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OpenAI announced on Monday that its products, including ChatGPT and image creator Dall-E, are becoming faster, cheaper and more customizable.
The news came at the company’s first developer conference, which is being held in San Francisco. The event was a coming out of sorts for the company,which started out as a research organization but has morphed into a consumer brand and a major tech player in corporate America.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on stage that the company’s platform is now used by 92% of Fortune 500 firms and that ChatGPT has 100 million weekly users. More than 2 million developers use the platform, he said.
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OpenAI announced new products, called GPTs, that allow anyone to create a customized version of ChatGPT, which the company said in a press release is a “first step towards an agent-based future.”
The firm also said it’s launching the GPT Store, which will feature services by verified builders, who will be able to earn money based on how many people are using their GPT.
OpenAI’s GPT-4 model is the most advanced on the market, but the company faces increasing competition from open-source models that are free and can be tweaked to address a user’s specific needs.
OpenAI has been moving to make its products more customizable, allowing its customers to fine-tune the models — a feature that was not available when the company first launched.
The company said its products will now cost three times less, news that drew loud applause from the audience full of hundreds of developers who rely on OpenAI’s services.
The cost of AI models has been a major issue in the industry. Running them requires high-powered graphics processors, which aren’t normally part of cloud datacenters. Microsoft, OpenAI’s exclusive partner, has been working to upgrade its datacenters with GPUs and state-of-the-art networking.
Lower prices mean developers can offer products powered by GPT-4 and other OpenAI models for less money, or with better margins.
In February, Microsoft held an event at its headquarters to announce Bing Chat, which was powered by GPT-4. Altman made a cameo appearance on stage at that conference, but it was clear it was Microsoft’s show.
On Monday, it was Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella who was on stage with Altman. “I remember the first time he reached out and said ‘hey, do you have some Azure credits?’” Nadella said of Altman. “We’ve come a long way.”
