OpenAI just launched its new ChatGPT Agent that can make as many as 1 complicated cupcake order per hour, but even Sam Altman says you probably shouldn't trust it for 'high-stakes uses'

www.pcgamer.com

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Agent on Thursday, its latest effort in the industry-wide pursuit to turn AI into a profitable enterprise—not just one that eats investors' billions. In its announcement blog, OpenAI says its Agent "can now do work for you using its own computer," but CEO Sam Altman warns that the rollout presents unpredictable risks.
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OpenAI research lead Lisa Fulford told Wired that she used Agent to order "a lot of cupcakes," which took the tool about an hour, because she was very specific about the cupcakes.

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OpenAI just launched its new ChatGPT Agent that can make as many as 1 complicated cupcake order per hour, but even Sam Altman says you probably shouldn't trust it for 'high-stakes uses'

www.pcgamer.com /software/ai/openai-just-launched-its-new-chatgpt-agent-that-can-make-as-many-as-1-complicated-cupcake-order-per-hour-but-even-sam-altman-says-you-probably-shouldnt-trust-it-for-high-stakes-uses/

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Man, remember all the custom cupcake bakers who were clamoring for an AI to take their craft?
Me neither. Billionaires are a scourge upon society.
- Is just ordering them, not making them yet

I think in some ways Generative AI is very emblematic of the current state of software development. Projects are approached from the outset with the driving question being, "how can we make money materialize out of thin air?" Not, "What kind of problems are we trying to solve?" Or, "Why would someone pay for this?"
The last several projects I've worked on have been solutions in search of a problem. Hyped up products that made executives see dollar signs but didn't actually produce any because they failed to provide any tangible value.

So much for the internet. We somehow managed to turn one of humanity’s greatest achievements into a hateful echo chamber we use for warfare first and then into a blackbox where inefficient AI agents communicate with each other in the most inefficient way so the planet can cook us alive even faster. God forbid just calling up a bakery to order some cupcakes.
- Companies will dump billions into AI to fuck everyone over but the transition to clean energy is always too expensive.
- Or just sending an email.

For anyone wondering what the fuck that title meant:
OpenAI research lead Lisa Fulford told Wired that she used Agent to order "a lot of cupcakes," which took the tool about an hour, because she was very specific about the cupcakes.
"It was easier than me doing it myself," Fulford said, "because I didn't want to do it."
- I'm still wondering. Like did it call up a bakery and place an order? Or go online? I know it didn't actually make the cupcakes itself.
  But I'm not sure that spending an hour trying to wrangle ChatGPT into getting your cupcakes is any faster or easier than placing the order yourself.
  The article also noticeably omits what happened after. Were the cupcakes made, and did they match what she wanted?
  
  Also did baking the cupcakes use more or less energy than ChatGPT used to order them?
  
  I'm guessing it's the AI agent stuff. Which at the moment is literally just automating browsing through a website.
  Apparently there will be APIs to do this in the future. Ironically, AI wouldn't even be needed for that to be useful.
  
  The AI willed those cupcakes into existence, why don't you trust them?
  It's like the metaverse and NFT, you're not supposed to think about how it works. Instead you just need to believe reality will magically reorganize to make it work.
- Okay but that’s not what easier means.
  Easier would be to call the bakery or spending 10 minutes browsing their website, asking to cast, and checking out.
  I don’t want to spend an hour on tasks that would normally take 10 minutes. My executive dysfunctions already make me good at doing that.
  This might be a revolutionary idea, but what if they helped me do that take an hour in 10 minutes?
  I’m just putting that idea out there totally for free in case any AI companies want to jump on that opportunity.
  
  I don’t want to spend an hour on tasks that would normally take 10 minutes.
  I don't get it, do you think she spent an hour talking to ChatGPT to try and get it to order doughnuts?
  
  It’s a starting point
- With how terrible Google Search has become, I think I’m on Lisa’s side this time.
  
  unfortunately any ai service is going to make things worse. right now we can discover and choose. with search and browsing dead, ai provider will shove the product giving them the highest cut aka most garbage or snake oil products.
  even today targeted advertising for poor people is filled with betting, lottery & poker game. similarly elder people are primarily shown ads of miracle cure for chronic illness and scammy religious crap.
  edit: switch to kagi. its paid but well worth it. searchXNG is also a good alternative if you have got time for hosting it urself.

CEO Sam Altman warns that the rollout presents unpredictable risks.
But that doesn't prevent his profit motive from consuming untold amounts of electricity to shove this into your face. They know what they're doing. They know their product is used primarily to generate spam, and secondarily is designed to form addictive faux-relationships with their users.
Burn in hell. Actually, given the direction this is all going, we will all be burning in hell within generations.

So instead of working on fixing an existing problem for anybody, they're solving a new problem for nobody. Let them eat cupcakes, I guess.

I spent maybe 90 minutes trying to get ChatGPT to write me a fucking AppleScript or bash to copy all calendar events from a source calendar to a destination. That shit does not work.
- for coding you want to use claude
  if you don’t want to pay for claude after so many messages what you can do is use mistral to code it up then use claude to proof check the code
  
  tx, will try it some time.
- It won't do that well. What you have to do is ask it to help you leverage your existing development skills in an unfamiliar domain. I used it to help me write a python program to authenticate, pull and filter data from a GCP firestore database and create an XLSX with summary and detail sheets.
  I've never used Python before in my life. It took me about 4 hours. Of course I've been doing that sort of thing in Java for many years. Turned out I wrote that faster in Python than I could in Java. Configuring the connection to that database in Python was so simple compared to Java.
  The stuff it wrote was sometimes incomplete or wrong in subtle ways, but I could see the bits that didn't make sense which helped me focus on those things and ask better questions to help me figure it out. I think the last hour was just me tweaking stuff by myself because I didn't need help with it by that point.
  
  I needed about 30 minutes to do a python application from scratch that took linear JSON data files, merged them and presented them as a tree in a GUI.
  Before that I had barely done anything in python, basically could do a basic function declaration with a simple operation and nothing else. I even didn't have a lot of experience with UI at all.
  But like you I had experience with java and such, and those skills transfer. All it took was searching basic syntax/related code examples and required library imports. And I mean basic, search engine search, not AI answers.
  All I'm saying is, I really don't think AI is providing anything a lot more efficient than doing a good old crawl through API docs and stack overflow. So the fact it's using tremendous amounts of resources to maybe achieve a 10% efficiency boost is bothering me a lot.
  
  Anyone who already knows another programming language but has never used python in their life can write a simple python app quickly, regardless

That's quite a bold statement to make since he now has US military contracts. What is he making cupcakes for the Pentagon?
- Grok has tje Pentagon contract. Does OpenAI also have one?
  
  Microsoft's AI, which is OpenAI, is approved for Defense Contracts. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/16/openai-wins-200-million-us-defense-contract.html It even has an ominous project name which was posted to a public site which I cannot seem to recall at the moment.

So now they're raiding We Bare Bears for ideas?
- Explain.
  
  Reference

I need an agent who would set up DevOps for me. Then robots would definitely be the ones working hard, not humans.

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