In the span of half a year, ChatGPT has become one of the world’s best-known internet brands. Now its creator, OpenAI, has bigger plans for the chatbot: CEO Sam Altman privately told some developers OpenAI wants to turn it into a “supersmart personal assistant for work.” With built-in knowledge about an individual and their workplace, such an assistant could carry out tasks such as drafting emails or documents in that person’s style and with up-to-date information about their business.
The assistant features could put OpenAI on a collision course with Microsoft, its primary business partner, investor and cloud provider, as well as with other OpenAI software customers such as Salesforce. Those firms also want to use OpenAI’s software to build AI “copilots” for people to use at work. But for OpenAI, building new ChatGPT capabilities will be the focus of its commercial efforts, according to Altman’s comments and two other people with knowledge of the company’s plans.