The Code Interpreter is probably the most interesting ChatGPT plugin of OpenAI and opens up completely new capabilities for the Chatbot.
At the end of March, OpenAI introduced a groundbreaking new feature for ChatGPT: Plugins. One of them is a so-called Code Interpreter. With it, the language model can not only generate code, but also execute it independently.
As with Auto-GPT, the busy developer community has found exciting use cases for this technology in a very short time. Especially for data journalism and similar data-based analysis, the tool seems to open up completely new possibilities. This is also due to the possibility of uploading and downloading files up to 100 MB in size.
We have compiled some of the most exciting demonstrations of ChatGPT’s Code Interpreter.
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Visualize data
As mentioned earlier, one strength of the Code Interpreter lies in the visualization of data. The software is not limited to any particular type of display or graphic. The possibilities range from simple bar graphs to more complex and lesser-known graphs.
So it looks like ChatGPT with Code Interpreter can do basically any visualization technique you ask. And you can tell it to make charts “more beautiful”
(I actually asked it to generate artificial data to create the charts to show what they could do, which the AI happily did😬) pic.twitter.com/CsmRO8vDe1
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) May 2, 2023
ChatGPT can not only process the data, but also clean it or generate synthetic data in case of doubt. The AI is not completely flawless: “If you give it something with a lot of text, it seems to tokenize that and the data you are cleaning can come back somewhat mangled,” notes data scientist Kathryn Cramer on Twitter.
The code interpreter feature on ChatGPT is the most mind blowing thing I’ve seen yet.
All I did was upload a CSV of SF crime data and ask it to visualize trends(!!) pic.twitter.com/pkFdPqgAzb
—John Backus (@backus) April 29, 2023
Analyzing your own musical tastes
Twitter user @SHL0MS went a step further and analyzed a Spotify playlist of about 300 hours of all his favorite songs. ChatGPT not only provided the visualization, but the AI also helped with data retrieval and explained how to use the Spotify API accordingly.
analyzing a 300hr Spotify favorites playlist with ChatGPT Code Interpreter
i used to use a Jupyter notebook some guy made for PCA analysis but it broke
GPT showed me how to export from the Spotify API, ran multidimensional PCA and t-SNE analyses, and summarized my taste for me pic.twitter.com/cVmUvuuRdM
— 𒐪 (@SHL0MS) May 1, 2023
Create animated GIFs
In addition to data processing, the Code Interpreter has limited multimedia capabilities. For example, a short prompt can be used to create a GIF animation.
The ability to create GIFs from scratch can of course be combined with the data analysis capabilities described above. Like here to show all lighthouse sites in the USA.
Recommendation

This was kind of delightful: I uploaded a CSV file of every lighthouse location in the US.
“ChatGPT Code Interpreter: Create a gif of a map of the lighthouse locations, where the map is very dark but each lighthouse twinkles.” A couple seconds later… pic.twitter.com/f14JLWQCyB
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) May 2, 2023
Simple video editing
However, the Code Interpreter handles not only GIFs, but other file formats as well. For example, Prompt Engineer Riley Goodside uploaded a GIF and asked ChatGPT to convert it to an MP4 with a dramatic zoom. ChatGPT doesn’t store data for long, but asks for a re-upload if in doubt.
came back 1hr later to make a 10s version and check if my upload was still in the mount dir. it wasn’t, but GPT was smart enough to figure out what happened and ask for a re-upload: pic.twitter.com/52FEyb5ZuI
—Riley Goodside (@goodside) April 30, 2023
Code Interpreter is still in closed alpha
Like all other ChatGPT plugins, the Code Interpreter is currently in a closed alpha phase, so only selected users have access to it. In all likelihood, it will only be available to paying ChatGPT Plus customers in a full rollout in the future.