ChatGPT Launches "Canvas" Feature - The AI Podcast

Summary

The AI Podcast: ChatGPT Launches "Canvas" Feature

Release Date: February 19, 2025

Introduction

In this episode of The AI Podcast, the host delves into OpenAI's latest innovation: the Canvas feature for ChatGPT. Launched on February 19, 2025, Canvas promises to revolutionize how users interact with ChatGPT, particularly benefiting writers and developers by providing advanced tools for writing and coding projects.

Overview of the Canvas Feature

The host begins by introducing Canvas as a significant enhancement to ChatGPT's capabilities. Described as "a new way to work with ChatGPT on writing and coding projects that go beyond simple chat," Canvas is accessible to Plus and Teams users through the model picker by selecting GPT-4 with Canvas.

“It’s going to be like a little sparkling pencil over on the right-hand side.” [02:15]

Upon activation, Canvas appears as a side module with a pencil icon. Clicking this icon opens a comprehensive panel resembling a document editor, complete with new features and buttons tailored for enhanced collaboration and editing.

Enhancements for Writing

Canvas introduces several tools designed to streamline the writing process:

Suggest Edits
- Users can highlight specific text and request ChatGPT to suggest edits. For example, selecting an article title allows prompts like "Make this more creative," resulting in an improved title.
“Instead of having to get ChatGPT to redo whatever your thing is every single time... you’re essentially editing and working in real time.” [05:30]
Adjusting Length and Style
- The feature allows users to modify the length of sections, expanding brief sentences into paragraphs or condensing lengthy passages into concise statements.
Changing Reading Levels
- Users can adjust the content's reading level, ranging from kindergarten to graduate school, making complex topics more accessible.
“Sometimes it writes you three paragraphs and you're like, no, please, I wanted two sentences on this.” [07:45]
Final Polish
- A dedicated button for final polishing checks grammar, clarity, and consistency, ensuring the document maintains a uniform writing style.
Adding Emojis
- Although the host personally may not use this feature frequently, users have the option to add relevant emojis for emphasis and engagement.

These tools collectively enable real-time, precise editing, enhancing the overall writing experience.

Enhancements for Coding

Canvas isn't limited to writing; it also offers substantial improvements for developers:

Code Review
- ChatGPT can review code, providing suggestions for improvements and optimizing performance.
Adding Logs and Comments
- Developers can insert print statements for debugging and add comments to explain code functionality, facilitating easier understanding and collaboration.
“Something that my developers have been doing... they'll use ChatGPT to go and just comment the entire code.” [12:10]
Bug Fixing
- The feature can identify and rectify bugs within the code, ensuring smoother and error-free execution.
Porting to New Languages
- Users can seamlessly convert code from one programming language to another, such as from JavaScript to Python, enhancing flexibility and adaptability.

User Experience and Trigger Mechanism

Canvas can be accessed manually via a button located at the bottom right of the ChatGPT interface. Alternatively, users can incorporate "use canvas" into their prompts to trigger the feature automatically. OpenAI has implemented intelligent triggers trained on GPT-4 to recognize when Canvas should be activated, targeting specific tasks like writing blogs or generating code without over-triggering for general inquiries.

“For writing tasks we prioritize improving correct triggers at the expense of non-correct triggers.” [18:00]

Despite extensive testing, the trigger mechanism isn't flawless. The host notes that while Canvas activates correctly 83% of the time for intended tasks, users might sometimes find it intrusive for simple requests. However, the manual toggle provides control over the feature's activation.

Reception and Community Feedback

The release of Canvas has sparked significant discussion within the AI and developer communities. Positive feedback highlights Canvas's robust capabilities compared to competitors like Anthropic's Artifact, particularly emphasizing its comprehensive coding tools.

One user remarked:

“ChatGPT is probably just going to keep developing and developing this feature. It's kind of rough for cursor.” [21:30]

Additionally, the integration of multi-file edits and testing environments has raised concerns among startup ecosystems, with some fearing that such advancements could overshadow emerging AI tools.

