Simon Smith

EVP Generative AI @klickhealth

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

"Please hold while I transfer you to Megatron."

[ElevenLabs @ElevenLabs]

Hasbro has spent decades finding new ways to bring their characters to life, through toys, film, games, theme parks, and more. Today, they took the next step.

Developers, enterprises, and app and experience builders can now integrate rights-cleared voices for Hasbro characters like Cobra Commander, Megatron, Col. Mustard, and Optimus into their products and experiences via the ElevenLabs Iconic Marketplace.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

Interesting results (awaiting confirmation from OpenAI) but also worth noting that it's not cheap.

[Zhengyao Jiang @zhengyaojiang]

OpenAI ran a hiring challenge, but the top candidate was one they couldn’t hire: our autonomous research agent, Aiden.

In Parameter Golf, Aiden ran for 22 days, and out-outperformed all 1,016 other researchers: 🧵 (1/8)

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

Noticed this doesn't happen if you're in a different thread when you trigger archiving. So it may only happen when you're on the thread you're archiving.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

Archive error still happening in Codex. I think this is the issue:

1. I click archive on a thread in the sidebar, then "Confirm."
2. Codex immediately tries to load that thread after it's archived, which causes an error because it's archived.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

This mood board skill for Codex generates mood boards faster using batch generation, simpler using an HTML page, and more Codexy by leveraging built-in image attachment and annotation capability. You'll need an OPENAI_API_KEY set. Get it on GitHub: https://t.co/tGip8VOeoT

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

Frustrated at the slowness and clunkiness of mood board generation in the new Codex Creative Production plugin, I created a faster, simpler, more Codexy mood board skill. Details and link in the thread.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

The weird thing about the Codex Creative Production plugin is that there's a way better, faster, simpler way to generate mood boards. The current implementation is over-engineered and doesn't take advantage of existing API and Codex capabilities.

First, speed: I can get six mood board images in 54 seconds via low quality (but good) image batching versus the many minutes it currently takes. The trick is to not use the Codex Image Gen skill, which the Creative Production plugin relies on, because it doesn't expose batch generation or quality except in CLI mode. Instead, we can go straight to the GPT Image 2 API with these settings:

- Quality: low
- Size: 1024x1024
- Mode: generate-batch
- Number of images: 6
- Concurrency: 6

If OpenAI updates the Image Gen skill to allow at the very least low quality batch image generation, then the Creative Production plugin can use those settings for the mood boards, and save high resolution imagery for final images. For a mood board, we don't need high resolution images. This is visual exploration!

Second, unnecessary complexity: All you need is HTML and Codex. We don't need to spin up a local server just so I can click on images and add them to a prompt, which takes extra time, adds extra complexity, and is buggy. All we have to do is put the images in a grid within an HTML file, and users can click that and use Codex's built in "attach image to thread" capability.

So, OpenAI has the pieces to make a way better Creative Production plugin. It just feels like this was rushed to market without a lot of thought for the user experience and finding the most elegant, Codexy technical implementation.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

@sound4movement I think it may work for all business accounts? Could always just get a business account for one person if so. Though not sure if you need more than one seat.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

Got Sites in our ChatGPT Enterprise account now and am exploring it with Codex.

It’s more fully featured than I've seen some people on X suggest. You get a relational database, file storage, environment variables, versioning, access controls, and server-side logic.

You don't yet appear able to use OpenAI API endpoints within sites, with usage billed directly back to your ChatGPT business instance. That seems like a logical thing to offer if it's not there yet, as it would drive even more usage for OpenAI, while making it dead simple for people to create AI-enabled sites. (If this already works, my apologies. I've just started exploring and experimenting.)

Another thing that's unclear to me but I want to explore is pairing Sites with Codex Automations. Can I update a site with an automation, the way I can currently with sites hosted elsewhere? My assumption is yes, but I need to test that.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

OpenAI, please treat Codex as sacred and don't allow seemingly rushed, rough releases to taint it. It is elegant and thoughtful and user friendly and the Creative Production plugin I just tested feels... not so much.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

Okay, I'm giving up at this point. Everything just takes too long and is too confusing or broken. Here's my TL;DR on the Creative Production plugin:

- I'm not sure who this is for. If you're a creative professional, you're unlikely to use this, because you'll already be aware of better options for things like mood boarding (e.g. Mixboard). And if you're a small business owner or something, you're going to find the experience kind of confusing; for example, after selecting "cues," it's not clear you have to click the "continue" button (all the buttons are grey), and when you do, you get a modal window with text in it to prompt Codex for the next step. Odd.

- Everything is too damn slow. I understand that it's generating a bunch of images, but I can get the same batch in Mixboard in a few seconds, whereas it can take several minutes in Codex, and it has to fight through sandbox issues just to render them. I can just open the browser in Codex and use Mixboard there, then drag in images I like. Way faster that way.

