Hey Everyone,
The OpenAI store is set to make the startup which claims it has 100 million “weekly users”, the Apple of AI.
But it’s pay to play, to be a Creator in the Store you need to be a premium paid user of ChatGPT to get access to all of their GPT creator tools.
Start a free trial for more deep dives, to survive with a basic living wage I’m having to put more articles behind a paywall. If you like my work, support the channel.
In the coming weeks, these AI agents, chatbots, maybe even models, which OpenAI is calling GPTs are going to flood the internet and OpenAI is going to cash in on 30% commision and more paid ChatGPT users.
It’s essentially a moat for OpenAI to own the marketplace for agents in the AI Creator Economy. In their own words:
“GPTs are a new way for anyone to create a tailored version of ChatGPT to be more helpful in their daily life, at specific tasks, at work, or at home—and then share that creation with others. For example, GPTs can help you learn the rules to any board game, help teach your kids math, or design stickers.”
The OpenAI’s GPT Store lets you build (and monetize) your own GPT
This could be an agent, chatbot, model or some other derivative of the technology
GPTs can be made with no coding experience, and can be as simple or complex as you like, as they explained. This is where it’s supposed to attract various kinds of creators, designers, hobbyists and of course “AI guy grifters” as well.
OpenAI’s DevDay biggest announcements felt tailed to one thing, how can OpenAI make even more money!
See the relevant Tweet.
GPTs are supposed to be like full-fledged personalized copilots – tailored versions of ChatGPT that are available for personal or public use. Will these function more just like chatbots with personalities? Will they develop some serious agents, or even specialized models, it’s not clear to me exactly.
Character.AI has been trending with younger users, so OpenAI may feel threatened in how the Creator Economy and entertainment aspect of LLMs is evolving. OpenAI makes around $1.3 Billion in ARR so far, and it hopes to significantly boost this amount in 2024.
With 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies using OpenAI’s technology, an ecosystem of 2 million developers and over 100 million weekly users, will it be able to attract a new breed of Creators who use and design chatbots, agents and other tools in the space?
What could OpenAI’s GPT Store become?
“We believe if you give people amazing tools, they will build better things” – Sam Altman”
Go to 20:00 of the video where he begins to talk about “where we are headed next and agents”.
Go to 21:00 where he begins to introduce GPTs. Read the documentation here.
Details about how the store will look and work are scarce for now, though OpenAI is promising to eventually pay creators an unspecified amount based on how much their GPTs are used.
Typically this means in an App store context for GPTs, they will take your premium subscription to participate + 30% of your revenue. That’s very heavy commercialization.
If you believe that OpenAI is developing a software developer ecosystem that’s impressive, you’ll realize by them doing this it can attract people that wouldn’t necessarily be Creators in the Age of AI otherwise.
Put another way:
OpenAI is launching custom versions of ChatGPT that can be adapted and tailored for specific applications, turning the chatbot interface into a digital platform like iOS or Android.
This sounds very much like what Character.AI and others are already doing which makes the ecosystem more entertaining for young people. The main adopters of Generative A.I. apps have been niche professionals and younger consumers thus far. With an App Store of millions of GPTs, OpenAI is hoping it stimulates innovation and builds more of a mainstream audience around its budding ecosystem.
While this has been rumored for months, it was nice to finally get a basic idea of how this could work. Publishing a customized chatbot isn’t exactly new but how might agents evolve on such a platform? More complex agents are what makes the idea of the the Store more attractive.
So GPTs won’t just be mirror ChatGPT like chatbots, but these agents can progressively iterate and become more complex and useful. The GPTs that dominate the store could potentially become very lucrative over time. This formalizes in 2024 an entire “Creator Economy” around A.I. agents, in this context called “GPTs”.
According to each GPT is a bundled set of instructions, knowledge, and tools with access to OpenAI’s multi-model tool kit. As these GPTs get better in 2024 it could create sustained interest in ChatGPT and its derivatives and customized agents.
OpenAI wants to be the “Apple of AI”
OpenAI seems very intentional in how they did their first DevDay. As the FT notes, the store’s launch comes exactly a year after the public debut of ChatGPT, echoing Apple’s decision to launch the iOS App Store a year after the iPhone, which brought it into the software services business.
OpenAI with Microsoft’s help have every intention to increase their revenue dramatically in 2024. OpenAI is pretending this is in response to customer demand:
“Since launching ChatGPT, people have been asking for ways to customize ChatGPT to fit specific ways that they use it”.
But this is all about commercializing, creating a moat, boosting paid subscriptions and increasing revenue in the fastest way possible. It might also be the best method to make agents more useful and popular. In the Open-source community there’s been a lot of experimentation around this but no mechanism to reach a significant audience, now that is no longer the case.
The Creator Economy is a boom and bust cycle, with the layoffs of the most popular NFT ecosystem recently, OpenSea, can attest to. So what will the boom and bust cycle for GPTs look like and how sustainable might it become?
