AI would just be annoying slop. If you are using Slack for something else, maybe AI features would help those other uses, but you also might be stretching the cases for which Slack is a good thing.
Is that what the top says?
That is a fascinating observation. We supposedly just unlocked the prometean fire, why aren't everyday things everyone uses getting better?
Clown emoji.
Slack is a really really good product because it is simple enough and works nice - performant, has just enough features but not too many and the UX/UI is good.
Its not a power tool but it gets the job done without getting in the way. You would know what I mean if you have used teams/ google chat etc.
Sure you can criticise slack for being a bit slow, not having nested threads.
For context: slack is the main app I use at work and spend a * lot * of time there.
But OpenAI _can_ beat Slack at these things if they have the technical acumen. But real differentiator comes in having an all in one platform that can help you run workflows. Recall that ChatGPT UI is fundamentally a chat box. If ChatGPT can integrate common workflows like
- send an email to a colleague for something
- schedule a meeting at a certain time
- deploy to production
- approve leaves
- create quick code changes with natural language like "change threshold to 50 in my repo"
- integration with observability and alerting
Then you don't have to leave this tool at all. There's a lot of potential here.
I frequently want to just tag GPT when using slack. Like "hey take this jira task and create a quick pull request" and it will link the pull request in the thread.
Or when my colleague asks me for a meeting, I can tag GPT with something like "hey schedule a meeting later in the day when we both have time".
The days of a single company maintaining a grip on something like workplace chat (and the inherent data) are numbered now. We're not building a C compiler.
Time will come when their subscription fee competes directly with another spend that can generate bespoke but commonplace business tools like chat with no data egress (or better yet, a demonstration that what you now keep and can act on what you previously paid Salesforce to steal.) Soon.
You got me thinking about whether a pre-send message that could theoretically appear: "Given the channel that you are currently in, this might not be an appropriate message. Would you like to reword it, have AI reword it, or send it anyways?"
This presumably would feel absolutely terrible to use, but it might be a way to nudge towards community consensus for how certain spaces would work.
What? What API costs is the op talking about?
If the company has enough grc red tape, integrating with slack can become almost impossible I can imagine
Slack is based on IRC. IRC is free and there are multiple browser clients for it. Knowing that completely takes the air out of a commercial vanity tool.
The main problem with IRC is that messages aren't stored anywhere. The classic IRC protocol simply broadcasts new messages to whoever is currently present in the channel. When you rejoin, messages are typically not replayed. In theory, a modified server could handle this, and a supported client could recognize that it's receiving playback and present it as channel history.
I wonder why we don't extend the IRC protocol in these backward-compatible ways instead of inventing new messengers/protocols.
> Slack uses AI to improve the existing product
> Slack is still marginally better, so businesses continue paying for it
> OpenAI now on the hook for maintaining one of many cheap slack clones
> Investors are left scratching their heads...
Late stage bubble behavior