The Building a ChatGPT Plugin for Medium article published on Medium Engineering provides a technical exploration of the capabilities and proof of concept of ChatGPT plugins.

OpenAI has recently introduced plugins for ChatGPT to enable access to up-to-date content on the internet.

ChatGPT had been trained on a 2021 dataset and had limited access to the internet, however, plugins can solve this problem by allowing platforms such as Medium to expose their content to ChatGPT.

The user prompt and installed plugins enable ChatGPT to trigger the correct API to retrieve a piece of content.

Chat GPT plugin support is currently in private alpha, with access granted to Medium to explore the possibilities of making their content retrievable by ChatGPT.

The article explains how to build a ChatGPT plugin with a well-known/ai-plugin.json file, which provides necessary information so that ChatGPT can understand that your domain supports plugins and link the appropriate description, icons, and links to the end-users when installing the plugin.

The OpenAPI YAML file exposes the schema that allows ChatGPT to understand the API, and the Go language can be used to write the MediumGPT service that converts hardcoded GraphQL queries into REST APIs.

The article focuses on the technical side of building a ChatGPT plugin and demonstrates how it works.