“If they add multi-file edits and testing environments, my app and 50 other startups are cooked.” [23:15]

Despite these apprehensions, the overall response on platforms like Twitter remains optimistic, with many eager to adopt Canvas's advanced features.

Conclusion

OpenAI's Canvas feature represents a significant leap forward in enhancing ChatGPT's utility for both writers and developers. By providing specialized tools for editing, coding, and collaboration, Canvas aims to make complex tasks more manageable and efficient. While there are challenges concerning trigger accuracy and potential impacts on the startup landscape, the innovation has been largely well-received, promising to redefine AI-assisted workflows.

The host expresses enthusiasm for exploring Canvas further and encourages listeners to share their experiences and thoughts on this groundbreaking feature.

Notable Quotes:

“It’s going to be like a little sparkling pencil over on the right-hand side.” [02:15]
“Instead of having to get ChatGPT to redo whatever your thing is every single time... you’re essentially editing and working in real time.” [05:30]
“Sometimes it writes you three paragraphs and you're like, no, please, I wanted two sentences on this.” [07:45]
“Something that my developers have been doing... they'll use ChatGPT to go and just comment the entire code.” [12:10]
“For writing tasks we prioritize improving correct triggers at the expense of non-correct triggers.” [18:00]
“ChatGPT is probably just going to keep developing and developing this feature. It's kind of rough for cursor.” [21:30]
“If they add multi-file edits and testing environments, my app and 50 other startups are cooked.” [23:15]

This comprehensive summary encapsulates the key points, discussions, insights, and conclusions from the episode, providing a clear and detailed overview for those who haven't tuned in.

Transcript

A (0:00)

