OpenAI launches Canvas, an interface that makes ChatGPT a better project collaborator

Fresh off the largest VC round of all time, OpenAI is launching Canvas, an interface that makes ChatGPT a better project collaborator.

The new feature opens a separate window from the normal ChatGPT app that's specifically designed to collaborate with you on projects that involve writing, editing, and coding. This is very similar to Anthropic's Artifacts feature, which opens a new window that appears alongside Claude and runs the code that the chatbot is generating at the user's request.

Canvas takes things even a step further than Artifacts, as it enables you to highlight parts of your project, ask ChatGPT for help, and make direct changes to your document or your code. For example, after having it write, you can ask it to suggest edits, adjust length, change reading levels, or even add emojis.

For developers, it can review code, add logs and comments, fix bugs, and port to other coding languages like JavaScript and Python.

As Every's Dan Shipper puts it, Canvas looks like the next step in OpenAI's plan to build a new operating system for the AI age. Basically, OpenAI is trying to make it so you never want or have to leave ChatGPT.

The problem, as Ethan Mollick and David Cramer describe, is that this doesn't really fit with existing workflows. You write blogs in Google Docs or Word. You code in VS Code. This is why products like Grammarly and Cursor are so popular: they live where you already work. On the flip side, widespread adoption of Canvas would require a complete 180 in how and where people work.

Can OpenAI get people to change so drastically? Maybe. You can never count out the company that invented the fastest growing consumer product of all time. But in a world where they are losing $5B a year, the clock is ticking.