The Beginning of the Everything App

Welcome to edition #9 of the “No Longer a Nincompoop with Nofil” newsletter. The biggest update to ChatGPT was released recently and I don’t say this lightly, it is going to completely change the way we use the internet forever. Strap in.

Here’s the tea ☕

• ChatGPT is no longer alone 😶

• Google is drowning 🌊

• JARVIS is here 🤖

The Internet of tomorrow

When ChatGPT was released four months ago, it was “simply a chatbot”. Clearly it had lots of potential considering it became the fastest app to hit 100 million users ever. But I’m not sure anybody saw this coming.

You see ChatGPT was great at having conversations and writing poems or code, but it didn’t actually know anything, like what the time was, or how the weather was like. It couldn’t see your calendar or make an appointment for you, it didn’t even have a memory more than a few thousand words. That’s no longer the case. The folks at OpenAI have created ChatGPT plugins, a way for ChatGPT to interact with any other application and use its powers on top of its own. You might be wondering, well that sounds good but how powerful can that really be? Let me show you.

This is real data. That’s a real restaurant, a real recipe and a real order to buy ingredients. ChatGPT is being given the power of any and every single application. OpenAI is essentially building an app store for ChatGPT plugins, with any and every app capable of having AI superpowers added to it.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this very well could be bigger than both the Google and iOS app stores. Not only because of cool AI features, but because you can connect your own app to any other app and have AI do anything with them. This has very serious and very real implications for the future of technology and the internet as a whole. Lets dive into them.

The Death of Search

For decades the way we’ve interacted with the internet has been through search engines and for the majority of the 21st century we’ve had Google. It’s a very simple process. You type what you want to search and Google returns all the relevant results from things other people have posted online, and some of the top links will be ads people have paid for. For years there was no alternative so people didn’t complain, I mean, how could we? There was no other way to search.

But what if there was? What happens when you can just get the entire answer in one go, all at once, to absolutely anything? No sifting through multiple sites and ads to find the exact answer. No need to read blogs to understand concepts and link answers together. What if the internet knew exactly what you wanted and gave it to you on a silver platter.

Google is hedging their bets that people wont pay to use a service like this. I think they’re wrong. Google has lived in this fantasy land of ever growing margins and practically zero competition for over a decade. Will Google become obsolete? Highly unlikely. All they need to do is acquire a competitor of OpenAI and make it open source and accessible, just like they did with Android.

But the real question is how will Google adapt to this technology? How will they adapt their ad model (which accounts for 80% of their entire revenue) when people won’t be clicking on ad links anymore? Why go through a website when AI can do it and retrieve the answer for you. The way we use the internet is about to fundamentally change, and Google, well they are far, far behind the ball on this one.

JARVIS

You know in Iron Man when Tony Stark gets his robot assistant Jarvis to do all kinds of things for him like manage his entire calendar, or assist with his research, run his security systems, provide real-time information on his surroundings etc. ChatGPT plugins give us this power. We will literally have a personal Jarvis to use whenever we want. Need to book a flight? Plan a holiday? Buy a meal? Send an email? Manage an entire business? Do pretty much anything on the internet? AI can do it for you. This is where we are headed.

Oh and see all that typing? We won’t be doing all that nonsense, we’ll be talking. Can you imagine if Siri had half the brain ChatGPT has? It’s okay Siri, you’ll get there eventually.

The next evolution of Software

You might be thinking that actually connecting an app to ChatGPT must be so complicated. Nope. OpenAI have made it so easy to create an application that the main programming language you need to know is plain old English.

The common question people have always had is “Can we build this?”. That question won’t exist for much longer. If you know and understand the problem, AI will build the solution. All you need to do is ask (say please just in case).

There is a lot I haven’t covered in this newsletter, particularly the economic implications of such a technology. I hope to cover them in a future edition.

I’ve also curated a list of new technologies and news within the Movies, Video, Photography, Music and Gaming industries. You can check the reddit thread here.

As always, Thanks for reading ❤️

Written by a human named Nofil