Now anyone can make their own GPT chatbot, for fun or productivity — no coding skills necessary — and soon will be able to list it on a marketplace called the GPT Store. This was among the news announcements to come out of OpenAI’s first developer conference — OpenAI DevDay in San Francisco — where a new, lower-priced model called GPT-4 Turbo with 128K context, was unveiled, along with a new Assistants API, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision and the DALL-E 3 API. Now in preview, GPT-4 Turbo “is more capable and has knowledge of world events up to April 2023,” according to OpenAI.

GPT-4 Turbo’s 128k context window means “it can fit the equivalent of more than 300 pages of text in a single prompt,” OpenAI explains in a blog post, adding that performance has been optimized “so we are able to offer GPT-4 Turbo at a 3x cheaper price for input tokens and a 2x cheaper price for output tokens compared to GPT-4.”

“OpenAI suggests people might want to build custom bots to help with specific problems or interests in their life, such as helping someone learn the rules of a board game, teach their kids math, or help design stickers using AI-generated art,” Wired writes, explaining that “to create one of these custom bots or AI agents, which OpenAI calls ‘GPTs,’ a user need only specify, by talking with ChatGPT, what they would like the bot to do.”

ChatGPT takes it from there, writing the code behind the scenes. The bots can then be plugged into other sites and services “to do things like access databases, search emails, and automate ecommerce orders,” according to Wired.

The new features “indicate a more hands-off approach to the AI marketplace, which has hitherto been defined by a handful of dedicated general-purpose systems,” writes TechCrunch. This week, indie Quora announced a similar creator economy bot initiative with its Poe AI chatbot.

“We believe if you give people the tools, they will do amazing things,” TechCrunch quotes OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman saying from the stage, where he emphasized that GPTs can be as simple or complex as one likes.

Regarding the nomenclature, TechCrunch warns “you can expect some confusion” since GPT, or “generative pretrained transformer” “is actually the technical term for this type of large language model,” and a LLM is the polar opposite of a DIY chatbot.

Ars Technica writes that Altman spoke before a small audience and had a guest star appearance by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Stats shared, per Ars Technica: “over 2 million developers are building apps using OpenAI APIs, over 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies are building on its platform, and ChatGPT now has over 100 million active weekly users.”

Related:
OpenAI Promises to Defend Business Customers Against Copyright Claims, TechCrunch, 11/6/23
OpenAI Launches DALL-E 3 API, New Text-to-Speech Models, TechCrunch, 11/6/23
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Now Has 100 Million Weekly Active Users, TechCrunch, 11/6/23