Quick Hits: New AI Features From Arc and ChatGPT

I couldn’t write this week because my thumb hurt.

I’ve been writing a lot lately, and my theory is that it’s a repetitive stress injury from pressing the spacebar too much. (Or it’s because I’m burying my anger. Or maybe it’s both?) 

I’ve tried a few things to make it feel better: various stretches that you might imagine seeing performed in Florida retirement homes, a wrist wrap that would look appropriate on a contestant at a senior PGA tour event, and a painkilling cream that smells like the discount vodka we used to drink in college—all to no avail. 

(My dad plunges his aching thumb into an icy drink and says “ahhhhhhh,” which was the obvious next thing to try, but my pride hasn’t allowed me to do this yet. I’d like to continue to pretend that I’m not fully becoming him in my old age.)

In lieu of a better solution, I’ve had to resort to using my left thumb to press the spacebar, which is awkward and slow. I am an athlete of the keyboard. For me, writing is thinking, and spacing with my left thumb is like asking Michael Jordan to do a lay-up on one leg. It just doesn’t feel right; the sentences don’t flow.

So I lazed this week. James Bond had a license to kill, and writers—when the ideas aren’t flowing—have a license to laze. To pass the time, I drank too much coffee. I stared off into space. I wrote a short story from the perspective of Bryan Johnson’s left kidney. Photos below.

What I look like when I can’t figure out what to write and my thumb hurts.

The one thing that can get a writer with a sore thumb to actually, you know, write is a deadline. There was a lot of news this week, so I’m writing quick hits about an incredible new ChatGPT feature, the Arc browser’s AI update, and my podcast.

Hopefully my thumb will be back to typing shape by next week for a full essay.

Arc introduces v2: the browser that browsers for you with AI

(Disclosure: I am an angel investor in Arc and good friends with its co-founder and CTO, Hursh Agrawal.)

In December 2022, I asked myself where power might settle in the AI ecosystem and predicted it would do so in four places: 

1. The operating system layer
2. The browser
3. The layer of models that are willing to return risky results to users
4. The copyright layer

I wrote that power would settle at the browser layer because: 

“[Browsers are] able to sit between the user and any other interaction with the internet. Once Chrome, Arc, or Mac OS has an intelligent AI assistant that can perform tasks for you given a few sentences about what you want, your desire to go to a website that can do the same thing will go down tremendously. Operating systems and browsers also have the advantage of being run on your computer, so the integration will be more seamless and they’ll have access to lots of data that web-based AI applications aren’t going to have access to—so they’ll likely have better abilities to complete tasks.” [Emphasis added]

Well, Arc built exactly that. On Thursday, the company launched two powerful new AI features for its browser: Instant Links and Arc Explore. 

With Instant Links, if you type a query into Arc like, “Get me the 5 latest articles on the Vision Pro,” Arc will search the internet, find articles about the Vision Pro, and open the five most recent articles in separate tabs in your sidebar. No Googling, scrolling, or manually clicking. 

With Arc Explore, if you ask it something like, “Get me the 5 best restaurants for Thai food in Fort Greene,” Arc will do the research and present you with the option to make a reservation—no separate web-browsing required. While this feature (which isn’t live yet) will doubtless require some refining,  it’s the embodiment of the idea I was writing about.

There’s a lot more to say about these tools. The web fundamentally changes if you’re going to fewer web pages—in fact, this might be the first sign of the webpage passing quietly into history. But I don’t have the thumb—err, brain—capacity to write about it here. 

It’s a truly magical feature, and the team has done a great job. I think they have a real shot to unseat ChatGPT as the primary way their users interact with AI.

ChatGPT releases @ mentions

Last Friday, OpenAI pushed a feature that allowed users to @ mention custom GPTs from within the ChatGPT interface:

If you type the @ symbol while you’re chatting with ChatGPT, you can tag any of your custom GPTs into the conversation—just like you might bring a coworker into a conversation in Slack. The difference is that you’re not pulling in another human, you’re pulling in a bot.

It turns ChatGPT into a group chat with a bunch of different bots that all have different personalities and abilities.

I predicted OpenAI might build this a few months ago:

“ChatGPT might at some point resemble something like Slack, but populated with one human and many different bots. Instead of chatting with one bot at a time like you do now, you may have a single channel where you can chat with many different bots at once—all offering their perspective and expertise when appropriate."

I think this is a fundamentally important move for OpenAI and ChatGPT. By decreasing friction to use custom GPTs—all you have to do is @ one to use it—usage will increase. Increased usage makes having a custom GPT in OpenAI’s store more valuable, allowing the custom GPT ecosystem to flourish. OpenAI will gain a competitive advantage as custom GPTs become more powerful and are able to accomplish more tasks on their own. I recorded a screen cast walking through the new functionality.

In the piece I quoted earlier, I wrote that there’s likely to be one dominant destination chatbot, and OpenAI is in the lead for that crown. The only thing that might compete is someone who figures out how to integrate a great AI experience inside of a browser…

‘How Do You Use ChatGPT’ hits #15 on the Spotify podcasts charts!

I have invented another great excuse to avoid writing: I became a podcaster! And this week, I became a ~charted~ podcaster. No, folks, I’m no longer just your average AI thinkboi next door breathily prognosticating into the digital void. I’m different now. Don’t worry, I won’t forget about you!

My podcast, How Do You Use ChatGPT?, hit number 15 on the Spotify charts for technology podcasts in the U.S. It was pretty cool to see: 

I am really excited about this show. If you haven’t watched or listened to it yet, it’s an interview podcast where I talk to the smartest people in the world about how they use ChatGPT in their daily lives. We go through actionable strategies for using it as a tool to think, write, create, make decisions, and more. 

It’s an optimistic and curious show. I try to avoid being either utopian or doomer, and I aim to feature people who share my conviction that we can live better lives with this new technology if we learn how to use it.

If you’ve been listening, take a second to rate it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts to keep your boy in the charts. More great episodes to come!

Note: You may have noticed that after starting this piece by saying I couldn’t write this week because of my thumb, I ended up writing a full-length piece anyway. Turns out I did have a lot of thoughts to get out after all—sore thumb be damned.