OpenAI has introduced Canvas, a new interface for ChatGPT that enhances collaboration on writing and coding projects, offering users a more interactive and context-aware AI assistant experience.
Canvas opens in a separate window, allowing users to work side-by-side with ChatGPT on projects that extend beyond simple chat interactions. The interface is built with GPT-4o, OpenAI's latest language model, and is currently in beta.
"Canvas offers a new interface for this kind of work," stated OpenAI in their announcement. "With canvas, ChatGPT can better understand the context of what you're trying to accomplish."
The new interface introduces several key features, including inline feedback and suggestions from ChatGPT, similar to a copy editor or code reviewer. Users can access a menu of shortcuts for quick actions like adjusting writing length, debugging code, and performing other useful tasks. Canvas also allows users to highlight specific sections for ChatGPT to focus on, directly edit text or code, and restore previous versions of their work through a back button.
For writing tasks, Canvas offers shortcuts such as suggesting edits, adjusting document length, changing reading levels, adding final polish, and inserting emojis. Coding shortcuts include code review, adding logs and comments, bug fixing, and porting to different programming languages.
OpenAI's research team, led by Karina Nguyen with core contributions from Kai Chen, Michael Wu, and Tarun Gogineni, developed core behaviours for Canvas. These include triggering the canvas for appropriate tasks, generating diverse content types, making targeted edits, rewriting documents, and providing inline critique. The company used over 20 automated internal evaluations and novel synthetic data generation techniques to train the model.
Canvas is currently being rolled out to ChatGPT Plus and Team users globally, with Enterprise and Edu users gaining access the following week. OpenAI plans to make Canvas available to all ChatGPT Free users once it's out of the beta phase.