OpenAI has introduced the GPT Store, a marketplace within its ChatGPT ecosystem, where paid users can buy and sell customised chatbot agents based on the company’s language models. While the paid ChatGPT Plus service already provides customised bots, the GPT Store expands opportunities for users to offer and monetise a wider array of specialised tools.
The new models allow for the development of chatbot agents with unique personalities or themes, such as those for salary negotiation, lesson planning, or recipe development. OpenAI reports that more than 3 million custom versions of ChatGPT have already been created, and the store aims to highlight useful GPT tools on a weekly basis.
Comparable to Apple’s App Store, the GPT Store is expected to foster increased development in the AI space by a diverse range of users. Meta, too, offers chatbots with distinct personalities in a similar offering. Originally scheduled to open in November, the GPT Store faced delays due to internal upheaval at OpenAI, involving the firing and subsequent reappointment of CEO Sam Altman.
OpenAI plans to launch a revenue-sharing program in the first quarter of the year, allowing builders to be compensated based on user engagement with their GPTs, although specific details are yet to be disclosed.
Why is this important?
Subscribers to OpenAI’s premium services, ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise, can access the GPT Store. Additionally, a new subscription tier called Team is introduced at $25 per month, per user, enabling Team subscribers to create custom GPTs for team-specific needs.
Altman, during a demo day for developers, offered to cover legal costs for developers facing copyright law issues related to products based on ChatGPT and OpenAI’s technology.OpenAI has faced multiple copyright infringement lawsuits for allegedly using copyrighted text to train its large language models. Altman emphasised the difficulty of creating ChatGPT without including copyrighted material in the training corpus.
ChatGPT, released in November 2022, gained rapid popularity, accumulating 100 million users within months. OpenAI, known for its Dall-E image generation software, has not clarified whether the GPT Store will also support custom image bots or exclusively focus on bespoke chatbots.