OpenAIannounced ChatGPT Workon July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here’s what I’ve figured out about it so far.
The more interesting version of ChatGPT Work is the one that runs in the cloud. This can be accessed viachatgpt.comor through the ChatGPT mobile apps. Let’s call itWork Cloud.
If you install the ChatGPT desktop app—the app that used to be called Codex—you gain access to a thing called ChatGPT Work that can access files and run programs directly on your computer. Let’s call that oneWork Local. This one feels more like regular Codex re-skinned to be less intimidating to non-software-developers.
For the rest of this article I’m going to talk exclusively about Work Cloud.
Right now, ChatGPT Work (in both flavors) is available only to $20/month and up subscribers. Free users and $8/month Go users do not have access.
The interface for accessing Work is a tab selector, which presents it as an alternative to Chat:
The obvious question iswhen should I use Chat, and when should I use Work?
OpenAI’sofficial answerto that question is:
Use Chat when you want an answer, explanation, brainstorm, or short draft. Use ChatGPT Work when you want ChatGPT to complete a task with a clear outcome, such as a brief, deck, analysis, recurring update, workflow, or file you can review and use.
I find that almost entirely useless, because I’ve been using regular ChatGPT Chat for all of those task categories for years!
The better question then iswhat features does Work have that are missing from Chat?
After extensive experimentation I think I’ve mostly figured that out: