Now that I’ve had more time to work with the new ChatGPT app, I’m even more convinced that it’s a profound mistake on OpenAI’s part. But read on, because GPT-Live—also introduced this week—is compelling.
Codex Ascendant, ChatGPT Bleeding Out
One of the most shocking changes from the previous paradigm, where there were separate ChatGPT and Codex apps, is that ChatGPT itself—the chat part—is now relegated to a small pop-up in the lower right corner of the new app’s window, which is summoned when you select “Chat”, nestled among the items in the sidebar. That’s right: if you were a regular ChatGPT user, when you launch this new app, you’re not going to see the thing you launched the app to see! And if you were an even moderately heavy user of ChatGPT, you had a large number of chats, probably organized, in the sidebar of the ChatGPT app. Those are now relegated to the bottom three or so lines of that new pop-up, and the experience of using chat within that area is remarkably degraded. You can break the pop-up out into its own window, but it’s still the same new, much more limited interface; making it bigger doesn’t restore any of the previous app’s affordances. It also feels way buggier when trying to have multiple simultaneous chats. I recently had two chats I was trying to work with, moving between them, and one just plain gave up:
The main two modes the new app steers you toward are “ChatGPT Codex” (essentially the earlier, developer-focused Codex app) and “ChatGPT Work”. You switch between the modes by clicking on the title at the top of the sidebar, which has no indication that it’s a menu, a truly mind-boggling choice. These modes seem really strange to roll out to all users of ChatGPT, since both of these names tip OpenAI’s hand that they want you to work in this app. What about all those people who are using ChatGPT in their personal lives? This app offers them nothing, as far as I can tell, except a 💩 sandwich. And it’s worse for those of us who used the dedicated Codex app for development too.
It’s got that New Coke flavor
That’s all completely leaving aside the fact that the old ChatGPT app was a native Mac app, and a decent one at that. It wasn’t perfect: its sidebar didn’t follow Mac-native behaviors for item selection, for instance, but it was quite a bit better than the Claude app, which is a cross-platform Electron app with no particular Mac-like affordances. (As I linked earlier, Gruber has been on a tear at Daring Fireball in the days leading up to this release, pointing out where ChatGPT is was superior to Claude’s desktop app in this regard.)
The original ChatGPT app is still around, renamed “ChatGPT Classic” during the migration to the new app. That name is apt: I expect the user base will like “New ChatGPT” about as much as people liked “New Coke”. (For those too young to know that reference, people revolted when a new formula for Coke was introduced. The company introduced the original taste as “Coca-Cola Classic”. Eventually Coke relented and restored the original and killed off “New Coke”.) I don’t imagine that OpenAI is going to reverse themselves the way Coke was forced to, but this is definitely “New Coke”-level bad.
GPT-Live: The Way Forward?
One new thing that might shine a light on some of the thinking (I might be being generous here) is the new GPT-Live. It’s a new mode of the mobile ChatGPT app that lets you have a real-time, full duplex conversation. You were able to have something of a spoken conversation with ChatGPT before, but this is different, and it’s compelling. Watch the short demos on the website to get a better sense of it.
Introducing GPT-Live
A new generation of voice models for natural human-AI interaction, now powering ChatGPT Voice.
Siri AI vs. GPT-Live
I’ve been using Siri AI in the iOS 27 Golden Gate developer betas, and it’s interesting to compare it to GPT-Live. Apple’s advantages with Siri AI are in its integration with apps on your device, as well as the ability to activate Siri passively with “Hey, Siri”, or with a hardware button. Siri AI can now handle pretty complex tasks, getting context from the Messages, Mail, Calendar, and other first-party apps. It will also be able to get some of that context through Apple’s App Intents developer framework, as apps adopt it. It really does allow for some compelling back-and-forth—it’s time to re-train yourself to actually ask Siri for help now that it actually seems to be able to successfully understand and execute complex, multi-turn requests.
GPT-Live doesn’t have those deep hooks into the Apple ecosystem yet. It can do quite a bit with third parties now, but since I’m in the Apple ecosystem, it’s more limited in my case. But GPT-Live’s conversational style blows new Siri out of the water right now, and it will be interesting to watch these companies fight this battle. (Especially interesting now that they’re starting to sharpen the legal knives.) I suspect that it will be easier for Apple to build on its advantages and make Siri AI more real-time/full-duplex than it will be for ChatGPT to get to app data on Apple devices, but we’ll see.
So, maybe OpenAI is starting to downplay the standard ChatGPT interface because they imagine that people are just going to talk to ChatGPT instead of using the text interface. I still think this is wrong-headed, since there are many times that I want that back-and-forth to be easily accessible and organized in text form. I also think that most people want that to be front and center instead of “Work” or “Codex”, but—like I said earlier—I’m trying to be generous. Interestingly, Siri AI is going the other direction: Siri now has an app that you can use to interact chatbot-style and see previous conversations. Another issue with this theory is that GPT-Live isn’t available on the desktop app, but it is in the mobile app, which doesn’t have the Codex/Work split like the desktop does. What a mess.
Anyway, GPT-Live is exciting and a big potential win if they can get the device-level integration (and this is probably why they’re thinking along hardware lines themselves) figured out.
But the new ChatGPT app is an appalling mess, and they should seriously consider taking a page from Coca-Cola’s playbook and making “Classic” the path forward.