OpenAI and its technologies are accessible and utilized by businesses in 156 countries worldwide, if I’m an AI builder in Nigeria, Indonesia or Brazil, there’s nothing stopping me from monetizing my GPT in a way that democratizes AI to some degree. Being the best funded Generative A.I. startup with the backing of the second biggest Cloud provider and biggest software services player in the world, has its advantages.
“We believe if you give people better tools, they will do amazing things. Eventually you’ll ask a computer for what you need and it will do all these tasks for you,” said Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI.
Since GPTs could be about anything, various niche Creators will try to monetize their domain. This means OpenAI store might signal the beginning of a Creator Economy around A.I. tools, agents, chatbots, models and even very lucrative enterprise use cases. Some of the builders will go on to found startups around their ideas and agents. The possibilities truly are endless.
The Democratization of Agent Customization
OpenAI have made building GPTs really easy to work with:
OpenAI’s interface lets you guide how you want a GPT to interact with people before you publish.
Names, Descriptions, Instructions, Conversation starters, and Profile images can be created using ChatGPT itself according to of . He goes on:
“Instructions are basically custom system prompts, to dictate how the GPT should behave, and what it should avoid doing.
Conversation starters are placeholder questions or prompts to show users good ways to use your GPT.
Multiple plugins are available, as well as the ability to add your own functions.
You can upload files for the GPT to query from – no more “Chat with your PDF” plugin required.” Read his entire list here.
Since OpenAI is a multi-modal tool set now for agents, how GPTs are created and made more useful in the real world will only improve with plugins, Open-Source add-ons and become more like a gaming ecosystem with various “mods”. It could also start to innovate actual agents that become useful in our professional lives.
An App Store for AI
If your agent is truly useful people will pay you to get access and OpenAI will presumably take 30% of the profits.
What this does for OpenAI is also creates a valuable search interface for GPTs. This could stimulate niche likes education, entertainment and the AI girlfriends and boyfriend apps we have been seeing already in 2023. Social chatbots have become a bit more sticky compared to the more all-knowing interfaces like ChatGPT that just spit out information.
People want their social chatbots to be customized and personalized to their preferences or perhaps around a theme. More complex agents could be trained to do things that helps automate the work of particular kinds of professionals that entire industries of people might want access to.
The App Store model has proven unbelievably lucrative for Apple, so it should come as no surprise that OpenAI is attempting to replicate it here. Not only will GPTs be hosted and developed on OpenAI platforms, but they will also be promoted and evaluated. OpenAI eventually will likely create advertising in the Store, so Creators could promote their work even in a paid manner.
OpenAI might even elect to make GPTs the starting point of a kind of Roblox for AI agents. Where children and young people are lured to be the “agent developers” of the future. Entire games could be created with the use of AI, and Microsoft would definately want in on that. They could all be monetized in OpenAI’s store like Steam, but for AI generated games.
“Agents” as the New “Apps”
OpenAI has the largest user base in the U.S., India and Japan so you could expect the GPT Store to thrive in those places first. That 100 million weekly users, a metric likely chosen since ChatGPT hasn’t fared so well in attracting daily active users yet, could swell into a fairly large amount of monthly active users (MAUs) if they implement the GPT store well.
The easier to build and more entertaining a GPT could be, the more of a real audience and more builders would the ecosystem attract, apart from the 2 million developers in the ecosystem already after just one year.
Programming a GPT will also become easier as OpenAI’s multi-modal tools continue to improve, expand and have better UX and interfaces. Searching for GPTs might actually become entertaining in and of itself, much in the way I might browse the new games on Steam a few times a year.
Companionship AI and customizing chatbots is something OpenAI does really badly or not at all. It’s difficult to know if the GPT Store could change this. If the agent ecosystem becomes dynamic, its search becomes a possible play for lucrative Ads. This is the sort of revenue stream that Microsoft I’m sure is pushing them to fully explore eventually.
Microsoft’s Tyranny of Subscriptions Continues, Powered by AI
Remember, Microsoft gets 75% share of OpenAI’s profits until it makes back the money on its investment, after which the company would assume a 49% stake in OpenAI. In this light, we really need to see OpenAI as just an “AI extension” of Microsoft’s sprawling ecosystem.
Microsoft’s control over OpenAI is unparalleled. Microsoft didn’t just opening up its fat wallet for OpenAI. It’s also the arms dealer, as the exclusive provider of computing power for OpenAI’s research, products and programming interfaces for developers. They also got early access to GPT-4 to integrate in their own products which has resulted in Copilot among other things. OpenAI is in essence almost like a spin-off of Microsoft at this point. OpenAI is commercially speaking, the ultimate “ClosedAI sell-out” of the early Generative A.I. movement.
With their marketing around “AGI”, they are always promising bigger and better things, trying to exploit their popularity and early dominance.
I wonder in the grifting AI Creator Economy, if anyone outside of these circles will care. X and LinkedIn are full of people posting about every feature of OpenAI in real-time much of it with summaries from ChatGPT itself or another such agent.
