ChatGPT Now Answers With Mini Apps

You can now ask ChatGPT a question and it will build a mini application for you, right inside the chat. No coding needed.

OpenAI released it a couple of days before I recorded the video. They call it Intelligent UI. Ask ChatGPT to explain something or help with a task and the answer can come back with buttons you can press, numbers you can change and parts you can click through. Their own example breaks down the design of a seven-speed bike, then explodes out the parts so you can click through each one.

Not many people are talking about it. I think it's extremely cool!

A few months ago this was something you had to build. You'd open Codex, or ChatGPT Work, hand it the job and wait for a little app to come back. I wrote about giving ChatGPT a job when Work launched in July. Now the same sort of thing happens natively, inside a normal conversation.

My first go with it had nothing to do with work. I was at an apple festival in a Cypriot village at the weekend and heard some traditional music where I could not for the life of me work out the time signature. I’m used used to 4/4 or 3/4.

This was neither, and I couldn't clap along. I asked ChatGPT what I was hearing. It suggested the likely song, explained how it's constructed and built a little interactive graphic that stepped me through the pulses. That would have been very hard to explain in text alone. Seeing it laid out, I finally understood what was going on.

A calculator for a workshop

It goes beyond learning, though. You can use it to work out what to charge a client, compare a couple of options or organise something with far too many moving parts.

Super helpful for quick business analysis.

I run workshops for a living, so the obvious test was the money: is a small AI workshop worth running, and what does it actually leave me with?

My prompt asked for exactly that shape: a calculator, in this chat, with inputs I can edit and results that update when I change them. I started with some illustrative figures and ChatGPT built the calculator. Right there in Chat.

On one side are the inputs. I set the ticket price to 199 euros and scrolled attendance up to 20 people. Then the fixed costs, the cost per attendee, the payment fee Stripe takes and how many hours the workshop takes me, which I put at three.

On the other side are the results: surplus before tax, surplus per hour, break-even attendance (how many people need to turn up before you stop losing money) and margin. On my illustrative figures the margin came out at 85.7%. Then it runs through all the mathematics underneath, so you can see where every number comes from.

Now compare that with how you'd do this in a normal chat. You ask "what if I charge 149 instead?" and get a great big long answer. Then "what if only 12 people come?" and get another. Each answer sits further up the scroll and you're comparing them in your head.

AIs tend to be very verbose and just talk and talk and talk.

And when you just want a damn answer that’s not helpful!

With a quick interactive UI element you can see the answer and quickly make adjustments to check the effect.

So simple yet so effective.

It copes with moving parts too

The third example will be handy as we head towards Christmas and Thanksgiving.

I asked for a dinner planner: eight people coming over for a relaxed Sunday dinner at 7pm, one oven and four hob rings. Suggest a manageable menu, a vegetarian option and apple crumble for dessert (I did just go to an apple festival, I have a lot of apples). Editable guest count and serving time, an ingredient checklist with quantities, a backwards cooking timeline, and oven use shown clearly so it doesn't schedule two incompatible temperatures at once.

Previously ChatGPT would give me a table. Maybe a chart, maybe a nice little PDF.

That’s fine…

But what if plans change? I have to go and regenerate the whole plan again. Annoying.

This time I nudged the guests up to 12 and it warned me straight away: careful, you're going to have an oven capacity issue. It reacts to new inputs.

Again, this saves us going back and forth, back and forth with the AI. Super time saving!

Do this today

Intelligent UI will generally trigger itself when ChatGPT thinks it’ll be helpful.

However we can also force it to trigger by using words like “create”, “show me”, “build” etc.

Here’s an example prompt that’ll trigger Intelligent UI and let you see how it works. Copy this into ChatGPT. Swap the workshop for whatever you sell, whether that's a coaching package, a consulting day or a course, and use your real numbers.

Open it in ChatGPT directly (preloaded link)

Then change one input at a time and watch which results move. If something needs adding, a second ticket tier or a venue cost, just ask in the chat as you would normally and it will rebuild the calculator.

If you only watch one bit

• 03:16 The workshop calculator: the prompt, then ticket price, attendees and break-even

• 05:03 Pushing dinner to 12 guests and getting the oven warning

• 02:40 The Cypriot rhythm, stepped through pulse by pulse

The full video runs through all three, plus a clickable learning breakdown of how a large language model picks its next word.

To the Task,

Kyle