On Monday, OpenAI, the innovator behind ChatGPT and GPT-4, hosted its inaugural developer conference, Dev Day, at a downtown event space in San Francisco. During the event, the company introduced several groundbreaking features, including GPTs—enabling effortless creation of customized ChatGPT versions—a dedicated store for discovering and acquiring tailor-made ChatGPTs, an “Assistant” API simplifying the invocation of specific functions for developers’ applications, and a host of other enhancements and upgrades.
Sam Altman took center stage, providing a comprehensive overview of the significant milestones achieved—starting with ChatGPT a year ago, culminating in the present GPT-4, hailed as “still the most powerful model.”
OpenAI revealed that it boasts a developer community exceeding 2 million, actively engaged in constructing applications across diverse use cases. Impressively, OpenAI’s APIs have gained traction in 92% of Fortune 500 companies. Notably, ChatGPT alone attracts approximately 100 million weekly active users, according to the company’s disclosure.
Altman welcomed a distinguished guest onto the stage: Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. In a lighthearted exchange, Altman humorously inquired, “How is Microsoft approaching the partnership?” eliciting laughter from both Nadella and the audience.
Nadella expressed admiration, stating, “You guys have built something magical.” He went on to highlight the profound impact of the partnership, noting that it has “dramatically changed” the landscape of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service. Emphasizing their commitment, Nadella remarked, “Our job is to create the best system so you can build the best models.”
Nadella outlined key initiatives in the partnership, stating, “We’re building our copilot as developers on OpenAI API.” Emphasizing Microsoft’s commitment, he added, “Our mission is to empower every individual, and we’ll ensure you have the best models and compute.”
Describing Microsoft’s role as a platform and developer company, Nadella highlighted the need to excel in providing systems for OpenAI’s ambitious roadmap. The shared mission, he said, is to empower every person globally. Altman responded, expressing excitement about jointly building artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Key product and technology announcements include:
- GPTs: OpenAI introduces custom versions of ChatGPT for specific tasks, with initial offerings for Canva and Zapier AI. Additional GPTs will be made available.
- GPT Store: In November, OpenAI will launch the GPT Store, allowing developers to acquire GPTs created by others and enabling creators to earn money.
- Copyright Shield: OpenAI introduces a service to cover the cost of defending customers against copyright issues.
- Fine-tuning service: Developers can now fine-tune GPT-4 for their specific needs.
- Custom Models program: OpenAI collaborates with selected organizations to train custom GPT-4 models tailored to their specific domains.
- New ChatGPT UI: A redesigned user interface with a dark background, featuring improved navigation between ChatGPT and DALL-E.
- GPT-4 Updates: Information source updated to April 2023, improved PDF and document search capabilities, and a four-fold increase in the context window to 128,000 in the new “Turbo” version.
- GPT-4 Turbo Features: Acceptance of images as prompts, generation of “human-quality speech” in output.
- Assistant API: A function-calling mechanism simplifying integration of specific “assistant” functions into applications.
- Reproducible Outputs: A new “seed” parameter enhances GPT’s ability to produce reproducible outputs.
- GPT-3.5 Turbo Upgrade: Improved function handling and JSON capabilities.
- Price Reductions: Reduced prices on GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-3.5 Turbo based on input and output tokens, along with a doubled “tokens per minute” rate.
Onstage, Altman showcased the functionality of GPTs by creating a program called Startup Mentor from scratch. This program is designed to provide advice to entrepreneurs. Altman demonstrated the capability of uploading a file, using a talk he had given as an example of external input. The program is tailored to address queries such as, “What are the three things to look for when hiring people for a startup?”