Apps SDK

The GPT App Store (which is technically now obsolete with this SDK) was funny.

Are they still expecting us to get paid based on “revenue sharing”?

Hey don't sell them short, they also delivered a TikTok clone with vertically integrated slop generation. It's the 5D Chess path to AGI, they just need to rot the average human brain until the bar for super-human intelligence is reduced to an attainable level.

mcp was a dud

Phind is awesome. I often forget to use it until legacy search engines fail to surface what I’m looking for after a dozen searches. Phind usually finds it.

That said, I used it a lot more a year ago. Lately I’ve been using regular LLMs since they’ve gotten better at searching.

Given there is already a MCP-UI project, I’m not surprised it can be done. But even that I’m not very convinced that it’s the right approach. After all, it’s still far too slow for real usage…

The problem is not the limitations of the capabilities per se but their discoverability (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverability). The user doesn't know what the capabilities are, as they are added and -- infuriatingly -- removed. Google Assistant is a perfect example of this.

Conservational user interfaces are opaque; they lack affordances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

Ah, that’s interesting. I’m considering building something similar for our product, and my solution to the schema constraints you mentioned thus far is breaking my widgets into blocks as universal as possible, as to still be useful. All of this is just ideas yet mind you, but my thinking was—maybe I can get the model to pick from a range of composable widgets depending on the task that are interoperable?

For a concrete example, think a search result listing that can be broken down into a single result or a matrix to compare results, as well as a filter section. So you could ask for different facets of your current context, to iterate over a search session and interact with the results. Dunno, I’m still researching.

Have you written somewhere about your experience with Phind in this area?

> If those features aren't supported by the widget's hard-coded schema, you're out of luck as a user.

Chat paired to the pre-built and on-demand widgets address this limitation.

For example, in the keynote demo, they showed how the chat interface lets you perform advanced filtering that pulls together information from multiple sources, like filtering only Zillow housers near a dog park.

That’s solved by MCP though. You can update your MCP’s servers schema dynamically without ever having to touch the app itself but the app will be aware of the new schema.

I know that AG-UI from copilot kit is in this space. But it hasn't worked well with the MCP model AFAIK

deploying an app to 700M people?

Lmfao..you've reminded me of the phone they made with HTC that had a Facebook button .

Which post was that?

counterpoint: a lot of people around me just type "zillow" in google to access it, so maybe it's not absurd to refer to it by name in a chat interface

I feel like we're rehashing the debate around whether or not a GUI or terminal is more powerful.

For a large number of tasks that cleanly generalize into a stream of tokens, command line or chat is probably superior. We'll get some affordances like tab auto completion to help remember the name of certain bots or mCP endpoints that can be brought in as needed...

But for anything that involves discovery, graphical interaction feels more intuitive and we'll probably get bespoke interfaces relevant to that particular task at hand with some sort of partially hidden layers to abstract away the token stream?

Talking about monetization strategy, there is a world where we would not have to remember "Zillow" or "Spotify", and instead ask for real state or music related actions, and have OpenAI "decide" for us what is "the best" options... As in "the option that paid the most to get promoted".

Very much agreed. I think the dominance of the chat interface to LLMs has materially impaired the general usefulness of these tools — the sooner it goes away the better. It’s almost impossible to explain to a non-engineer how the illusion of a continuous conversation is crafted through context management and why past moments in a conversation might fall out of memory. My general advice to non-technical friends is to create a new conversation for each prompt so that they can get a more deterministic sense of how to formulate instructions and which are successful.

I was really hoping Apple would make some innovations on the UX side, but they certainly haven’t yet.

Ye, that's basically an MCP server, that can be used by ChatGPT.

This is not just branding, MCP is an implementation detail; the product is chatting with apps.

> This means OAI won't need ads.

Ads are defenitely there. Just hidden so deeply in the black box which is generating the useful tips :)

> This means OAI won't need ads. Just rev share

If OpenAI thinks there’s sweet, sweet revenue in email and calendar apps, just waiting to be shared, their investors are in for a big surprise.

