OpenAI Aims to Open Store as ChatGPT Turns 1

OpenAI is debuting custom ChatGPT versions that can be tweaked for a variety of uses.

As the Financial Times (FT) noted Monday (Nov. 6) in a report from the company’s first public event, this will essentially turn the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot into a digital platform, along the lines of Apple’s iOS.

With that in mind, the company says it will launch a GPT store in the coming weeks to collect the best custom GPT apps and – someday – share revenues with the most popular creators. The FT report likens the move to Apple’s entry into the software services market with the launch of its App Store.

“We believe if you give people better tools, they will do amazing things,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said at the event. “Eventually you’ll ask a computer for what you need and it will do all these tasks for you.”

Letting people create these chatbots without coding makes it more “accessible and gives agency to everyone,” Altman said, adding that “gradual iterative deployment” was OpenAI’s strategy for developing autonomous AI safely.

Monday’s event also included the debut of OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo AI model, the latest version of the AI offering the company launched in March.

“GPT-4 Turbo is more capable and has knowledge of world events up to April 2023,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “It has a 128k context window so it can fit the equivalent of more than 300 pages of text in a single prompt.”

The event also highlighted the fact that ChatGPT now has around 100 million weekly active users, with more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies using it, up from 80% in August.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke recently with Beerud Sheth, CEO at conversational AI platform Gupshup, about AI’s potential impact on the future of work.

“Enterprise use of AI has to be accurate and relevant — and it has to be goal oriented,” said Sheth, interviewed for PYMNTS’ AI Effect series. “Consumers can have fun with AI, but in a business chat or within an enterprise workflow, the numbers have to be exact, and the answer has to be right.”

“But in terms of how customers acquire new customers, sell their services, engage and manage the relationship and collect payments, AI will transform virtually every touchpoint,” Sheth added, pointing out that conversational interface is “much more natural and intuitive.”