The wave of ChatGPT integration announcements is just getting started, and this week Instacart debuted its first effort to tap into the generative AI zeitgeist with the debut of its ChatGPT Instacart plugin.
The plugin, explained in detail in a blog post by the company’s chief architect JJ Zhuang on the company’s website, allows Instacart users to ask for recipe advice and guidance using natural language with ChatGPT. From there, the OpenAI-powered chatbot will respond with a recipe suggestion followed by a prompt that tells the user that Instacart can turn the recipe into a shopping list.
In the video below, you can watch a fish taco recipe magically transformed into a shoppable recipe via ChatGPT.
The news of the new plugin comes after OpenAI namechecked Instacart earlier this month when announcing the release of its developer APIs for integration of ChatGPT into their apps. In the announcement, they hinted that they were thinking about the same fish taco recipe Instacart showcased in this week’s news.
To use the new plugin, users must log in to ChatGPT and look for the Instacart carrot under enabled plugins. The plugin is only available to ChatGPT Plus paying subscribers, but Instacart says that they and OpenAI plan to make it available to all ChatGPT users in the “coming weeks.”
One interesting detail in the announcement was the mention of what are essentially guardrails the Instacart team has built into the plugin. From the post: “At Instacart, we know that large language model technology is still in its early stages, so our ChatGPT plugin is a custom, constrained tool that will be triggered only in response to relevant food-related ChatGPT questions, and people won’t be able to use it for non-recipe related tasks.”
What this means is the company wants to ensure that folks are only using its plugin for food-relevant content and not trying to get it to, say, write a poem about the virtues of its personal shoppers or to give suggestions about who to pick for their fantasy baseball team. That said, ChatGPT is a bit unpredictable, and there’s always the chance a clever query crafter could get a brand’s plugin to hallucinate and spit out something off-brand or off-topic, which is why Instacart lets us know they will be rolling the plugin out “thoughtfully and make any modifications as needed along the way.”
I like the move, but I think the tool’s adoption will likely be somewhat limited until we see the integration of the AI tool into the Instacart app. While the announcement doesn’t say when ChatGPT will be embedded within the Instacart app, I’m pretty sure that’s something the developers are working on.
Stepping back, it’s clear that food retail will be one of the most active sectors to integrate generative AI, and not just ChatGPT. Earlier this week, I wrote about the launch of a new proprietary generative AI platform called Open Quin. Open Quin’s first targeted vertical is grocery shopping, where users can ask for food guidance in natural language.
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