A platform requires a user moat or unfair advantage. Having a better quality model is neither

> This means OAI won't need ads. Just rev share.

They obviously want both. In fact they are already building an ad team.

They have money they have to burn, so it makes sense to throw all the scalable business models in the history, eg app store, algo feed, etc, to the wall and see what stick.

Don’t they already have ads? I think I’ve seen sponsored results when asking for product recommendations. Maybe misremembering tho.

When the iPhone came out, there were like 6 apps, and no app store.

In 2024, iOS App Store generated $1.3T in revenue, 85% of which went to developers.

what's their moat that you refer to?

This is nonsense. Why would they destroy the incentive to get real-time, live data and MCP actions that help their users?

Connecting these apps will, at times, require authentication. Where it does not require payment, it's a fantastic distribution channel.

[injected with guerilla ads]

I don't see how this is a significant upgrade over the many existing hotel-finder tools. At best it slightly augments them as a first pass, but I would still rather look at an actual map of options than trust a stream of generated, ad-augmented text.

I would not want to use LLMs for such a thing like that. Something like SQL queries or other kind of computer codes would be better. You would have to read the documentation, but it can be specified more precisely and more accurately. If you have a local program that can manage these queries (and then convert them to the remote service's format; a service could provide a file to specify the schema and the estimated cost of different fields) and interact with multiple services (including local files), then that will be better, without having to worry about problems with OpenAI, require as much power that OpenAI uses, more privacy violations than is necessary, etc.

However, it might be useful for people who do want to use that instead.

I think the future is that models will not be able to answer that well, because sites will move to protect their data/content.

Instead, the model will provide you with a list of (in chat) “apps” that can fulfill your request. SEO becomes AISO (AI Search Optimization). Sites can partly expose data to entice you to choose them.

We've actually got systems that can understand English now. Chatbots don't have to be glorified regular expression matches or based on inferior NLP. I've thought more than once that the true value of LLMs could well be that they essentially solve the language comprehension problem and that their ability to consume language is relatively underutilized compared to our attempts to get them to produce language. Under all the generative bling their language comprehension and ability to package that into something that conventional computing can understand is pretty impressive. They've even got a certain amount of common sense built in.

Do people even want chatbots for events?

I personally prefer well curated information.

Sure absolutely NO difference this time. Say it 100 times and maybe reality will change.

Chatbots with and without GPT is like comparing a car with round vs triangular wheels

You can’t think of anything that’s changed in the Chatbot space since 2018?

The apps can send any arbitrary HTML / interface back though.

e.g. Coursera can send back a video player

It's not just as ChatGPT as the interface. It's that Chat with AI will now be the universal interface and every tech company will have their version of it. Everything you want to do will happen in one place. Cards will provide predefined and interactive experience. Over time you'll see entirely dynamic content get generated on the fly. The user experience is going to be one where we've shrunk websites to apps and apps to cards or widgets. Effectively any action you need to take can be done like this and then agents can operate more complex workflow in the background. This is probably the interface for the next 10 years and what replaces the mobile app experience and stronghold that Apple or Google have. This lasts until fully immersive AR/VR become a more mainstream thing. At that point these cards are on a heads up display but we'll be looking at something totally different. Like agents roaming the earth...

Is it? Honestly, most agents and/or ai apps I interact with that are actually useful present some form of chat-like interface.

I’m not very bullish on people wanting to live in the ChatGPT UI, specifically, but the concept of dynamic apps embedded into a chat-experience I think is a reasonable direction.

I’m mostly curious about if and when we get an open standard for this, similar to MCP.

I suspect there are many, many things for which chat is a great interface. And by positioning ChatGPT as the distributor for all these things, they get to be the new Google. But you're also right that many domains for which a purpose-built interface is the right approach, and if the domain is valuable enough, it'll have someone coming after it to build that.