OpenAI’s DevDay keynote had the look and feel of all Silicon Valley product announcements – a well-scripted parade of announcements, a couple live demos, and even a “one more thing” that is revealed with low-key fanfare but, by it’s placement at the end of the talk, signals to the world that this is the game-changer.
That thing was the app store for custom AI chatbots. To make it easier to grok and talk about, OpenAI has co-opted the acronym for the rather technical mouthful that is “Generative Pre-trained Transformers” and made it into a product name. Custom versions of ChatGPT are now GPTs. This makes it easier for the broader public to understand and makes it a whole lot easier for marketers to fold into their campaigns in the same way, “There’s an App for that” became a catch phrase for Apple’s app ecosystem, I can see “Just GPT it!” becoming a verb for leveraging AI to do some grunt work for you.
That’s my 30,000 foot view before diving in and playing around more. Stratechery has a much more informed deep dive on the significance of what was announced and I recommend reading Ben Thompson’s analysis which includes important observations around the significance of OpenAI using Microsoft’s infrastructure and what that partnership means for the market going forward.
As a teaser, I found this passage thought-provoking,
This has two implications. First, while this may have been OpenAI’s first developer conference, I remain unconvinced that OpenAI is going to ever be a true developer-focused company. I think that was Altman’s plan, but reality in the form of ChatGPT intervened: ChatGPT is the most important consumer-facing product since the iPhone, making OpenAI The Accidental Consumer Tech Company. That, by extension, means that integration will continue to matter more than modularization, which is great for Microsoft’s compute stack and maybe less exciting for developers.
The OpenAI Keynote
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