Inspiration
We started with a simple north star: Whatever we made should be something that would go viral if OpenAI tweeted: "ChatGPT can now do X".
We identified two main ways to do this:
- Discoverability: Creating a plugin that seamlessly fit into existing workflows
- Extreme Novelty: If it doesn't fit into existing workflows, it needs to be so novel, people who don't even use ChatGPT will see it and want to use it.
Going for discoverability would have been the easier route, but we like a challenge, and so we've created something that leans into the creative aspects of LLMs to create a truly unique experience, and we're excited to share it with you
What it does
It gives ChatGPT a set of personalities.
Unlike most plugins it starts working its magic from the first prompt, without being called.
Plugins are going to increasingly make ChatGPT multi-modal. However, enabling multi-modal behavior needs to be done in a natural way for users. A calculator is expected to be cold and calculating, but once we start to rely on ChatGPT to do things like shop and recommend plans, it needs to have a personality that aligns with the user.
CharactersGPT benefits users by taking on this challenge, and making them align with characters users already know and love.
It also benefits brands by bridging the gap needed to turn ChatGPT into the next big platform for marketing. We see OpenAI's plugin play at least in part as inserting ChatGPT at the heart of most commerce. Imagine being able to cut through the Christmas noise by having families shop with Spiderman, picking out toys and clothes that feature everyone's favorite web-sliner
How we built it
We built it with a focus on UX.
Most plugins do not work until explictly called, we came up with a unique strategy that allows us to define alignment with the same level of importance as OpenAI's seed prompts.
Some plugins slow down the chat interface with large description prompts (we quickly realized that a longer description can easily double the startup time of the chat interfacee)
We also realized many plugins don't take care to not interfere with the usage of other plugins. Since ours is playing at enabling the next level of the plugin platform: turning it into more of a metaverse with well known brands and mascots than a souless interface, we ensured it plays nicely with existing plugins and will scale with all the great things being built
Challenges we ran into
We lost a half of our team but continued to soldier on, and we ran into some issues with client isolation on the Wi-Fi network that sunk some vary exciting plans we had
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We've created a more natural interface than Alexa in just 24 hours, while enabling entirely new streams of revenue and marketing in the ChatGPT platform.
What we learned
Start with a steel thread: The narrowest vertical of implemntation possible to ensure that things like our Wi-Fi issue are discovered earlier in the process
What's next for CharacterGPT
Partner with the entertainment industry to turn CharacterGPT to extend multi modal capabilities: stay tuned for our browser plugin that will change the UI of ChatGPT to match the loveable characters that we surface
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