Nathaniel Whittemore

The shift, they write, from sequential to parallel use, is what lets a single knowledge worker operate at the scale of a small team.

One turn to inspect a dataset, another to draft a script, another to assemble a report, another to check an application.

The user becomes the orchestrator of workstreams rather than executing a single task at a time.

So what goodies did we actually get?

The three highlights are annotations, plugins, and sites.

Annotations are effectively a more precise way to interact with context.

Within Codex, when you're looking at a specific document or artifact, you can highlight, rather than having to explain with words the specific part of the document that you want to discuss or query about or change, you can use the annotations feature to select just that part of the document for the model to reason over within Codex.

Simon Smith from Qlik Health wrote, You can already use annotations to give feedback on websites, but now it looks like that interaction model is expanding across outputs.

I love working with Codex by selecting things in the preview pane, adding them into the chat context, and then talking to Codex about them.

This makes that way of working more powerful.

Next up was an expansion of Codex plugins.

Now, previously, plugins were a way to connect specific software into the Codex ecosystem.

But with this latest update, Codex is adding a set of role-specific plugins for common functions including sales, data analytics, creative production, product design, public equity investing, and investment banking.

Now, given the IPO horse race dynamics and competitive storyline between Anthropic and OpenAI, this is the update that a lot of mainstream media focused on as it resembled to them Anthropic's strategy of releasing a set of tools for specific functions and industries as well.

In their announcement, OpenAI writes, Each role-specific plugin bundles the relevant applications,

skills, instructions, and workflows.

Across these six new function plugins, they include access to 62 apps and 110 skills, basically about 10 apps and 20 skills per role.

You can almost think about the role-specific plugins as organized bundles of features that were already available, but presented in a way that requires much less setup.

Another way to think about it is that this goes a long way to productizing best practices.

You can think about it kind of like this.