OpenAI lets mom-and-pop stores customize ChatGPT
OpenAI said Monday it has developed a service that allows individuals and small businesses to build customized versions of the popular online chatbot ChatGPT and share them directly on the Internet.
Through a new service called GPTs, anyone can quickly customize the chatbot for a specific task, without the help of additional software or computer code. For example, the owner of a small bed-and-breakfast can build a chatbot that answers questions for everyone staying there.
“You can imagine someone building a GPT that specializes in teaching someone a new language or providing interior design advice,” Peter Deng, OpenAI’s vice president of consumer and enterprise products, said in an interview.
OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence startup, has accelerated the release of its AI tools in recent weeks. In September, it folded its DALL-E image generator into ChatGPT and released a new version of its popular chatbot that communicates with people through spoken words, much like Apple’s digital assistant Siri.
ChatGPT attracted hundreds of millions of users after it launched late last year, wowing people with the way it answered questions, wrote papers and discussed virtually any topic. Several other companies, including Google and the startup Anthropic, released similar chatbots. Now OpenAI is trying to give its rivals an edge.
The new GPTs service is available to anyone using ChatGPT Plus, a version of the chatbot that sells for $20 per month.
Millions of seasoned software developers already use ChatGPT’s underlying technology, GPT-4, to build their own applications, including everything from automated tutors to search engines. The new GPTs service focuses on a different audience: private individuals and small companies without experience as a software developer.
Anyone can build a custom chatbot by providing a handful of instructions and, in some cases, uploading a few documents. For example, when a B&B owner designs a bot that answers guest questions, he or she can upload the B&B’s existing guest manual.
The owner can also ask the service to create a logo for the new bot using OpenAI’s image generator.
Mr Deng acknowledged that any bot created with the service is prone to errors. Technologies like ChatGPT are trained on vast amounts of data collected over the Internet and sometimes “hallucinate” or make things up.
Because the technology can also be used to generate offensive, false and even dangerous material, OpenAI said it would investigate all new bots created with GPTs and ban any bots that violate its terms of service. In the coming weeks, it will offer these bots through an app store similar to Apple’s for iPhone applications.
The company also said that all users of the service can request that their documents and other data not be used to train future versions of OpenAI’s technology.
OpenAI is facing lawsuits from writers, artists and computer programmers who claim the company illegally used their work to build its AI systems.
The company said more than 100 million people were actively using ChatGPT every week, and more than two million software developers were using GPT-4 and other services to build apps.