just one day After OpenAI announced a $6.6 billion funding round, the company is releasing its first major interface evolution for ChatGPT.
In what could be OpenAI’s acknowledgment that its transformational chatbot is ready for user experiences beyond a question-and-answer format, the new beta feature is an editable canvas that opens in a window next to the standard ChatGPT chat box.
“The main thing we’re trying to solve is a better way to collaborate with ChatGPT in writing and coding,” says Daniel Levine, OpenAI’s product lead for the canvas feature. Canvas is rolling out in beta today to ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers, with Enterprise and Edu customers likely to get the feature next week. The feature is fully functional on desktop computers – mobile users can only view canvas projects for now.
During a pre-launch demo at WIRED, Levine focused on the hope for more “natural” human-AI collaboration with this new option. His team used synthetic data generated by OpenAI’s latest model, o1-preview, to give GPT-4o’s model useful canvas features, such as knowing when to activate and how much to adjust the document.
With the canvas, ChatGPT can generate an initial draft of a project for you and the AI to edit together, or you can paste an existing draft of what you’re working on for feedback. Levine began by asking ChatGPT to use the canvas to help draft a crucial email. He went on to highlight a couple of paragraphs and call for specific changes. The generative AI tool is able to add comments to the canvas to spot potential improvements or even directly change what’s in the document.