LinkedIn is of course owned by Microsoft itself. So this is not real “word-of-mouth marketing” per se as Sam Altman likes to claim. In reality, OpenAI’s success really is a fundamental symptom of monopoly capitalism’s hold on the world. It helps that GPT-4 and the GPT Store are essentially first movers in Generative A.I.’s goldrush renaissance that began in and around May, 2022.
The AI Bro Olympic Games of AI
OpenAI’s growth has been anything but organic given the $13 Billion from Microsoft. OpenAI is seeking a (“internal”) valuation of $86 Billion just one year after launching ChatGPT. That’s anything but a startup story, it’s a story of aligning with the powers that be.
It’s also started an A.I. arms race that will be entirely difficult to control, regulate or make less dangerous. Thus OpenAI’s first mover advantage means it can build things other startups simply cannot compete with. Anthropic had to align with Amazon and Google, and their lucrative funding and partnerships, just to keep up!
OpenAI argues that “gradual iterative deployment” was their approach to creating autonomous AI safely. We don’t know when GPT-5 will launch but the delay between GPT-4 and GPT-5 is giving the world time to catch up, so a GPT store as a “moat” enables OpenAI to keep the pole position.
OpenAI furthermore will likely get even more funding from the likes of the Middle East and Japan’s Softbank. Whatever the case, we might be dealing with a swarm of GPTs in 2024 and 2025 and we’ll see if their business model truly is scalable with all of these supposed developers and millions of users.
We don’t even know if OpenAI can be profitable any time soon or their timeline for paying off Microsoft. Regardless, Microsoft will still own a majority stake in OpenAI. GPTs could however truly enable real-world utility. With another feature called Actions, OpenAI is letting GPTs hook into external services for accessing data like emails, databases, and more, starting with Canva and Zapier. So it’s not the GPT chatbots that will be fun to watch, but the Agents and open-source hybrids that chain together various tasks.
For all the praise OpenAI gets on social media, a GPT Store will be the true litmus test of its mainstream appeal. It’s not clear to me either at this point whether there will be the ability to simply charge for your GPT, or whether it will be strictly revenue sharing.
Can it stimulate a Creator Economy around all of these agents? “ChatGPT” has very dry connotations to most people, how can OpenAI be seen as a “fun” brand? OpenAI has a lot of pressure to monetize the heck out of what it is doing at every turn. How many AI agent builders will be lured into becoming a paying customer due to the GPT Store?
What’s even less clear is how are a bunch of agents going to contribute to AGI? Google researchers recently debunked or may have just given a major reality check to the marketing slant of OpenAI around AGI, as AI’s holy grail.
What transformers are good at is performing tasks that relate to the data they’ve been trained on, according to the paper. They’re not so good at dealing with tasks that go even remotely beyond that. Which begs the question how good can the GPT Store’s agents possibly be or become?
Another problem is while OpenAI appeals to the “AI guy” within, how will it attract more female consumers, builders and users to its gold rush movement?
Women might not be as excited adopters of GPTs as young men and this will limit its mass appeal. A lot of young women were correct in being skeptical of crypto and various schemes and projects of Web3. A few years from now, we might be saying the same for Generative A.I.’s hype cycle.
Whatever the case, an OpenAI store for GPTs and various “agents” will be at least entertaining to watch. Though how will we use them on our phones or what will they be able to do in a business context?
OpenAI almost feels like a manufactured company by Silicon Valley insiders to stave off the decline of Silicon Valley for a few more years. The stock market in 2023 has bought the story that Generative A.I. is going to be totally transformative, but even after 18 months, I’m not so sure.
Microsoft’s stock is approaching all-time highs after OpenAI’s first DevDay conference. at a share price of $360. That’s up over 50% during the last year, giving them a market cap of $2.68 Trillion. They better hope what they have manufactured has staying power, and the “GPT Store” may be the key.
OpenAI is not an ordinary startup story for its part, but a symbol and a promise for the future that very probably will go unfulfilled. As OpenAI is about to release its GPT Store, you know Google and perhaps even Amazon might follow their lead. The gimmicks in this space, are just getting started.
Appendix
Let’s do a search for GPT Store tweets that might be helpful:
Meme credit: Shubham Saboo
Related Tweets to GPT Store
(Substack won’t let me embed X posts)
https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1721594384737792495
https://twitter.com/nickfloats/status/1721607017901572543
https://twitter.com/thealexker/status/1721957628253716850
https://twitter.com/CogRev_Podcast/status/1722074203464339920
https://twitter.com/bindureddy/status/1721599122841706869
https://twitter.com/iam_chonchol/status/1721802991471301068
https://twitter.com/TheAIAdvantage/status/1721974035175608618
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626516035863212034
Remember to read the comments on these X posts above as they have some nuggets from the community of developers, A.I. enthusiasts and A.I. builders.
Further Reading
How OpenAI is building a path toward AI agents (Casey Newton)
It doesn’t seem like Substack writers have written much yet about OpenAI’s “GPT Store” yet, as of November 8th, 2023.
DevDay Summary Short Video
Read More in AI Supremacy
