Reporting from San Francisco: OpenAI is introducing a way for individual ChatGPT users to create customized versions of its popular AI chatbot, personalized for their own use and for sharing with others.
The personal chatbots, dubbed “GPTs,” are the latest move by the company to democratize its artificial intelligence technology, a year after ChatGPT opened the eyes of the industry and the world to the potential of large language models and increasingly sophisticated forms of generative AI.
Announced Monday morning at an OpenAI developer event in San Francisco, GPTs can be created through natural language conversations. The company cited examples including GPTs for learning the rules to board games, designing stickers, or teaching math to kids.
On stage, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman created a GPT to interact with startup founders, commenting that it would have come in handy in his days running the Y Combinator accelerator.
There will also be a GPT Store, featuring “creations by verified builders,” the company says, explaining that it has created new systems to check GPTs for compliance with its usage policies.
GPTs can be created for personal use, for sharing with friends, internal corporate use, or widespread public distribution, the company says. They are rolling out initially to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users, with a broader release “soon,” the company said in a news release.
OpenAI partners closely with Microsoft, which is a major investor in the company, powering a popular Azure OpenAI service for the company’s cloud platform and contributing to the company’s AI search and productivity apps.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made a surprise appearance at the event Monday. “We love you guys,” Nadella told Altman, saying the OpenAI partnership “requires us to be on the top of our game.”
Altman said later, “I think we have the best partnership in tech, and we’re excited to build AGI together,” referring to their ambitions to create artificial general intelligence.
For developers, OpenAI also introduced a new API to create AI assistants; and a new version of its GPT-4 large language model for developers, dubbed GPT-4 Turbo, supporting longer text entries and knowledge of world events up to April 2023, among other updated features.
