Sam Altman announces GPT Store at OpenAI DevDay

It's been almost a year since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public, kicking off an AI gold rush. The company shared what's coming next at their inaugural OpenAI developer conference this week. They always have these conferences when they get big. The announcements included introduction of custom GPTs, this was fascinating, for people to create their own, an upcoming app store, and a new turbo model of ChatGPT-4. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spelled out the company's vision in his keynote. Let's listen to a bit.

We're gonna launch the GPT store. You can list a GPT there and we'll be able to feature the best and the most popular GPTs. We believe that AI will be about individual empowerment and agency at a scale that we've never seen before, and that will elevate humanity to a scale that we've never seen before either. We're excited to see what you all will do with this technology and to discover the new future that we're all going to architect together.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Love that, Sam Altman, but honestly, it sounds like the App Store on super, on, on steroids essentially. That's what's happening here. They're becoming a platform. Uh, that's what jumped out at me about this announcement. Um, a number of people on X were comparing Sam Altman to Steve Jobs after that presentation. I would agree. But it was the App Store, that's what it seemed to be, and they're becoming a platform. Um, what do you think?

Uh, I th- I think you're right, but the App Store is arguably one of the most valuable businesses in the world.

Exactly. Yeah, it's the new App Store.

And as someone who spent... or my team spent a couple of months trying to figure out how to build a PropG.AI, and then basically now anyone (laughs) can do it by just going to the platform, I think we should have waited two or three months. Um, I... Look, i- i- it kind of... I- I was blown away by this, and it indicates why software continues and technology continues to every year grab more and more of the world's GDP. And that is they said, "Okay, we're massively upgrading the product. You can now upload enormous amounts of data for, for these LLMs to analyze. We have decided we're taking out fear. We're giving you umbrella protection liability from any copyright infringement," which I thought was extraordinary. I'm on the board... I'm on the board of, um, Maia Tech Startup section and the CEO uploaded the board deck to, to, uh, ChatGPT, uh, 4, 4.5 and said, "Act, uh, in the voice of an aggressive growth board member. Um, give me feedback and ask me questions." And the questions it came back with were, were chilling. They were so insightful and, uh, I mean, they kind of provoked an interesting conversation at the board level. It was like we had another board member in the room. And while they're doing all this, while they're offering custom, you know, chatbots, the ability to make these things more relevant, they've updated the input or the, the news up until April, they've updated the amount of data they're scraping up until, or current events up until April. They dramatically lowered the costs, and this is the key difference between technology and every other business. Businesses measure their power and their leverage by management's ability to raise prices. And since whatever you wanna call it, Moore's law, the gestalt in technology is let's massively upgrade the product and let's lower prices. If this had been a consumer company that said, "We've dramatically improved the quality of this car, this scarf, this soda, this streaming media platform," the immediate next sentence would be, "As a result, we're raising prices 15% 'cause we have the margin power." Instead these guys say, (sighs) "The product's incr- is just distinctly better and we're massively cutting costs." I was, I was totally blown away by this thing.