OpenAI Takes Landmark Step With GPTs

OpenAI’s new GPT Store will enable anyone to build and monetize their own GPTs (Generative Pre-trained Transformers). These are "custom versions of ChatGPT that combine instructions, extra knowledge, and any combination of skills": Essentially specialized versions of ChatGPT that can be used for any purpose. "For example, GPTs can help you learn the rules to any board game, help teach your kids math, or design stickers." GPTs can be created at chat.openai.com/create.

OpenAI also announced the forthcoming launch of the GPT Store, which will let people sell the GPTs they have created to other users and enjoy a share of the profits.

This is a hugely significant step in the development and deployment of AI, and has major implications for other companies and individuals building AI products.

No Code

Creating a new GPT is said to be straightforward, taking as little as a few minutes, and requires no coding—though they can also be extremely complex and sophisticated. It's possible to build a GPT simply by interacting with ChatGPT, tailoring its responses to a given purpose. As OpenAI notes, "Many power users maintain a list of carefully crafted prompts and instruction sets, manually copying them into ChatGPT. GPTs now do all of that for you."

However, GPTs can also be trained with proprietary information, meaning it's possible for a company to create a GPT for internal use—for example, to help build their own products using closed source code. A writer could train a GPT on their own corpus of content. It also means that creators can build GPTs that have particular utility which could not be gained from scraping the web. (The new version has been updated, but is still trained on data available only up to April this year.)

GPT Store

The GPT Store is a major new step, following in the footsteps of Apple and its own tremendously popular store. Creators will benefit from revenue sharing with OpenAI, meaning this is set to become a significant new income stream for the company as a large number of creators flock to the platform.

At the outset, only "verified creators" will be able to upload GPTs to the store, and it's likely these will be well-established companies that provide a few flagship examples. However, in time the ecosystem promises to develop into a thriving marketplace of GPTs, all based on OpenAI's ChatGPT.

While OpenAI's GPTs are a huge step forward for making AI more available and useful, there could be downsides. The move threatens to disrupt an already fast-moving industry, accelerating development of AI apps but concentrating reliance on OpenAI and its software—something critics have already cautioned against.

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