By Krystal Hu and Anna Tong
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -OpenAI will enable ChatGPT users to build customized bots 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 capitalize 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 also pushing for more AI agent-like features to handle personal and work tasks when commanded by a human without close supervision. It will launch a GPT Store later this month where people can share their GPTs – OpenAI’s version of agents that will allow ChatGPT to book flights and perform other tasks – and earn money based on the number of users.
“GPTs will continue to get more useful and smarter, and you’ll eventually be able to let them take on real tasks in the real world,” OpenAI wrote in a blog on Monday.
“We think it’s important to move incrementally towards this future, as it will require careful technical and safety work – and time for society to adapt.”
Even before event attendees were allowed to check in at 8:30 a.m. PDT, hundreds had lined up around the block in the Mid-Market neighborhood in downtown San Francisco. Most were developers already using OpenAI technology, eager for updates.
Satya Nadella, chief executive of Microsoft, made a brief, surprise appearance at the conference, reiterating his commitment to the partnership with OpenAI and support for the expensive race in building foundational models.
“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 its own backer, 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.
(Reporting by Krystal Hu and Anna Tong in San FranciscoEditing by Richard Chang and Matthew Lewis)
