OpenAI Code Interpreter — What you need to know

A human like robot writing computer code late at night — Midjourney v 5.2

This article is an explanation for non-programmers as to why the Code Interpreter capability added to the ChatGPT is a big deal. This capability was announced on July 6th, 2023 along with a few other updates. It was announced without any fanfare. You can read about it in the release notes here.

ChatGPT - Release Notes | OpenAI Help Center

First, it has been released to paid subscribers only, and is still considered to be in a phase of software development called Beta, which means they are still working on it. That said, Code Interpreter is a game changer. Here is how it was described by OpenAI when it was released in its Alpha software development phase.

Code interpreter

An experimental ChatGPT model that can use Python, handle uploads and downloads

We provide our models with a working Python interpreter in a sandboxed,
firewalled execution environment, along with some ephemeral disk space.
Code run by our interpreter plugin is evaluated in a persistent session that
is alive for the duration of a chat conversation (with an upper-bound timeout)
and subsequent calls can build on top of each other.

We support…