OpenAI has just launched a new feature which they are calling Canvas. I'm going to break down everything that it's able to do. This is really good for Anyone that uses ChatGPT for writing or developers using it for coding. They have a bunch of new features and this is completely changing the way that we are using ChatGPT. They just posted over on X they said we're rolling out an early version of Canvas. A new way to work with ChatGPT on writing and coding projects that go beyond simple chat starting today plus and Teams users can try it by selecting GPT4 with Canvas in the model picker. So right on ChatGPT where you would typically go and hit the dropdown to change what model you're talking with, it's going to appear right there. You're going to be able to go grab it right there. So what it looks like is just this little pop up module on the side. It's going to be like a little sparkling pencil over on the right hand side. When you open this up, it open up an entire new, entire new screen or panel that you're actually going to start being able to edit what you're working on. There's a bunch of new features, a bunch of new buttons that are really interesting. So let's get into them specifically. I'll talk about anyone using this for writing first. I think this is a really amazing new use case. And the idea with this is that you're able to essentially better collaborate and write. And some things that you that might have been prompts in the past that you use ChatGPT for, they're now all gonna have shortcuts. The first one is to suggest edits. You can ask Chat GPT to suggest an edit and what it's going to be, right? It pulls open this whole side panel. You'll be chatting with ChatGPT. It's giving you your answers. It opens this full on side panel where it's kind of like a document editor, like you know, Google Docs or something else. You select a piece of the text and you can then get it to manipulate that text in particular. So they have examples where they're highlighting the title of an article that you got it to generate and you highlight the article title. There's a little pop up that comes up and you type in it. Make this more creative and it rewrites the title to be more creative. Instead of having to get ChatGPT to redo whatever your thing is every single time and try to get one shot, everything perfect right with this really long, elaborate prompt, you're essentially editing and working in real time. They do some really cool things. They had a demo where you uploaded a document of a bunch of information that you'd saved. And they said, hey, take all this info and write an article X, Y and Z. I was able to do that. They then went and selected the introduction to the article and they said, and they can make a bunch of different. A bunch of different edits to that. So one of them is adjusting the length. Sometimes you get chatgpt to write something and it's just like, you know a sentence and you're like, geez, like, flush this out, make this a paragraph. Or sometimes it writes you three paragraphs and you're like, no, please, I wanted two sentences on this. So it just has a button that you'll be able to select what you're talking about and get it to redo that. And. And it's nice because sometimes I get it. Like, sometimes it'll write a whole chunk of whatever I wanted correctly. But the beginning part is just not good. So you're going to be able to just like edit the little pieces of a document that you want. This is amazing for me. The other thing that it's able to do is change the reading level. So you can adjust it from kindergarten to graduate school. There's a reading level that you're actually able to switch right inside of it, which is going to be awesome, right? Sometimes I'm like, okay, this is way too complex. I don't even understand. Especially when it's really technical stuff. Like, I don't even understand this. Please just like, explain it like it's going to a fifth grader, and then I can understand complex topics better. This is going to be something everyone can do. Very simple. The other thing is you can add final polish. So they just have a button to add final polish. You can do it to the whole document to a specific area. It's going to check for things like grammar, clarity and consistency, which is great. Sometimes if you're manually editing stuff, right? Like, I find a lot of times I get it to write something, then I go and like, change something. Oh, I don't like this paragraph. I delete it. And then by the end of it, I'm like, is this whole thing, like, really consistent? Is my writing style the same as. It's like, how do we kind of like fix that? So that's what this final polish button is going to do. The last thing that they can do, they have a button specifically to add Emojis, Any relevant emojis. They say you can add emphasis and color. Probably not something I will use a lot because I'm always telling it to please never use any emojis. Uh, but that's just me. So maybe there's other people that are a little bit different. So that's some of the writing features that are absolutely fascinating. And I'll show you what, what that's actually looking like in a second. I wanted to talk about what even if you're not a developer, but if you are, this will be interesting. But what they're doing with coding in Canvas. So what was previously done was Anthropic, the biggest competitor to ChatGPT right now, with their cloud model that had something called Artifact, which is similar, but it honestly seems like a bit of a nerfed version after seeing what the coding function can do here. And you're able to essentially have a side panel that would help you with your code. So the new coding shortcuts that they're adding with their, with their new canvas number one is to review the code. So ChatGPT can give some suggestions to improve your code. Again, you can select a certain line of code and have it work on that or the whole thing. It can add a log, so it can insert print statements to help you debug and understand your code. So that's very, very useful. And then it can add comments. This is something that developers on my projects that I'm working on, they use this all the time. Sometimes when someone writes the code and a new person comes in, it's hard to understand. It's hard. You gotta go figure the whole thing out. And something that my developers have been doing when code gets switched from one developer to another is they'll use Chat GBT to go and just comment the entire code. Explaining how everything works makes it so much easier to understand. And you. It's just way faster than trying to read the whole thing. So the next thing it can do is it can fix bugs. This is really useful. Obviously, code is not