Giving your AI a computer

There are basically two ways to give Claude or ChatGPT a computer: the AI company can provide a virtual computer for its agent to use, or you can give the AI access to your own. Let’s start with the easier (and less powerful) case. To use the computers provided by the AI companies, the mode you want is called ChatGPT Work in ChatGPT, and Cowork in Claude (the naming will not get less confusing, I am sorry to say). In this mode, you next pick the model and its thinking level — I would start with Sol set to High for ChatGPT, and Fable or Opus set to High for Claude. You can also pick what applications you want the AI to connect to, which lets the AI act on your stuff.

Personally, I have the systems connected to my email, a non-private part of my Google Drive, and lots of other applications, but you have to decide what you are comfortable with. Once you are set up, you can do pretty powerful things. For example, I told both systems: “connect to my Gmail and help me prep for the MBA seminar I am giving on Monday the 21st, including building some presentation and demos as inspiration. Answer any outstanding messages on the topic. ” Both systems got to work: they connected to my email and figured out the task (including correctly figuring out that the next Monday the 21st was in September, not August), and after that they just started working, which is what agents do.

They did research on the web, decided on a presentation demo, thought about how I might want to respond to the colleague who emailed me, and more. About 10 minutes later, both returned answers, having created a range of teaching materials and writing an email to the colleague. This is impressive stuff that would have taken a couple hours of human work (though my students shouldn’t worry, I am not actually going to use the AI’s presentation). But you may have noticed something; Claude (the top response) only prepared a draft but ChatGPT actually sent an email to my colleagues! What happened?