OpenAI to launch customised AI bots as ChatGPT hits 100-million users

San Francisco — OpenAI will enable ChatGPT users to build customised AI bots called GPTs to handle specific tasks, and it has slashed costs on more powerful models for developers, the artificial-intelligence lab said at its first developer conference on Monday.

CEO Sam Altman shared the updates at the San Francisco event, which attracted 900 developers from around the world, in OpenAI’s latest attempt to capitalise on the popularity of ChatGPT by offering developers incentives to build in its ecosystem. ChatGPT, launched in November 2022, now has 100- million weekly active users, Altman said.

OpenAI is launching a marketplace for GPTs, which are AI agents that will allow ChatGPT to book flights and perform other tasks when commanded by a human without close supervision.

It will launch a GPT Store later this month where people can share their GPTs and earn money based on the number of users.

“Eventually, you'll just ask the computer for what you need, and it'll do all of these tasks for you,” Altman said in his keynote speech.

“We really believe that gradual iterative deployment is the best way to address the safety challenges of AI. We think it’s especially important to move carefully towards this future of agents.”

Even before event attendees were allowed to check in at 8.30am, hundreds had lined up around the block in the Mid-Market neighbourhood in downtown San Francisco. Most were developers already using OpenAI technology, eager for updates. The YouTube live stream of Altman’s speech attracted more than 40,000 viewers.

Satya Nadella, CEO of OpenAI backer Microsoft, made a brief, surprise appearance at the conference, reiterating his support for the expensive race in building foundation models. Microsoft has invested more than $10bn in OpenAI.

“We commit ourselves deeply to making sure you all as builders of these foundation models have not only the best systems for training and inference, but the most compute so that you can keep pushing forward on the frontier,” he said.

For its 2-million developers, OpenAI announced a new GPT-4 Turbo model and slashed the cost by over 50%. It unveiled assistant application programming interfaces (APIs) with vision and image modalities, confirming a Reuters report. It launched a beta program for developers to fine-tune GPT-4 models.

OpenAI wants more enterprises and developers to build models to rival those developed by Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google, and open source models such as Meta Platforms’ Llama. It also competes for enterprise customers with Microsoft.

To address data and price concerns of big enterprises, OpenAI launched its Custom Models program, offering a dedicated group of researchers to train custom GPT-4 for them.

It matched Google and Microsoft’s offers to cover any legal cost incurred by claims around copyright infringement for enterprise users.

Reuters