OpenAI added a powerful new feature to their mega-popular ChatGPT last week. It’s called custom GPTs and it allows users to alter the way the AI chatbot works at a fundamental level. You can now tailor how it communicates and provide specific datasets it can pull from. But is this, as many AI proponents are already calling it, a genuine game changer for the world of generative AI? Or is this just another fun gimmick?
The rollout of custom GPTs arrives at a pivotal moment for the company, after the shocking exit of cofounder and former CEO Sam Altman, the demotion and subsequent resignation of former president Greg Brockman, and the resignations in protest from several senior members of the company.
Rumors are still swirling as to what caused the schism, but for the first time in the company’s short history, it feels like OpenAI’s place in the AI arms race is truly uncertain. Which may mean that its future relevance could come down to how its users and the developer community continue to innovate on the platform, something custom GPTs allows them to do explicitly.
First, let’s start with the underlying technology. GPT means “generative pre-trained transformer” and it’s what’s powering much of the current AI boom. Think of it like a really good version of the autocomplete feature on your phone, but instead it uses huge chunks of the internet—oftentimes dubiously acquired—as its source material. The newest version of ChatGPT runs on GPT-4, which has the ability to “see,” or analyze images, and works with other parts of OpenAI’s suite of AI tools, including its image generator DALL-E 3.
Up until now, if you wanted ChatGPT to talk to you in a certain way, it took some convincing. You would have to ask the chat bot to assume a role or a personality, and if you wanted it to cite specific material, you had to upload it yourself. Previously, the only way to share a specific build of ChatGPT was to tell other users the inputs you gave it and have them try it themselves and hope it worked the same way.
Custom GPTs streamline this process entirely.
In terms of building one, which all paying ChatGPT subscribers can currently do, it’s fairly straightforward. You click on the upper-lefthand corner of ChatGPT, select “Explore,” and it takes you to a page with custom GPTs created by OpenAI and a chat interface for building your own. You can talk through what you’re imagining or input more specific details manually.
