OpenAI announced its new custom chatbot features at its first ever developer conference, OpenAI DevDay, in San Francisco. “You can build a GPT—a customized version of ChatGPT—for almost anything,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said at the event. “Because they combine instructions, expanded knowledge, and actions, they can be more helpful to you.”
The company said today that more than 2 million developers and over 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using its APIs, which provide access to ChatGPT or the underlying text- and image-generating technology in some way. OpenAI says ChatGPT now has around 100 million weekly active users. “About a year ago, we shipped ChatGPT as a low-key research preview—and that went pretty well,” Altman said. “OpenAI is the most advanced and widely-used AI platform in the world now.”
In the year since ChatGPT was launched, the bot has just about upended the tech industry. Google and other Big Tech companies have reorganized their operations to focus on building similar AI tools. Dozens of well-funded startups now offer alternative AI models. And governments have felt compelled to make moves aimed at mitigating misuse of powerful models.
The new custom chatbots could see OpenAI jump ahead of its AI competitors once more, if they become popular. The company today also announced a new version of its most powerful text-generation model, called GPT-4 Turbo, which includes more recent information from up to April 2023. ChatGPT could previously draw on information from only up to 2021, because that is when the data used to train the underlying AI model was collected. An upgrade in September allowed ChatGPT to access some more recent information by browsing the web.
GPT-4 Turbo will also be able to take in larger amounts of text—equivalent to 300 pages—to use as instructions or to work with, allowing it to search and synthesize information from more documents. OpenAI also says its APIs will now allow models to accept and generate images and audio in the same way ChatGPT was recently upgraded to take in images. And it says that it cut the prices of all its APIs, making the cost for using its most advanced model between a half and a third of what it previously was.
