On November 6th, Open AI at its Developer Days announced the release of GPT Apps that allows the user to create custom GPTs that can be shared with "low code" or "no code." This feature is only available for the Chat GPT Plus users.
During Developer Days, the demos that they did for custom GPTs were very impressive, but let's dive in and look at what creating a "GPT" actually is and what the future implications could be.
What is an Open AI GPT?
First let's describe what it's not. It's not a separate GPT you are creating. You are also not "fine tuning a model."
On the Open AI screen they simply describe it as customizing a version of ChatGPT for a specific purpose. When you enter the screen to create your GPT, it asks you what kind of GPT you want to create. What then follows is a back and forth of questions that customize the purpose of the GPT. It creates an app name and icon. As you are answering the questions it builds it and you can try it out on the right hand side. This literally takes minutes and is probably the ultimate in a "no code" experience. You can always iterate and conversationally make changes or click the "Configure" tab to make specific edits. It also suggests "conversation starters" to help the user interact with your app.
So it is a fun way to create a very targeted prompt for your purpose that may have been difficult to do. Which might or might not sound impressive, but the experience of doing it is impressive. Plus there are features that put it above just a prompt organizer. For example you can enable searching the Web, using DALL-E to do image creation, and use code interpreter. You can also upload files for the app to use. Using any of these greatly increases the impressiveness of the app. At that point you can share you app with specific people or with the public.
But maybe the most important feature and the one that can separate an app from other apps is the ability use "custom actions." Custom actions allows the app to call APIs. In order to use custom actions turns it from a "no code" to a "low code" experience.
But if it's this easy and a person can build something pretty cool in minutes what's to stop someone else from being able to do it or to copy it? I think there are two things that can make it unique.
1) Use file uploads to augment the app's retrieval. If you work at a company and have the Chat GPT Enterprise that emphasizes security, you might create an app centered around your department or initiative, upload some files for it to use, and then share it with others in your company. What's also nice about the Enterprise version, is you can just choose to share it to your organization and not to the public.
2) By using APIs such as those from Zapier, your app can stand out by giving it capabilities that people with no code abilities would not easily be able to duplicate. Plus, If you take it a step further and you have an external API that you own and that information is the central part of the app, your app has that as a barrier.
App Store
One of the other big announcements, is the announcement of an App Store by the end of this month. We'll see when the actual timing is and few details of how the store will work have been released at this time. Many people are comparing it to the introduction of the Apple App Store, but there are important differences. No one knows how the economics of Open AIs App Store will work or if it's a separate cost, but I doubt it's like Apple's. Also, no one knows what the approval process or what requirements there might be. One of the big questions to me, is if it's this easy to create an app, will the App Store be overrun with submissions, duplicates, or near duplicates? Or will some kind of cost or approval barrier prevent that? We don't know the answers to that yet, but will soon - I expect answers to some of these questions before the end of the year.
My Experiment
With it being so easy to create an app, I had to try it out. And if you have Chat GPT Plus, I encourage you to give it a try of building your own app.
I like to run. My idea as a runner was to create a running app that would tell me given a location the best routes in the area. When I travel, I will often not know the best places to run, which entails me doing a lot of googling.
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-C7mXg4svV-run-planner
So if the app is given a location, it will search the Web across many different sites to look at what are popular running routes. It's interesting watching it search different sites for routes - many of these sites wouldn't have occurred to me to search through if I was doing this manually.
Searching Wheeling IL, it gave me a list of possible routes with some having links for more information. It even told me that with Wheeling having variable weather at different times of the year, some of the trails can be slick so check the weather before going out.
I also added to the app the ability to search for upcoming races in the area and to give training plans for different types of races.
The experience was fun and took me probably less than 30 minutes.
Future Implications
It's going to be very interesting to see how the future plays out for all of this.
First, the App Store, there are a lot of questions surrounding it as mentioned above. But also, I had to wonder how does an App Store align with Open AI's "core values." Recently to much media fanfare Open AI changed their "core values" page with the main difference being -
AGI focus
We are committed to building safe, beneficial AGI that will have a massive positive impact on humanity's future.
Anything that doesn’t help with that is out of scope.
So does having an App Store seem out of scope to building AGI? It seems so to me. Right after they announce their only focus is building AGI, they announce an App Store?
Second, this is another surge in the swell of "low code" and "no code" solutions. This is just going to accelerate as tasks become more automated and expert skills shift downstream or to different use cases.
Third, right now what you can change on the Configure tab is pretty limited. But we can expect that to become much more feature rich in the future. As that part gets built out, it's those new capabilities that could make GPT Apps really take off.
Fourth, one of the other things that Open AI introduced was the Assistant's API that has threading, coding in a sandbox, retrieval, and function calling. Somewhat similarly, what if Chat GPT Apps could themselves be called as autonomous agents? The potential would be endless.
Summary
GPT Apps was just one of the big announcements. The much anticipated Dev Days lived up to the hype for me. And if you have access to Chat GPT Plus, you should try it out.
As big of a year as Open AI had this year, I'm expecting 2024 to be an even bigger year for them - especially with Sam Altman discussing in an interview that they are working on GPT 5 and openly talking about research in building AGI and "how to build superintelligence."
