Presenting canvas A fresh approach to writing and coding with ChatGPT
Canvas ChatGPT, is a brand-new ChatGPT interface for writing and coding tasks that go beyond plain conversation. You can work on a project using ChatGPT while Canvas opens in a different window. This early beta offers a unique method of collaboration that involves side-by-side idea generation and improvement rather than merely talking.
While in beta, Canvas can be manually chosen in the model selector and was constructed using GPT-4o. OpenAI introducing Canvas to ChatGPT Plus and Team users worldwide as of right now. Present access will be available to Enterprise and Edu users. When Canvas is released from beta, it also intend to make it accessible to all ChatGPT Free users.
Improved cooperation with ChatGPT
Every day, people utilize ChatGPT to get writing and coding assistance. Despite being user-friendly and effective for a variety of tasks, the chat interface is constrained when working on projects that need editing and changes. A new interface for this type of work is provided by Canvas ChatGPT.
With canvas, ChatGPT is better able to comprehend the context of your task. To specify precisely what you want ChatGPT to concentrate on, you can highlight particular parts. It can provide inline comments and recommendations while keeping the project as a whole in mind, much like a copy editor or code reviewer.
In Canvas ChatGPT, you have control over the project. Code or text can be edited directly. You can ask ChatGPT to change the length of your writing, debug your code, and carry out other helpful tasks quickly by using the shortcut menu. Additionally, you can use the canvas’s back button to restore earlier iterations of your work.
When ChatGPT recognizes a situation where Canvas ChatGPT could be useful, it opens immediately. To launch Canvas and work on an existing project, you may also include the phrase “use canvas” in your prompt.
Shortcuts for writing include:
- Make edit suggestions: ChatGPT provides inline comments and suggestions.
- Modify the length: changes the document’s length to make it longer or shorter.
- Modify reading level: Modifies the reading level from elementary school to college.
- Apply the finishing touch by proofreading for consistency, clarity, and grammar.
- Emoji addition: Uses appropriate emojis to add color and emphasis.
Canvas coding
It can be challenging to keep up with all the changes made to your code in chat because coding is an iterative process. It intends to keep enhancing transparency in these types of adjustments, and Canvas ChatGPT makes it simpler to monitor and comprehend ChatGPT’s changes.
Coding shortcuts include:
- Examine your code: ChatGPT offers inline recommendations to help you make it better.
- Include logs: adds print statements to your code to aid with debugging and comprehension.
- Add comments: To make the code easier to read, add comments.
- Fix bugs: Detects and rewrites problematic code to resolve errors.
- Translate to a language: converts your code into Python, Java, C++, PHP, JavaScript, or TypeScript.
Training the model to become a collaborator
GPT-4o was trained to work as a creative partner. The model is aware of when to open a canvas, make specific changes, and then start over. In order to offer accurate comments and recommendations, it also comprehends the larger context.
OpenAI study team created the following fundamental behaviors to back this up:
- Triggering the Canvas ChatGPT for writing and coding
- Generating diverse content types
- Making targeted edits
- Rewriting documents
- Providing inline critique
It used more than 20 automated internal assessments to gauge its success. To post-train the model for its fundamental characteristics, it employed cutting-edge synthetic data creation approaches, such as extracting outputs from OpenAI o1-preview. Without depending on human-generated data, this method enabled us to quickly adjust writing quality and new user interactions.
Determining when to trigger a Canvas ChatGPT was one of the main challenges. In order to prevent over-triggering for broad Q&A tasks, OpenAI trained the model to open a canvas for prompts like “Write a blog post about the history of coffee beans.” “Help me cook a new recipe for dinner.” For writing tasks, it prioritized improving “correct triggers” (at the expense of “correct non-triggers”), reaching 83% compared to a baseline zero-shot GPT-4o with prompted instructions.
It is important to note that the prompt utilized has a significant impact on the quality of these baselines. The baseline may still perform poorly with different prompts, but in a different way for example, by being equally inaccurate on writing and coding tasks, which would produce a different distribution of errors and other types of suboptimal performance. To prevent upsetting its power users, it purposefully slanted the model against triggering for coding. OpenAI keeps improving this in response to user input.
Determining when to make a targeted change as opposed to rewriting the entire material presented a second challenge: fine-tuning the model’s editing behavior once the canvas was activated. When users directly choose text through the interface, it trained the model to make targeted adjustments; otherwise, it favors rewrites. As it improves the model, this behavior keeps changing.
Lastly, meticulous iteration was necessary to train the model to produce high-quality comments. It is extremely difficult to measure quality in an automated manner, in contrast to the first two situations, which are readily adapted to automated evaluation with extensive manual evaluations. As a result, it evaluated the accuracy and quality of the comments using human judgment. OpenAI integrated canvas model outperforms the zero-shot GPT-4o with prompted instructions by 30% in accuracy and 16% in quality, showing that synthetic training significantly enhances response quality and behavior compared to zero-shot prompting with detailed instructions.
What’s next
Rethinking its interactions with AI is necessary to make it more accessible and helpful. Canvas ChatGPT is a novel strategy and the first significant visual interface improvement for ChatGPT since its launch two years ago.
OpenAI intends to quickly enhance Canvas’s capabilities, which are now in early beta.
