OpenAI’s Clever Coding Hack with ChatGPT ‘Startup-Killing’ Agents

OpenAI is continuing its push into the application layer with ChatGPT “agents.” As we scooped this week, it plans new features that will allow users to create and edit spreadsheets and presentations, generate reports and automate tasks on their browsers—all through ChatGPT.

There was one interesting detail in that news that you might have missed. Instead of leveraging a computer-using agent that would open and click around in a PowerPoint or Excel file to insert text boxes and formulas, OpenAI’s agents will instead write code to generate a spreadsheet or presentation that looks like what the user wants.

This strategy allows OpenAI to leverage the natural strengths large language models have in writing code to avoid the slowdowns or errors that could arise from having the LLM click around in a PowerPoint or Excel document. 

It’s also less resource-intensive: Editing a PowerPoint or Excel spreadsheet directly would require ChatGPT to spin up a “virtual machine” (essentially a “virtual” computer that runs through ChatGPT). That requires more computational resources than simply writing code.