The introduction of new product models allows for the development of chatbot agents with unique personalities or themes
On Wednesday, OpenAI unveiled the GPT Store, a platform enabling paid ChatGPT users to purchase and sell specialized chatbot agents utilizing the company’s language models. Renowned for the success of ChatGPT, which played a pivotal role in the AI boom, OpenAI initially provided tailored bots via the paid ChatGPT Plus service. With the introduction of the GPT Store, users now have the opportunity to share and monetize a more extensive array of tools.
Utilizing the new models, chatbot agents can be crafted with distinct personalities or themes, encompassing applications like salary negotiation, lesson plan creation, and recipe development. OpenAI, in a blog post introducing the launch, revealed that over 3 million customized versions of ChatGPT have already been generated. Additionally, the company expressed its intention to feature beneficial GPT tools weekly within the store.
Drawing parallels with Apple’s App Store, the store is encouraging diverse AI development from a broader user base. Meta provides chatbots with distinct personalities in a comparable manner.
Originally scheduled to open in November, the GPT Store faced a delay due to internal disruptions within the company. Late last year, OpenAI’s board dismissed Sam Altman as CEO, leading to internal turmoil. Altman returned to the role a week later after a near-mass departure of employees.
In a recent blog post, the company announced its intention to introduce a revenue-sharing program in the first quarter of this year. Builders will be compensated based on user engagement with their GPTs, although specific details are yet to be disclosed.
Last week, in an email addressed to platform developers, OpenAI urged users to ensure that their chatbots comply with usage policies and GPT brand guidelines. The company highlighted various products already available, including offerings from Canva and AllTrails, in a press release accompanying the launch.
The GPT Store is accessible to subscribers of premium services such as ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise. Additionally, a new subscription tier named Team is introduced, costing $25 per user per month. Team subscribers gain the ability to create custom GPTs tailored to their team’s requirements.
During its inaugural demo day for developers, Altman offered to cover the legal expenses for developers who might face copyright law issues while creating products based on ChatGPT and OpenAI’s technology. OpenAI itself has faced multiple lawsuits for alleged copyright infringement related to using copyrighted text for training its large language models. Altman stated in early January that creating ChatGPT without including copyrighted material in the training corpus of the artificial intelligence would be “impossible.”
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s flagship product, was quietly released in November 2022 but rapidly gained popularity, accumulating 100 million users within a few months. OpenAI also develops the Dall-E image generation software; however, it remains unclear whether the store will support custom image bots or exclusively bespoke chatbots.
