🧙🏼‍♂️ OpenAI's GPT store is here!

What's brewing in AI #22

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Welcome to the 498 new subscribers who joined last week. I’m excited that you are here to learn with me.

Here’s what’s brewing in AI this week:

  • OpenAI launches the official GPT store

  • My two cents on how to improve it

  • Trending GPTs

  • And other top stories in AI this last week

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 Dario’s Picks - GPT store launch day special

I. OpenAI launches the official GPT store

OpenAI introduced the official GPT store today. It’s available at chat.openai.com/gpts (ps. you need a Plus subscription to access it).

Here’s what you need to know:

  • There’s now 3 million user-created GPTs in total. The GPTs in the store includes those which are set to public, and are compliant with OpenAI’s policies and brand guidelines.

  • The store is divided into 7 categories with a small selection of the top GPTs in each. A handful of GPTs will also be featured under the Top Picks section weekly. Additionally, there’s a search bar where you can find all the GPTs in the store.

  • Builders will be able to monetize their GPTs based on engagement (whatever that means). This feature is rolling out in Q1 and will be available for US builders first.

  • The first batch of featured GPTs include AllTrails, Consensus, Code Tutor and Books.

  • There’s also a private section of the Store for subscribers on the new ChatGPT Team plan (see below), which lets you share GPTs securely within your workspace.

II. The new ChatGPT plan for teams

Alongside the GPT store launch, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Team.

The new plan gives you a dedicated workspace for your team, and is priced at $25/person/month (requires minimum 2 users). This gives you the ability to create and share GPTs securely within your Team’s workspace, with enhanced privacy (no training on your data) similar to ChatGPT Enterprise.

The plan also includes higher message caps on GPT-4 and DALL·E, though it’s unclear exactly how much higher the new caps are.

Why it matters: For many use cases, it’s often quicker to just go and create a GPT for yourself, rather than looking for a pre-made solution. This new plan essentially allows you to create automations for your work in a private manner, and share it with your team, all at a very budget-friendly price.

III. How good do you think the new store is for exploring GPTs?

🗳️ click to cast your vote (live results!)

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 In Focus 

Improvements needed for the GPT store (my take)

The GPT store holds the wonderful potential to create an economy around AI apps in ChatGPT which benefits users and creators alike. Potentially we could see a lot of smart innovation in simple AI apps and creators being fairly rewarded for their creations. It can also help democratize earning money on AI products, since anyone can easily make a GPT without technical skills.

On the positive side the user interface for the store is sleek and minimalistic, making it easy to navigate. BUT, there’s a lot to improve. Here’s list of things off the top of my head that I imagine needs to be in place for GPTs to really flourish:

  • The discoverability is still quite limited as only a few dozen of GPTs actually make the cut for featured in each category; I think it would be useful to be able to browse more GPTs.

  • It’s possible to make multiple GPTs with the same name. If you search for let’s say, Kraftful, you’ll see a bunch of “fake” options pop up, not just the original one. This makes it difficult to find what you’re looking for and I’m sure the creators are not happy about it.

  • The sorting/ranking of GPTs seems to be dependent on usage only. It’s a step up from the alphabetical sorting we saw with the ChatGPT plugins store (lol), but it still seems like a poor strategy if the aim is to highlight the most useful GPT. It’s easy to send bot traffic to a GPT or make it unnecessary difficult to use in order to inflate the “engagement” metric. I think there needs to be a more complex algorithm at play or human curation, in order to surface the best ones. A rating and review system would also be helpful.

  • The monetization aspect is vaguely explained – what does it really mean that builders will be “paid based on user engagement” with their GPTs? Again, I’m concerned OpenAI will simply use the number conversations as basis for calculating rewards, which I’m quite sure would initiate a storm of tricks and tactics to game the system. Also, there might be highly specialized GPTs which could be very valuable to the user, but not needed every day. If the monetization is based on usage, it shift incentives towards creating GPTs that are often used; I think we’ll miss out on some great innovation if that’s the case. Maybe an Apple Store model with pay-to-install or in-app purchases (paid tier) could be more sensible?

  • I’m not surprised, though a bit disappointed that US builders are the only ones that will be able to monetise their GPTs in the first phase. However, some projection about when the rest of the world can join the party will be much appreciated. There’s little incentive to put effort into making quality GPTs if you have no clue about if/when you will be able to start monetising them.

For the aspects of discoverability, I’ll try to lead by example on whatplugin.ai (my list of GPTs) by making it easy to browse, not having fakes/impostors, etc. to give you the best experience possible for finding awesome GPTs.

GPTs  

Trending

I discovered about a dozen featured GPTs in the new store that were not already in whatplugin.ai.

Here’s the most interesting ones:

  • AllTrails - Find trails that fit your nature for your next hike, ride, or run.

  • Photo Multiverse - Upload your photo for a DALL·E 3 version (with prompts) then customize your background world!

  • War Room - Solve any problem in the war room!

  • Write For Me - Write tailored, engaging content with a focus on quality, relevance and precise word count.

  • Code Tutor - Let's code together! I'm Khanmigo Lite, by Khan Academy. I won't write the code for you, but I'll help you work things out. Can you tell me the challenge you're working on?

Categories with most new launches

💻 Coding - 157 GPTs (3 new)

🖼️ Image Generation - 205 GPTs (2 new)

🎓 Learning - 177 GPTs (2 new)

 War Room, Books...

 Bytes 

  • Quora just raised $75m in funding from venture capital firm a16z. It expects most of it will go to “pay creators of bots on the platform through our recently-launched creator monetization program”.

  • We might have gotten a sneak peak of some upcoming features for Google Bard, including Motoko (apparently a code name for user-generated bots – potentially Google’s answer to GPTs?) and a 3-month free trial of Bard Advanced.

  • Rabbit launches R1 - a $199 pocket AI companion powered by a so-called Large Action Model, capable of being a universal controller for apps. The product’s tagline is “a personalised operating system through a natural language interface”.You can also checkout the keynote on this product from the CES.

  • OpenAI bites back after the NYT’s lawsuit.

  • Chinese customers don’t want Nvidias downgraded chips (the company can’t sell their best chips due to export restrictions), and are turning to Huawei.

  • Volkswagen is putting ChatGPT in its cars.

  • Microsoft exec Dee Templeton has joined OpenAI's board as a nonvoting observer.

That’s a wrap for this week!

Fellow wizards – join me on LinkedIn.

Until next time,

Dario Chincha 🧙🏼‍♂️

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