Lost in the noise of OpenAI’s executive kerfuffle is the launch of OpenAI’s AI app marketplace. According to Reuters, the GPT Store will allow developers to share AI-based apps – called GPTs – and earn revenue based on its number of users.
The announcements took place at the company’s first developer conference, OpenAI DevDay, which had a heavy emphasis on encouraging developers to expand its market among consumers with apps that can, for example, help teach math, design stickers or book flights.
Eventually, CEO Sam Altman told the conference, “you’ll just ask the computer for what you need, and it’ll do all of these tasks for you.”
For enterprises, the company also rolled out a Custom Models program, which will create custom GPT-4 models and will also be “expensive.”
Encouraging Point Solutions
On both the buy and sell side, a growing number of companies are customizing ChatGPT’s technology to their specific needs. That can include solutions that do everything from identifying financial fraud to answering questions using internal documents.
Chances are good that most, if not all, of these organizations already have experience using such marketplaces. The likes of SAP, UKG, BambooHR and ADP frequently collaborate with third parties to join their products with more specialized solutions.
Although an OpenAI marketplace would compete with those run by some of its partners – Salesforce and Microsoft come to mind – it would also do what all marketplaces do, namely simplify distribution for a wider set of prospects than the company has.
Developers Matter to OpenAI
It’s not surprising that OpenAI is nurturing a developer community. Confronting competitors like Google, Anthropic and its investor Microsoft will require more than the company’s home-grown efforts.
With ChatGPT’s active user now estimated to be 100 million people each week, its developer community seems healthy. Its 2 million developers is a noteworthy number, and around 900 of them attended DevDay. In comparison, Workday’s DevCon hosted some 2,000 developers. Over 5,000 people were expected to attend Microsoft Build.
During the conference, OpenAI also released a number of developer updates, including a significant reduction of fees, Reuters said. The company also launched a new GPT-4 Turbo model, which is cheaper and processes more data than GPT-4, along with APIs for use with vision and image modalities.
One founder told Reuters OpenAI’s announcements were “a huge boon” for startups. “All of a sudden, our costs went down by a factor of three X, which is huge,” he said. At the same time, he believed his company could find itself in competition with OpenAI’s home-grown bots. He described the two companies’ relationship as “complicated.”
Image and Video: OpenAI
