Open AI might have just made the biggest strategic bet yet, and
it's not making AI smarter. They're shifting from raw
intelligence with new language model updates to moving up the
application layer to the top of the stock to try and make AI
more useful. Just this week, Open AI Dev Day
happened, and it's one of the biggest events of the year for
companies like Open AI, where they tried to sell their vision
and their new product features to developers all over the
world. And for those that have been
listening in every single week, you'll really understand and how
important it is for companies like Open AI to retain the
developer ecosystem. It always gives us a really
interesting snapshot into the future of Open AI strategy.
In today's episode, we're going to go through three of the
biggest feature releases announced during Dev day.
Whether you should even care about it, If so, what you should
know about it. And finally, what this is going
to tell us about the future of AI in the next few years.
This is in the Loop with Jack Horton.
I hope you enjoy the show. So let's start today's episode
with the App Store announcement from ChatGPT.
So what they actually launched was essentially this new feature
of apps and ChatGPT that enables you to bring third party
applications from major companies like Spotify, Zillow,
Canva, booking.com, Expedia, Figma directly inside the
ChatGPT interface. Now I think what's funny here is
that obviously they tried with GPT plug insurance that failed.
They definitely tried with the GPT store and that failed as
well. So this is their third attempt
at a platform strategy and ecosystem strategy around App
Store ideas. And it basically lets you use
the applications from ChatGPT and get the benefit of chat GBTS
intelligence and it's context it has on you and other
applications plus the third party applications context and
intelligence. And so the key innovation here
has been the deep context integration that they're
enabling or they're saying they're going to enable.
So these aren't just, you know, let's say Expedia or Zillow
embedded into ChatGPT. They actually talk to ChatGPT
and share information back and forth.
So what they launched was an app's SDK that enables
developers to build this into ChatGPT.
And it's all built on top of model context protocols.
So MCPS, which Open AI has aligned with, is an open
standard just like pretty much everyone in the industry right
now. They've launched an app
directory and apparently going to be seen bringing out
monetization features, including the Agentic Commerce protocol
for direct in chat purchases. I might cover this in a future
episode, but it's another one of those model context protocols or
agent agent protocols that are emerging, but this time to
standardise how AI systems can purchase goods via the likes of
a ChatGPT. And this all makes sense.
They've got huge distribution for 3rd party businesses and app
builders and things like that. ChatGPT has 800 million weekly
active users. The fact that that's weekly is
ridiculous. And they've got 4 million
developers building on Open AI's platform of some sorts.
And just a caveat to this, although I say building on top
of using their API, so they'll be using that API, many other
providers, but just through the API, the processing about 6
billion tokens through their APIs per minute.
To put that in perspective, that's more weekly users and
usage than TikTok ever had. And what I think is really
important to understand about this is it really showcases the
future of all software interactions because every
application in the world, whether you're AB to C consumer
product or your B to B SAS product or your fintech product,
biotech product, whatever you do, it is going to be
conversational. This is exactly what we do with
our customers. We work with B to B SAS
providers and product management and developers and designers to
enable them to quickly turn all of their technology into a
conversational interface that controls all the features, gets
context about users, takes actions in other applications.
And we see this happening in real time.
And I think this is just another major proof point along that
journey. And think about it, in many
instances or use cases, you don't want to have to visit 10
different application interfaces just to get something done.
And the demos were really cool too.
I have to say, in one, someone logged into Cosia through
ChatGPT and was able to watch educational content and courses.
And they did the same with Zillow, which for those in the
UK is the platform for people to buy and rent and sell houses.
And they also did it with Spotify.
And this follows really a pattern we've seen many times
before with big, big platform providers, you know, Facebook,
Google, Apple, iOS. And really what we can see is
that we're in step 0 right now, which is crazy competition
between, you know, 5 to 7 to 8 providers in the world with no
real winning yet. Opening eyes obviously
identified them context to memory.
And they're trying to obviously press that advantage by opening
up a third party platform through the app SDK.
But execute solution is going to be really important here.
You know, back in the day of Apple building, you know, iTunes
and platforms like that, there was many, many companies trying
to do the same, Even those that should have done a really,
really good job but failed because it felt just wrong.
It didn't feel natural. They never nailed it.
For example, Sony were trying to build the exact same all the
music producer companies in the world were trying to produce
their own version of iTunes, but they all did it just wrong.
And I felt that sometimes with chat GB TS demos, it felt a bit
gimmicky. In the demo, they asked you to
design a company logo through a chat interface, speaking to
Camber and then make a presentation deck.
And I can see it with the deck maybe, but it just felt like, I
guess weird, you know, I wouldn't go to ChatGPT to design
A logo through Camber. I would just go to Camber for
some of those tasks. I think that really speaks to
how people in the world should see this, which is that for many
use cases, it's perfect for buying and finding and
researching houses. But for many use cases, you just
want to be in deep work mode and really engage with the platform.
Now that might change over time. Chat GB TS technology might
evolve as to a point where you don't need to visit third party
providers. But what I think this speaks to
really is open a eyes bid to capture just consuming fact all
user context possible. So once users, you know,
experience Koscia with ChatGPT as their personal tutor, you
don't want to go necessary back to this standard and experience.
And ChatGPT has all the context of everything.
So the conversation running up to that, the interactions that
happened during that and after that, it's how Open AI could
become the everyday assistant by owning all interaction context.
I think this is a worthy thing to dig into and deep dive into a
little bit more with this idea of context and opening eye
trying to capture all that context.