- I think Codex gets confused by the plugin. It's trying its best, but I tried it for creating assets for a real brand by providing that brand's URL, and it just didn't work.

- Relatedly, the plugin has a very opinionated position on what a creative workflow should look like, and the types of things people should be doing. It probably isn't right for a lot of creative workflows. So, again, maybe more for small teams that don't have creative departments or creative agencies, but then it needs to be way more user friendly than it is right now.

Bottom line: Some neat interaction ideas here, such as the preview pane image selector (when it works), but it's unclear who this is for, it's too user unfriendly to be for nontechnical people, it's too slow and opinionated to be for creative professionals, and it feels like it was made by people outside the Codex team who are too tolerant of bugs and bad user experience.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

Now I'm testing the new Codex Creative Production plugin. I'm inventing a fictional drug and starting through its workflow step by step. I have encountered what looks like a bug. I'm working through the "Positioning" step, but after doing the positioning intake and clicking "Continue with cues" it pops open a "send followup" modal with the mood board explore skill selected, which kicks us into the mood board workflow.

Overall, I find these interactive widgets need some work. It's not clear that I'm supposed to click "Continue with cues" to take the next step. Then, when I click that, it pops open another modal window with a prompt and, in this case, the wrong skill specified. This feels incredibly cumbersome, unfortunately, and will confuse a lot of nontechnical users.

People should just be able to click a big green button that says "continue" and have their answers prompt the next step. It's hard to know that the "Continue with cues" button means "Submit and continue," and it's weird that this pops up a modal with text in it. It feels unfinished, not as polished as things we typically see in Codex.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

I'm testing the new Codex Sites and the Creative Production plugin, and to be honest, they don't have the usual Codex level of polish. Lots of bugs and issues. They feel rushed. Great potential, but feel like they didn't come from the Codex team, which has been rock solid.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

@v_lugovsky It's fully gated. For us, that means users can only access the sites if they log in with SSO, which they also use to access ChatGPT Enterprise.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

Built and deployed my first Codex Sites web app. It's very meta: A site for posting and voting on Sites ideas.

For the most part, this was a seamless experience, and everything with the site itself worked with no bugs. I was also pleasantly surprised with the design (I gave Codex our brand color palette, but that's it in terms of design guidance).

Deployment and sharing were also easy. Codex can do it all, but in this case I chose to deploy it with Codex then test it myself before making it available to our workspace. After testing I opened it up to everyone via the sharing widget within the Codex Sites page.

There were a few small issues I encountered. The biggest was a security issue that prevented Codex from testing the live site either within the Codex browser or in Chrome. One minor issue was that I had to log in again to my ChatGPT account to access the site, whereas I was already logged into ChatGPT, which was odd. Another is that it looks like there should be a screenshot for the site in the Sites page, but right now it just shows up with the Sites icon.

Overall, though, I can see this being very useful for securely sharing sites and web apps within our company.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

Now I'm creating "scenes." Unfortunately the selector is broken in the preview pane, as shown in the video. Some kind of bug here that prevents you from actually selecting anything.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

This experience reminded me of Google's Mixboard, which is similar to the Codex plugin's mood board feature. The nice thing about the Codex plugin is that it's in Codex. But Mixboard is way faster and the UI is much more intuitive.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

Mood boarding works pretty well. It can take some time to generate all the images (maybe should use lower resolution or something for faster generation since these are just visual inspiration?), and it feels a bit unclear what you're supposed to do. Also, there needs to be more visual diversity, as many of these images seem to be thematically quite similar. But it's definitely useful and a good conceptual approach to this part of the process.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

Minor issue here is that the sandbox is blocking the local server for running the mood board generation and review process. Looks like Codex overcame the block, but not sure why it's happening. I have "Approve for me" as the permission setting here.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

Yeah, this isn't so seamless. We went through positioning and now I'm asking for the next step in the Creative Production plugin workflow. Instead of just triggering the mood board, Codex is giving me the prompt to trigger the mood board. That is weird. It should just DO this.

[Simon Smith @_simonsmith]

I'm thinking about cases where we want to have AI do qualitative analysis of something. For example, imagine we have a brand tracking dashboard with quantitative data on things like ad performance, and we also want to have a feed of competitor activity summarized by AI, with insights, implications, and potential responses we could take. We could run an Automation to add that insight to the dashboard rather than just sucking up a feed of data and presenting it.

Another option, of course, could be embedding AI in the site itself. Would be great if we could do that from OpenAI's API endpoints and have the site's consumption of AI tokens get billed back to our enterprise account with the ability to track which sites are consuming tokens and which user created the sites and are responsible for consuming those tokens.