Generative AI chatbots are nice, but occasionally, if you want a chatbot to do something in a very specific way, it should usually be preceded by feeding it countless prompts and instructions for it to work exactly the way you want it to. Purpose-built chatbots are a partial solution: they are geared towards doing one specific kind of thing in an exact way, requiring less work. OpenAI previously announced GPTs as pre-trained chatbots for this purpose, and now, the promised store for them is finally going live.
OpenAI’s GPT Store is finally launching, as announced by the company. The store will be home to both GPTs developed by OpenAI’s partners as well as ones made by third-parties, and users will be able to search for them in different categories such as writing, lifestyle, among others. You’ll also be able to see popular GPTs on a community leaderboard, so if you want to check out what other users are using and see if it’ll be good for your workflow, it’s a great way to do so. You’ll be able to check out the GPT Store by going into ChatGPT and clicking on “Explore GPTs” at the top right.
GPTs were announced all the way back in November, but the actual rollout of the GPT Store was greatly delayed, possibly due to OpenAI almost collapsing days later due to upper management issues. OpenAI also probably wanted to have a solid lineup of GPTs ready to go in time for the launch.
Currently, the app store is only available for paid ChatGPT users, so if you don’t happen to have one of ChatGPT’s subscription tiers, there’s one less cool new thing that you can check out. It doesn’t look like ChatGPT will be charging users directly for access to these GPTs, at least for now, but creators will be able to get money thanks to the “GPT builder revenue program,” which will see OpenAI pay users based on user engagement with the chatbots.
If you don’t want to pay, you can get very similar functionality by taking the time to train a specific ChatGPT instance to do something by feeding it prompts, but it’s time-consuming (and it will likely not give you the same exact result).
Source: OpenAI, TechCrunch
