I woke up today and got an email from OpenAI.
“Let’s see what they have launched today, I thought 🤔 .
But no. This time it was about [Tasks Update].
Yesterday, to test the new “Tasks” functionality I asked it to generate a motivational sentence for me every day at 7am.
Leaving aside that the result was mediocre, that I don’t need motivational sentences in my life and that instead of one, it did the task twice and none of them at the exact time (I know it’s in beta phase), I was thinking about what was the point of this.
On the one hand, as I was telling you yesterday, this is the first time that ChatGPT is proactive in executing a task that does not respond to a specific request in time by the user (until now it was only reactive).
And I thought about how Google managed to make itself indispensable. I attended the arrival of Google working on a .com and I could see how and, above all, why we stopped using Yahoo or Altavista.
For me, the key piece was the search engine, but even more so, Google Maps.
Why? Because I can use Safari but I still need Google Maps. Thus, I will never leave the Google ecosystem. Even if I use Opera or Firefox, I will still use Google Maps.
And this is what assistants are all about. To be necessary.
In a world where benchmark in technology is only a question of time, the one who manages to be the friend who solves everything for us will win the battle.
Did you think about why OpenAI paid so much for the “chat.com” domain? And that feature we saw last week that mistakenly suggested addressing it as “chatty” or other friendly names?
Because they seek to create that figure of a friend who helps us in everything and they are aware that, as happened with Google, sometimes loyalty is not for its main function but for the need to create any of its features, no matter how absurd they may seem to us.
I think, personally, that this is not the case. I don’t need Tasks at the moment, although I am almost sure that this is the path they intend to follow.
To make themselves indispensable and be that friend that, maybe, in a very short time, when they have gained our trust, they will start trying to sell us things 😉