Announcing B12’s AI Websites plugin for ChatGPT

One of the most exciting aspects of large language models is how they have lowered the conceptual complexity between saying what you want and seeing a first draft. While early versions of generative AI tools have been limited to text and image generation by virtue of the types of models they offer, it’s always been the dream (and part of B12’s mission) to use these models to unlock way more complex creative and analytical work.

For example, Greg Brockman (an early B12 investor) recently demoed a website sketch becoming a website with help from GPT: a sketch and a prompt can generate something many people wouldn’t know how to start. The example, while low-fidelity, opened our eyes to the beautiful and complex possibilities large language models could unlock:

The demo got B12 thinking about how we might combine some more structure and scaffolding with the lightweight expressive power of chat-based interfaces. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of B12’s AI Websites plugin for ChatGPT. The plugin creates a free professional website with scheduling, payments, and intake functionality 60 seconds after a brief chat session:

How does it work? B12 released our first algorithmic website creator in 2018. Over the years, we have iterated on ways to ask a small number of questions and generate a free website with scheduling, payments, and intake forms in 60 seconds. Our ChatGPT plugin defines the minimal set of those questions that’s required to create the website, and ChatGPT takes care of the rest. Once a website is generated, users can fully edit and customize the design without touching a line of code. With ChatGPT’s flexibility and B12’s AI website generation capabilities, there’s never been an easier way to go from concept to published site in minutes.

How to install the plugin

Note: To use ChatGPT plugins, you have to subscribe to ChatGPT Plus.

1. Open ChatGPT.
2. Locate the dropdown menu at the top of the page, and select the GPT-4 model.
3. Click on the Plugins dropdown menu and choose Plugin Store.
4. In the Plugin Store, type "B12" into the search box. The B12 plugin should appear in the search results.
5. Click on the Install button next to the B12 plugin listing.
6. Once the plugin is installed, ask ChatGPT to create a website for you.

Where we're going from here

We aren’t planning on stopping here, of course. Here are a few other open questions we’re exploring in the coming months:

• Beyond text and imagery, where else can generative AI contribute to drafts and scaffolds? One early idea is in proposing more distinct information architectures to cater the pages and sections on a website to the fine-grained description a customer offers.
• How do we further simplify traditional interfaces with what we learn from chat-based interfaces? The most striking example of this is in using embeddings to map a customer’s description of their business into a category in B12’s category hierarchy to help identify appropriate pages, copy, and images for their website.
• What does a website building copilot look like? We’ve started exploring with AI Assist, but are excited to update the tool to support full-page content drafts in the coming month.
• How can our customers offer the power of large language models to their clients? In the coming month we’ll be sharing our first version of a no-code AI tool that answers this question.

We’re excited for this first step of many. May a million websites bloom!