Tessa: There's a new tab in ChatGPT called 'Work', and OpenAI's official explanation for it is that you should use it for tasks with a clear outcome.
Wei-lin: Which is... every task? What does that even mean?
Tessa: Exactly. I've been using regular Chat for tasks with clear outcomes for years. It's a completely unhelpful description.
Wei-lin: So it's just a branding thing, then. It's ChatGPT Pro for business teams, with a slightly better model maybe?
Tessa: That's what I thought too, but it's not. It's fundamentally a different product. This piece from Simon Willison breaks it down, and 'Work' is... it's basically a computer.
Wei-lin: Wait, what? ChatGPT has always been a computer.
Tessa: No, it's been a brain in a jar. It could think, but it couldn't do anything. The Code Interpreter was the first step, but it was in a sandbox. It couldn't access the internet. ChatGPT Work can.
Wei-lin: It can access the internet to browse, like for search results.
Tessa: Not just browse. It has a code execution environment with full, unfiltered internet access. You can tell it to clone a GitHub repository, install all its dependencies, and then use that software to interact with some API on the web. The old version would just throw up a wall.
Wei-lin: Okay, that's a huge change. So it's not just running in its little container anymore. It can reach out.
Tessa: It can reach out. And it gets crazier. On top of that, it also has a full, headless Chrome browser.
Wei-lin: What does 'headless' mean here?
Tessa: It's just the browser, without the visible window. But it can do everything. It can load a website, fill out a form, take a screenshot of the result. It can even run JavaScript against the page to scrape data.
Wei-lin: So you can tell it to log into a site for you?
Tessa: Yes, and the article says it does it securely. It prompts you, the human, to take over just for the password and two-factor-auth part, so the model never sees your credentials. Then it continues on its way. It's like having a remote assistant using a browser on your behalf.
Wei-lin: Is this running on a totally different AI model? Is that the secret?
Tessa: That part's... honestly, I don't fully get it. The article tries to explain the model selection — Sol, Luna, Terra, all with different reasoning levels. But it's confusing. It seems like the models in 'Work' are different from 'Chat', and there are different tiers, but OpenAI's documentation is a mess. Simon Willison himself is mostly guessing at how it all maps together. So the 'why' is murky, but the 'what' is clear: it has these new powers.
Wei-lin: Okay, so it has internet, it has a browser... what else?
Tessa: A persistent filesystem. Before, every chat was a fresh start. You'd upload a file, and it would vanish after the session. Now, in Work, you have a `/workspace` folder that stays there. You can create a file in one chat, and then access it in a completely different chat an hour later.
Wei-lin: Which means you can actually build things over time. You're not starting from zero on every single prompt.
Tessa: Exactly. And that brings all of this together in the wildest feature, which he calls ChatGPT Sites. You can tell it to build and deploy an entire website.
Wei-lin: Like, a real website? On the internet?
Tessa: A real, live website. He gives this amazing example. He prompted it: 'Figure out all of the places in London with a pelican in her piety, then turn that into a JSON file and build a ChatGPT sites site about them.' And it did!
Wei-lin: What is a 'pelican in her piety'?
Tessa: It's this old medieval Christian symbol of a mother pelican pecking its own chest to feed its young with its blood. The point is, it's an obscure request. The AI went out, did the research, found the locations, compiled the data, and then built a beautiful, interactive website with a map and photos and deployed it to a public URL.
Wei-lin: From one sentence.
Tessa: From one sentence. And then — this is the final piece — you can schedule these tasks. You could tell it, 'check for new pelican sightings every morning at 8am and update the website.' It just... does it for you. In the background.
Wei-lin: So it's not a chatbot. It's an agent. Or an employee.
Tessa: It's an employee. A very, very capable one. I'm Tessa.
Wei-lin: I'm Wei-Lin.