perfect, especially when it gets spit out of a different AI model. And so just the ability to have this thing go through and fix any bugs that are in it is awesome. And essentially I've seen like the demos of this. It looks at every single line of code and it goes. And it verifies that everything is running smoothly on those, which is fantastic. The last thing is that you can actually port this to a new language. Right. Sometimes people will be like, hey, like, write me a code that can do X, Y and Z thing and it writes it in JavaScript and you're like, oh no, I need this thing to be in Python. So you have a very simple way to change the actual coding language from JavaScript to TypeScript to Python to C or PHP, like whatever you're actually trying to work in. So this is very, very interesting. So how does this thing actually work? How does this panel get triggered? Is it manual? I believe there's going to be a manual button right on the side that you can click on. It should be on ChatGPT by the time you're watching this should be right in the bottom right hand corner of ChatGPT. You click on that to open up a panel, but alternately you can add to your prompt that you're saying use canvas. So this is kind of awesome if you are, you know, just, you're like, okay, I know I'm going to, I'm going to be needing a canvas now. They tried to build in some automatic triggers to make this thing pop up. They trained GPT4.0 to essentially know when to make this pop up. And the thing that they tried to get us to do is to trigger the canvas for writing and coding, generating a bunch of different content types, making targeted edits, rewriting documents and providing inline critique. So if, if you're working on any of those things, they're going to try to trigger the canvas to open up in the side. So the problem is this could be annoying if you're just trying to get this thing to like, you know, write a recipe or you know, help me with a recipe. You don't need to edit this thing or work on this thing. You're not, you just want it to give you the information. You don't want the whole canvas to pop up. So they said a key challenge was defining when to trigger a canvas. We taught the model to open a canvas for prompts like write a blog about the history of coffee beans while avoiding over triggering for General Q&As like help me cook a new recipe for dinner. So they tried to really work on this. Um, and they had, I believe they met. They measured Progress with over 20 automated in internal evaluations to try to get this working correctly. Um, they said for writing tasks we prioritize improving correct triggers at the expense of non correct triggers. So it's about 83% compared to a baseline 0 shot GPT4O with prompted instructions. It's fairly good. It's not perfect, it's getting there prompt. But honestly, if you need it, you can click on the button that's going to automatically trigger. I think it's better that it under triggers when you can click the button if you need it versus over triggers. So everything that you don't want it to open, it's going to be opening. Okay, all of that out of the way. I think this is absolutely a fascinating new use case and people are talking about this all over Twitter with the big introduction that they gave. People are already, uh, OpenAI developers. The official, their official account over on X is showing a demo of what this would actually look like in the wild. And I thought it was sort of fascinating because essentially they're able to, you know, someone's asking it to. I have a 3D model and I want it to display in a 3D scene. I have latitude and longitude. I would like to translate this into XYZ coordinates. Can you write the code for me? Right, so it's, they essentially are saying this now nowhere in there does it say to open up the specific side panel, but it understands that this is what it needs. So it opens up, it opens up the canvas. Now while they're, while they're doing this, they simply click on the button on the right hand side and they want to port into a new language. So there's a little adjuster where they say switches to JavaScript immediately. It adjusts the entire thing into JavaScript, which is super, super useful. Then they're like, okay, this is cool, but I need to do like a specific, you know, geolocation to earth that I want to keep it at. So they go and add a little bit of code and as soon as the code is edited, now not everything's perfect, so they're going to just go ahead and select the chunk of code. Afterwards they just ask ChatGPT, I want this to be relative to Earth. And boom, it takes the that code and it, it goes through the entire document line by line of code to check to make sure everything's good. It rewrites the piece in question. Now I, I think the best feature of all of this that I'm really excited for is the fact that it is essentially able to select one line of code or one line of your document and go and just edit that specifically. So overall, very, very excited for that. The responses on X have been quite positive. People, someone said, interesting, exactly what I use cursor for. Any specific differences why I should use this feature? I would say ChatGPT is probably just going to keep developing and developing this feature. It's kind of rough for cursor. This week we had a whole bunch of. We had a whole bunch of like VS code fork projects. One in particular got into Y Combinator, got $500,000 and everyone was roasting them because they just copied an open source library. And there's a lot of memes right now that those code editors are really sweating because this is obviously gonna kill a lot of startups. So even as I'm scrolling down through the comments, I'm seeing someone that says if they add multi file edits and testing environments, my app and 50 other startups are cooked. So again, it's kind of rough. Every time OpenAI comes up with a new feature, a lot of people are gonna complain about the repercussions on the startup ecosystem because it does impact a lot. A lot of people working on these types of projects. I'll keep you up to date on everything else. Rolling out. This is an amazing new feature I'm really excited to try and to get started with. Let me know what you think in the comments. If you like the video, let me know. And if you're interested in making money online with AI tools, I would love to have you join my AI Hustle School community where I do an exclusive piece of content every single week. I make a video showing exactly what AI tools I'm using and and the side hustles that I do. So if that sounds interesting to you, you can check out the link in the description to my AI Hustle School community. Hope you have an amazing rest of your day.