OpenAI's GPT-4 is an outrageous, if imperfect, step forward, offering a glimpse of a future internet where generative AI creates one big personalized web portal
Read to the end for a good Twitter reply — Building A Portal To Everything — Very often I will come up with a big existential question … LinkedIn: Simo Kajaste , Lars Bastholm , and Cenktan Ozyildirim . Mastodon: @malwaretech@infosec.exchange Tweets: @jacksonfall , @alexisbuilding , @tante , @kaipmdh , and @mr_dudders LinkedIn: Simo Kajaste : HustleGPT. This dude co-founded a startup with GPT-4 where AI is making all the business decisions and human(s) acts as their assistant when needed. … Lars Bastholm : This is a deeply fascinating thread showing how you can use GPT-4 as an entrepreneur doing most of the work for you. — Follow along, as it is happening in real time. … Cenktan Ozyildirim : Onur Yurtsever, the founder of Smart Advice Financial Technologies, the Robo-advisory company with the largest market share in Turkey, was our guest speaker at our fintech class last night. … Mastodon: @malwaretech@infosec.exchange : Using exams as a metric for AIs seems like a really weird decision. Exams aren't even a good metric for humans. All they do is test someone's ability to memorize answers. … Tweets: Jackson Greathouse Fall / @jacksonfall : I gave GPT-4 a budget of $100 and told it to make as much money as possible. I'm acting as its human liaison, buying anything it says to. Do you think it'll be able to make smart investments and build an online business? Follow along 👀 https://twitter.com/... @alexisbuilding : 1. @jacksonfall is experimenting to see if GPT-4 can create a functioning business, starting with $100. 🧵 (1/7) https://twitter.com/... @tante : I think @broderick nailed t with this paragraph on “AI” in the current Garbage Day newsletter: https://www.garbageday.email/ ... https://twitter.com/... @kaipmdh : “If, at some point in the next few weeks, someone opens up a Google Doc, uses the AI prompt and, crucially, it works — well, we have officially entered the next stage of the AI arms race, as far as I'm concerned.” -@broderick https://www.garbageday.email/ ... Andy Dudfield / @mr_dudders : I don't totally agree with this, but it is a neat line. Certainly the idea that we are in the middle of an actual web scale vibes shift is unavoidable now. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When OpenAI shipped GPT-4 in March 2023, Garbage Day framed it less as a chatbot upgrade than as infrastructure for what it labels 'Building A Portal': generative models collapsing the many-site internet into one personalized interface. The adoption was immediate — Simo Kajaste launched a HustleGPT venture in which GPT-4 makes the business decisions and the human co-founders act as its assistants, turning the portal thesis into a working company almost overnight.
The arc cuts both ways. A critical 2020 look at GPT-2 had already argued such systems acquire superficial, unreliable knowledge, and by August 2023 skeptics warned against building businesses on the premise that the tech would be world-changing — the exact premise the portal thesis depends on.
First-order effects
- Entrepreneurs gain a model trusted with end-to-end execution rather than just answers: in HustleGPT, GPT-4 holds decision-making authority inside an actual startup while humans handle what it can't.
- The launch sets an instant capability benchmark for the field — days later, [[a:838422|Microsoft researchers published claims of near-human performance across coding, law, medicine, and psychology]], raising the stakes for every rival lab.
Second-order effects
- Platforms hosting the resulting experiments absorb the spillover: AI-authored hustle threads and synthetic posts flood social feeds, which later pushed LinkedIn toward buttons letting users report suspected AI-generated content.
- If the 'one big portal' framing takes hold, consumer sites face a prompt layer interposed between them and their audiences — search, discovery, and navigation migrating into the model itself rather than pointing back out to the open web.
Third-order effects
- OpenAI's later move to task-specific custom GPTs under its stated strategy of 'gradual iterative deployment' reads as the portal thesis turned product: distribution shifting from URLs to curated agents inside one platform, with OpenAI as gatekeeper.
- Whether the structural shift compounds or stalls hinges on unresolved capability questions — 2023 produced both AGI-signals claims and 'generative AI could be a dud' pushback (the skeptical case) — so builders are betting on a trend whose ceiling is genuinely contested.
The trend: Consumer internet usage is drifting from navigating many websites to delegating tasks through one personalized generative interface, with whoever controls the model controlling the front door.