OpenAI said on Monday that it had created a service that allows individuals and small businesses to create personalized versions of its popular online chatbot, ChatGPT, and share them instantly on the Internet.
Through a new service called GPT, anyone can quickly customize the chatbot for a particular task without the help of additional software or computer code. The owner of a small bed and breakfast, for example, could create a chatbot that answers questions from anyone staying there.
“You can imagine someone building a GPT that specializes in teaching someone a new language or giving advice on interior design,” Peter Deng, vice president of enterprise and consumer products at OpenAI, said in an interview.
San Francisco ai startup OpenAI has accelerated the rollout of its ai tools in recent weeks. In September, it brought its DALL-E imager to ChatGPT and launched a new version of its popular chatbot that interacts with people using spoken words, much like Apple’s Siri digital assistant.
ChatGPT attracted hundreds of millions of users after it launched late last year, surprising people with the way it answered questions, wrote term papers and discussed almost any topic. Several other companies, including Google and startup Anthropic, have launched similar chatbots. Now, OpenAI is trying to get ahead of its rivals.
The new GPT service is available to anyone who uses ChatGPT Plus, a version of the chatbot that sells for $20 a month.
Millions of experienced software developers are already using ChatGPT’s underlying technology, GPT-4, to create their own applications, including everything from automated tutors to search engines. The new GPTs service is aimed at a different audience: individuals and small companies without experience as software developers.
Anyone can create a custom chatbot by providing some instructions and, in some cases, uploading some documents. When a bed and breakfast owner designs a bot that answers questions to guests, for example, he can upload the B&B’s existing guest manual.
The owner could also ask the service to create a logo for the new bot using OpenAI’s image generator.
Deng acknowledged that any bot created with the service would be prone to errors. Empowered with huge amounts of data collected from the Internet, technologies like ChatGPT sometimes “hallucinate” or make things up.
Because the technology can also be used to generate offensive, lying and even dangerous material, OpenAI said it would vet all new bots created with GPT and disallow any that violate its terms of service. In the coming weeks, it will offer these bots through an app store similar to the one Apple offers for iPhone apps.
The company also said that any user of the service could request that their documents and other data not be used to train future versions of OpenAI technology.
OpenAI is facing lawsuits from writers, artists and computer programmers who argue that the company illegally used their labor to build its ai systems.
The company said that more than 100 million people actively used ChatGPT each week and that more than two million software developers used GPT-4 and other services to create applications.
