ChatGPT’s Biggest UI Update Yet! The Canvas

ChatGPT has just received its most significant UI update since its launch! OpenAI has unveiled a brand new interactive interface called Canvas, allowing you to collaborate with ChatGPT in a way that feels like using Word or VS Code!

What is Canvas?

Canvas is a standalone window (kind of feels like it borrowed from Claude’s artifacts feature 😄), where you can work on writing or coding projects with ChatGPT, no longer limited to a chat box! It provides a new collaborative experience, letting you and ChatGPT co-create and refine ideas side by side, much like brainstorming with a colleague in front of a whiteboard!

Highlights of Canvas:

Better Collaboration: You can highlight specific sections to let ChatGPT know which parts you want it to focus on. ChatGPT will act like an editor or code reviewer, offering inline feedback and suggestions.

More Flexible Control: You can directly edit text or code within Canvas and use shortcut menus to ask ChatGPT to adjust text length, debug code, and more. There’s also a “back” button to revert to previous versions.

Smarter Triggers: Canvas will automatically open when ChatGPT detects situations where it can assist. You can also prompt ChatGPT with “use canvas” to open it for working on existing projects.

Enhanced Shortcuts:

Writing Shortcuts: Suggest edits, adjust length, change reading level (from kindergarten to graduate level), polish text, and add emojis.

Coding Shortcuts: Review code, add logs, add comments, fix bugs, and translate to other languages (JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, C++, or PHP).

How was Canvas trained?

OpenAI used GPT-4o and innovative synthetic data generation techniques (such as extracting output from OpenAI o1-preview) to train the Canvas model, making it a creative partner. The model knows when to open Canvas, perform targeted edits, and even rewrite entire sections. It understands broader context, providing more accurate feedback and suggestions.

To support these features, OpenAI’s research team developed core behaviors such as:

Triggering Canvas (for writing and coding)
Generating different content types
Performing targeted edits
Rewriting documents
Providing inline comments
OpenAI also uses more than 20 internal evaluations to measure training progress. By improving the “right trigger,” the accuracy of correctly triggering Canvas for writing and coding tasks has been raised to 83% and 94%, respectively.

The Future of Canvas:

OpenAI believes that making AI more useful and accessible requires rethinking how we interact with it. Canvas represents a new approach and is the first major visual interface update for ChatGPT since its launch two years ago.

Canvas is still in early testing, and OpenAI plans to rapidly improve its features. Currently it is only available for ChatGPT Plus and Business users.

*Read about Canvas News here!