OpenAI is always cooking up something exciting. They have just announced Canvas for ChatGPT. It is a powerful tool that saves you time taking your content creation and coding game to the next level. In essence, ChatGPT will now be able to collaborate with you in your complex projects to edit your work, rewrite documents, add comments, fix bugs, and a lot more.
Canvas is built with GPT-4o. It can be selected as a model as it is still in beta. It will probably activate automatically in the future. With Canvas, ChatGPT now has contextual understanding. You can highlight sections of your work to work with ChatGPT to make edits and changes. Canvas opens automatically when ChatGPT detects a scenario in which it could be helpful. When writing, you can ask for edits, adjust the length of your writing, change reading level, and check for grammar.
Canvas is especially a game-changing development for coders. It can now provide inline suggestions to improve your code, add print statements for debugging, and even translate languages into JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, C++, or PHP. Now this is easier said than done. OpenAI had to figure out which scenarios trigger the canvas for writing and coding. Its researchers had to use distilling outputs from o1-preview model to train the model for its core behaviors.
As OpenAI explains, canvas knows when to activate based on your prompt. It works well for writing prompts but doesn’t over-trigger for Q&As. For writing and coding tasks, GPT-4o with canvas performs better than GPT-40 by 18%. To make the model to generate high quality comments, human evaluations were used. This is a major update to ChatGPT’s visual interface but is still in beta, so it will get even better.
Canvas has already rolled out to ChatGPT Plus users. You will just have to go and select ChatGPT-4o with canvas to get started.