Weiss explains that his team worked with OpenAI to make it so that ChatGPT (once installed and authenticated) can use the search engine API that already exists to access information from a user's Slack instance, in addition to the information that the ChatGPT language model was trained on. The other difference between the ChatGPT app that will be available in Slack and the publicly available model is how information is sourced. Weiss said that the version that will be available to Slack users will be “more conservative in the risk-taking sense” in that, if it can’t answer a question or an answer isn’t necessarily suitable for the workplace, the model has been tuned to acknowledge that. OpenAI has the ability to customize ChatGPT's large language model in order to fit different use cases. In addition, Weiss said ChatGPT won’t have access to any conversations that take place in a channel that the specific user doesn’t have access to, and noted that OpenAI released a statement last week that said any data accessed in order to create summaries is not stored for any purpose, including model training. Unlike other apps that exist within Slack’s open ecosystem that, once downloaded, are accessible to all users in a particular Slack instance, the ChatGPT app will have to be installed and authenticated by each user who wants to make use of the technology.

The app is currently in beta testing but Weiss expects it to be released publicly in the coming months.

Users will be able to access AI-generated conversation summaries to catch up on what’s happening in channels and threads quickly find answers relating to any project or topic via the use of AI-powered research tools and use the writing assistance function to have ChatGPT write replies, status updates, and meeting notes. With the ChatGPT app for Slack, there are three current use cases. “There's 2,600 apps in the Slack App Directory but this is one of the more exciting ones because it's built on this technology that OpenAI has been developing that I think fundamentally changes what's possible in a conversational interface,” Weiss said.

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