Why You Can Only Activate 3 Plugins on ChatGPT

I’ve heard a lot of people confused or questioning the reason you can only have 3 plugins activated on ChatGPT.

It actually provides some insight into prompt engineering by showing the limitations of token counts.

According to OpenAI’s Plugin documentation, each plugin is allowed an 8000-character description that will assist the model in providing context to improve the prompt experience of for users.

So with 3 plugins combined that is a potential 24,000 characters or approximately 8000 tokens total which are included in the system context.

Then end-users like us are allowed up to 32,000 tokens.

So you can now see why the 3 plugin limitation is in place, namely because ChatGPT has to know how to use the plugin and provide instructions about the details of each of the three plugins.

I experimented with extracting this system context from plugins with varying degrees of success.

Here’s a 🔗 ChatGPT thread showing some of the context provided to OpenAI by the developers of the Diagram plugin.

I’m teaching everything I know in The Ultimate AI Course. There’s a heavy focus on prompt engineering and developing AI tools with no code applications.