App Store For AI: OpenAI’s GPT Store Lets You Build (and Monetize) Your Own GPT

Photo credit: Devin Coldewey

OpenAI took the leash (and “chat”) from ChatGPT today with the announcement of GPTs, a way for anyone to create their own version of the popular conversational AI system. Not only can you create your own GPT for fun or productivity, but you’ll also soon be able to publish it on a marketplace called the GPT Store – and maybe even make a little money in the process.

The new features, announced today along with many others at OpenAI’s first developer day in San Francisco, suggest a more straightforward approach to the AI market that has so far been defined by a handful of dedicated, general-purpose systems. In fact, these systems will become even more universal with new capabilities, but the AI giant has clearly taken a cue from Apple and believes that being the go-to resource for others’ ingenuity is at least as valuable as having ingenuity yourself.

“We believe if you give people the tools, they will do amazing things,” founder and CEO Sam Altman said on stage.

To that end, the company is introducing so-called GPTs, “custom versions of ChatGPT that you can create for a specific purpose.” (And yes, you can expect some confusion on this point, since GPT, or “Generative Pretrained Transformer,” is actually the technical term for these types of large language models.)

GPTs can be created with no programming experience and can be as simple or complex as you like, as they explained.

For example, you could have a GPT trained with your recipe collection so you can quickly ask what ingredients you need for that one soup. Or you could have it record information about a sprawling fantasy series so you can ask it, “Wait, who is Sir Roderick Random?” And if you’re more serious, as a developer or company you could use a GPT for your entire proprietary Have code trained so that others can quickly check their style or generate harmonious code.

Photo credit: OpenAI GPT Store

It is possible to create a GPT by simply chatting with ChatGPT and describing what you want – we will be able to test this soon.

“You can actually program a GPT with voice just by talking to it,” Altman said. “It’s easy to adjust behavior so that they do what you want – this makes them very approachable and gives everyone room to maneuver.”

He demonstrated this on stage by describing ChatGPT in a “New GPT Blueprint” that he wanted to develop a bot that advises founders on improving their startup. He then uploaded a talk he gave on the topic, said he wanted it to be concise and constructive, and decided he was done.

You can also include external services, such as sending an unsupported language to a translation API – but users can choose whether their data can be processed this way.

An app store for AI

Photo credit: OpenAI GPT Store

Perhaps the most impactful announcement of all today was OpenAI’s GPT Store, which will be the platform on which these GPTs will be distributed and ultimately monetized:

Later this month we’re launching the GPT Store with creations from verified developers. Once in the store, GPTs will be searchable and potentially climb the leaderboards. We’ll also highlight the most useful and beautiful GPTs we come across in categories like productivity, education, and “just for fun.” You can also earn money in the coming months depending on how many people use your GPT.

Sound familiar? The App Store model has proven incredibly lucrative for Apple, so it shouldn’t be surprising that OpenAI is trying to replicate it here. GPTs are not only hosted and developed on OpenAI platforms, but also promoted and evaluated.

“We will pay the people who make the most widely used and useful GPTs with a portion of our sales,” and they “look forward to sharing more information soon,” Altman said.

It is not clear at this point whether there will be an option to simply charge the GPT fee or whether it will be strictly a revenue share. When I asked him later, he said he expects the strategy to evolve significantly, initially with direct revenue sharing (undetermined amount) and later with the ability to subscribe to individual GPTs if there is demand for it.

It’s not clear who these “verified builders” are exactly, but presumably this is just a hurdle to prevent low-effort, fraudulent content from getting in. (That’ll come later.) But they demonstrated GPTs built by Code.org, TripAdvisor and others on Canva, so it may be that these are official apps at first rather than individual GPT experiments.

OpenAI clearly has high goals here, and the decision to establish itself as a platform independent of existing app stores and distribution methods could bring the company into direct conflict with industry giants like Apple and even its long-standing patron Microsoft. Apple may have trouble monetizing GPT models without taking its share through the App Store, so OpenAI needs to tread carefully here.

And Microsoft is about to launch its own Copilot models specifically tailored for tasks like Office tools, and it certainly sounds like GPTs could run right into these enterprise-level models.

CEO Satya Nadella appeared briefly on stage to reiterate how excited he is about the partnership, but there’s certainly a sense that OpenAI is the one moving forward and Microsoft is relegating itself to a supporting role. How long can this relationship remain friendly? The next few years will be interesting to say the least.

The details of the GPT store are evolving as OpenAI elaborates throughout the day. We will update this post as we learn more.