OpenAI said on Wednesday it was opening an app store for people to share customized versions of its popular chatbot, ChatGPT, as the artificial intelligence company works to expand the reach of its flagship technology and turn it into a cash cow.
The new store is called GPT Store. People who spend $20 a month on a subscription to OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus service can browse the store for personalized chatbots that provide a wide range of services, including those that recommend books, teach math, and search for scientific articles.
The store “will help you find useful and popular custom versions of ChatGPT,” the company said in a blog post.
OpenAI, which was founded as a research lab, increasingly operates as a for-profit company that aims to compete with rivals such as Google. With the new store, the company hopes to turn its technology into an online platform that connects companies and customers.
Over the past four years, Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, which has also raised money from other investors. The San Francisco startup is in talks to close a deal that would value it at more than $80 billion.
Experienced software developers have long used ChatGPT's underlying technology, GPT-4, to create their own applications, including search engines and automated tutors. The app store is a way for a new audience (individuals and small businesses with no experience as software developers) to distribute applications based on the same technology.
In recent months, OpenAI has worked to improve and expand ChatGPT in other ways. In September, it brought its DALL-E imager to ChatGPT and launched a new version of the chatbot that interacts with people using spoken words, much like Apple's Siri digital assistant.
The company also said Wednesday that it would offer a version of its chatbot called ChatGPT Team. Available for $25 to $30 per month per user, ChatGPT Team offers a way for businesses and other groups to use the chatbot in a way that keeps their data private. Any information shared through the service will not be used to train its artificial intelligence technologies, OpenAI said.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft last month for copyright infringement of news content related to artificial intelligence systems.)
The GPT store opens after OpenAI created a service in November that allows people to create custom chatbots called “GPT.” Anyone can quickly customize ChatGPT for a particular task without the help of additional software or computer code.
The AllTrails.com website, for example, designed a chatbot that recommends hiking routes. Khan Academy, a nonprofit educational group, created one that can help people learn to write computer programs. In the last two months, three million custom chatbots have been created, OpenAI said.
The store is designed to expand the number of people who use and pay for services like ChatGPT Plus. OpenAI said it would begin sharing revenue with those offering custom versions of the chatbot, based on how frequently each custom chatbot was used.