Because apps running in ChatGPT will access all the
conversational context, they'll share information back and
forth. They'll integrate with Chat GBTS
memory feature for personalized experience across different
applications. Open IO calls is talking to apps
functionality from ChatGPT. The first time you'll see one of
these applications, ChatGPT will show a privacy policy and what
data is likely to be shared. Just like Google does.
Apps will pull contacts from your chat history and provide
personalized responses based on previous conversations.
And what we're really seeing here is them trying to be that
everyday system. But it raises really big
questions because, you know, some of this makes perfect sense
using Zillow to look at houses, then using GPT to, I don't know,
look for data such as how close is this to a good park or
school? Has there been any good
restaurants opening soon? The IRS, all that context from
your house browsing and can provide very relevant answers.
And I think once users experience this level of
contextual help, going back is going to be quite tough.
This is how open AI probably will start to really stress out
the likes of Google because although Google is way out in
front, things could change quite quickly over time.
And as I said, at Mindset, we see this all the time.
We've just launched a memory feature in beta.
Our customers are turning their applications into essentially
lots of different agents that feel like a single conversation.
And as a user, you can navigate their applications through
simple conversations and then hop into taking actions across
other applications. And so it's really interesting
how the type of technology and work we're doing alongside some
incredible companies will actually start to be further
developed and improved by the likes of Chat Chi BT bringing
out this contextual awareness feature.
And I, I assume most providers will start to do the same.
So when we combine these two worlds of our customers,
applications becoming conversational with these new
features by Chat Chi BT and soon all of the providers, no doubt
technology will increasingly just feel quite human.
Now, personally, I don't like the idea of opening and having
all this context about me. I'm not a big fan about this
idea. I'm not a big fan of my
conversation history suddenly being used as part of web
searching or the equivalent of modern day advertising as it
probably will emerge in the next couple of years.
Because the more details they have on me, the more they'll try
to sell to me. For some, they live there.
I, I always have my tin foil hat on with these things because
really we never got social media right many years ago.
And I think many of us regret the decisions or the lack of
decisions, shall I say, that were made during that time on
regulation, data protection and privacy.
Anyway, going to the third part of what I think is really
interesting here with the Dev Day release, which is agent
care. So Agent Kit is essentially an
agent and workflow builder for AI agents.
It included a visual agent workflow builder with drag and
drop workflows. I think like NAN Orchestration,
there was a chat box interface that you could put your
workflows into to test and play and access those workflows.
It came with an evaluation platform with trace grading,
which can essentially score multi step agent decisions and
ensure that it's producing relevant and high quality
outputs. They've got a connector registry
which is their objective of trying to handle enterprise
integrations, and they're also coming out the box with support
for MCP, which is fantastic. And they're teasing the release
of a reinforcement fine tuning feature for specialised agents,
so really being able to make them hyper specialised at some
use cases. I really like some of their
approaches here. It's very similar to NAN, to
Zapier, to Lindy AI. I'm yet to use the work for a
builder from Open AI, but I've used all the other main
providers that are basically the same as that Open AI set of
features and it'll be really interesting.
It reinforces something we've been saying for a long time at
Mindset, which is that anything to do, building a genetic
experiences must happen in configuration and not code.
There are many cases that you want to build in code, that's
fine. But really all an agent and a
workflow is, is a series of different prompts using
different tools and context of information at the right moment
and prompts being sent to the model to give the model context
or hyper specific context in that moment over a series of
steps. That's all that's happening.
All the magic happens in the language model layer, and we've
got a workflow builder and an agent builder.
So it's really good to see Open AI further prove our belief that
building agents should happen in configuration and not code.
But one thing that I would say here with this launch is that
it's extremely myopic and it surprises me a little bit.
To be honest, I thought that it'd been a little bit more
expansive because everything is just Open AI ecosystem only.
You can only use their models, their evaluation system, their
deployment methods. It's all locked into their
ecosystem. And although they're using some
open standards such as MCP, their proposition really is once
you're here in the Open AI ecosystem, you can't really
leave. And that makes sense given their
clear strategy of making ChatGPT into that next major
distribution platform, just like Apple did.
And it makes sense because Open AI is soon to launch their own
product features with Johnny I've so the legendary designer
behind most of the best Apple products ever released.
All this further does is try and lock people in when people don't
want that from a developer perspective, from a technology
and vendor perspective. So I think it's going to be
fantastic for internal use cases as a result, but not so much for
those that want to be able to use many best of breed systems.
It also creates this huge platform dependency problem
because what happens then is these platforms open everybody
up to cool exciting things to attract customers and developers
with great distribution and new features and tools.
But they just gradually close things down.
Whether that's reducing organic reach on social media, whether
it's increasing higher and higher revenue cuts like the App
Store or just building competing first party products like
Facebook did with the games. And it minds that almost all of
our customers want to be able to use best of breed systems.
They don't want to be locked in. Nobody knows what the next 10
years will look like. So you want to be able to build
and create value over time and you not have to RIP something
out because you're locked into an approach.
Anyway, let's let's conclude and summarize, I guess what we've
been talking about. I think really there's been a
bunch of nuclear features from the App Store, agent builder,
workflow builder, new contacts being shared to companies that
build on ChatGPT. And what we're really seeing
here is an operating system war. Open AI is trying to own all
interactions between humans and systems.
And no doubt Google or Microsoft and Apple are going to respond,
especially given that I've heard that Apple is looking to replace
Tim Cook as CEO. So we're looking at this big
platform battle that will shape how we interact with technology
over the next few years. And I, for one, I'm really
interested in how this all plays out.
And I think what I've really been pleased with here is that
this dev day by Open AI will only further open the world up
to building agentic technology and systems and testing it out
for themselves. Anyway, that's it for this week.
I hope you enjoyed the show and I'll see you next week.