Hello everyone,
I appreciate the ongoing discussion and the valuable insights shared. I’d like to clarify a bit about how I envision the ChatGPT plugin for SuttaCentral.
A ChatGPT plugin is a tool that currently only ChatGPT Plus subscribers have access to. Setting it up would involve configuring ChatGPT to communicate with the SuttaCentral API using an OpenAI manifest file. This file would be added to one of the domains that SuttaCentral owns, and then we’d need to register it with OpenAI. This would make the plugin available for everyone to use. I see this as a straightforward way to drive more interactions with users and help people engage with early Buddhist texts.
I imagine this plugin as a tool that allows ChatGPT to access SuttaCentral to answer questions. For example, a user might ask, “Can you summarize sutta MN10 and get a list of its parallels with their summaries as well?” or “Tell me about The Simile of the Saw sutta. What translations do you have available in Bengali and English?” The plugin would retrieve the information or text of the suttas from SuttaCentral, and ChatGPT could process it based on the user’s requests. I see this as more of a study tool.
Interestingly, ChatGPT has been trained on the Pali Canon and some Mahayana sutras. This means it might be able to do more than just respond to direct questions about specific suttas. It could potentially provide information or links to suttas where specific ideas are discussed.
Here are a link to a article that talk about creating a ChatGPT plugin: How to Create a ChatGPT Plugin: This article provides a step-by-step guide on creating a ChatGPT plugin.
Ayya @Vimala, regarding your translation project, this plugin wouldn’t be creating ready-to-publish translations. However, if we configure it to use the API to get different languages, ChatGPT Plus subscribers could ask to translate one of the suttas or sutras that hasn’t been translated to their language yet. It might be a helpful tool for a translator to use.
@michaelh, regarding your idea of making connections for the whole Canon, that might be better done using a custom trained model on the Pali text and translations. As mentioned before, ChatGPT can’t translate Pali well, probably because it wasn’t trained on any Pali. In theory, we could take one of the open source LLMs and train it on the Pali and/or Chinese and/or Tibetan Canons and make an LLM that could translate, summarize, and find connections between them.
Here’s the HuggingFace leaderboard for open source LLMs: HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard
Many of these are nearly at ChatGPT’s level and might actually surpass it soon. However, training an LLM would require significant computational resources. Unless someone has a very powerful computer or a lot of credit with one of the cloud computing providers, this might not be feasible for us to do at the moment. However, it’s an exciting possibility to consider for the future.
Thank you all for your enthusiasm and support. I’m looking forward to our collaboration and the journey ahead.
Metta,
Jon