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April 2023: Creating Apps with GPT

Walking you through every step

Hi folks, welcome to the very late April edition of “A Month of Blips”!

This edition:

  • Some products I have built with GPT

  • Live video of me coding an app with chatGPT

  • Current limitations for coding

  • What is the leading EU company building GPT tools?

Some products I have built with GPT

The main product I have built is a summarisation tool for webpages or PDFs. Currently the tool is limited in that it can handle only about 2,500 words of input text. I’m playing around with ways of extending the summarisation further:

Separately, I have a WordPress plugin launching soon that allows posts to be paywalled and customers to unlock access for as low as $0.01 (or as low as $0.75 if paying by card).

Live video of me coding an app with chatGPT

It’s not quite possible to get chatGPT to code an app. You need to have some knowledge. However, it’s massively accelerating. Here is an app I coded just for this newsletter, in 90 minutes. You can see me struggle with some issues as they arise and use chatGPT to help me resolve them. I recommend watching it at 2x speed or faster.

If you haven’t done coding much before then:

  1. It’s hard to overemphasise how accelerating it is to have GPT as a tool.

  2. Now is a great time to do coding because GPT massively accelerates learning. This is because you don’t need to wait to get your questions answered.

Current limitations for coding

There are a few key limits at present:

  1. GPT is a machine that can only take in a limited number of words as input, and then predict the next words. Currently that is about 3,000 words input for GPT 3.5 and about 6k for GPT-4 . If you try to write code longer than this, then GPT won’t be able. You can break things into chunks, but it requires human intervention to match up the chunks. The number of input possible is improving rapidly. There is a GPT-4 version that can take in about 26k words (btw, strictly, it’s a cap on input + output). Anthropic have a model that can take in about 80k words (although I don’t know how good it is because I don’t have access).

  2. OpenAI’s GPT is only trained up to 2021 data, so it’s not aware of the latest software packages. Often it may use an older package that runs into incompatibility issues with newer packages. Again, this can be resolved manually. Eventually I suppose GPT models will be trained on data right up to today.

What is the leading EU company building GPT tools?

I’ve asked this question of just a few people and haven’t gotten any clear answers.

Do you know? Please let me know.

I don’t mean companies that are using GPT tools (like I’m doing). I mean companies building their own GPT tools.

Basically, if you don’t have the GPT tool, you have to submit data to the tool provider (in my case OpenAI).

Having your own GPT tool is critical to being able to provide data privacy.

I have run my own GPT on my laptop and also on a server I control, but the model isn’t as good as OpenAI. I plan to spend some time building, or at least running, my own model (of course, building from knowledge out there… I don’t know enough to do everything needed).

Companies who are ahead on using GPT have generally got a license from OpenAI. I don’t know exactly how that works, but I imagine that OpenAI spins up a server specifically for each business. This can allow data to be segregated.

As I see it, pretty soon we’ll each have a GPT running on our phones – maybe in 1-2 years. My current sense is that this is much better than everyone sending data in to a big GPT in the cloud, it’s a lot less risky from a data privacy standpoint.

That’s it for this month, hope you enjoyed it.

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