[Originally, I had generated an image with Gollum hoarding books and pages (hence the title), but it was too dark. I decided to go with an Oprah theme instead. You get a GPT, You get a GPT. Everyone gets a GPT! ]

OpenAI just announced GPTs in GPT-4 Turbo. This truly is a turbo accelerator. It’s a very exciting announcement as well as properly formed JSON output and repeatable outcomes with seed parameters. With GPTs, it looks like you’ll be able to easily create assistants for almost anything. The limiting factors are your imagination and your training dataset. We’ve already seen companies taking their data private or adding paywall barriers to API, like Reddit. How much further will organizations close access to data?

On the one hand, ideas and conversation and progress is advanced with open data, but many organizations see the data as a valuable commodity. How will companies balance between letting consumers interact with data and services/API interact with data? Will more companies start paywalling their content? Is this the end of an open content/data era? Will organizations be able to get their content out to consumers to grow their endeavors, but still keep control of their content when it comes to training models?

How will this affect design? Will having a virtual assistant allow for application/product owners to be a bit less rigorous in their design and UX since a virtual assistant can now guide them through their tasks? This is another form of lowering the floor and raising the ceiling. More non-pros will be able to produce somewhat “pro-level” work with the help of these assistants. Pros will save time having assistants do things for them that were previously tedious.

I am still wary of the ominous statistical median. The content outputs of these models trend toward the most statistically average response to the prompt that is fed to it. Who wants the most statistically average campaign brief? The most statistically average outfit? Is this all a big race to the middle? Maybe, sometimes “just good enough” is good enough?

Again, rambling, I haven’t gotten to my outputting my thoughts on AGI and personhood. Maybe I’ll let that stew in my brain for a bit more. To quote Johnny Five, “Need more input.”