At the recent OpenAI developer conference, OpenAI announced it is rolling out GPTs, custom versions of ChatGPT created for specific tasks. Developers will also be able to share their GPTs on the forthcoming ChatGPT Store and monetize them, the company says.
GPTs provide a mechanism to combine ChatGPT with custom instructions, external knowledge, and any combination of skills. They attempt to answer the need for customizing ChatGPT for specific uses, such as learning the rules of board games, help teaching math, or designing stickers.
Many power users maintain a list of carefully crafted prompts and instruction sets, manually copying them into ChatGPT. GPTs now do all of that for you.
Before GPTs, prompt engineering was the most common approach to specializing ChatGPT's behavior. According to OpenAI, building GPTs does not require coding skills and is a great option for educators, coaches, or anyone who loves to build helpful tools.
Creating one is as easy as starting a conversation, giving it instructions and extra knowledge, and picking what it can do, like searching the web, making images or analyzing data
Using OpenAI's interface, the first step to creating a GPT is chatting with ChatGPT and describing what you would like to achieve. Once that is done, you can define instructions, conversation starters, knowledge, capabilities, and actions.
Instructions constitute possibly the most significant section. You define here which resources to use, the style, the tone, and the desired behavior. For example, you could specify that when the user provides some data, your GPT should use those files to carry through some Internet searches, then run some script to process the results, and so on.
Conversation starters are sentences you provide as helpers for users to know what they can ask the GPT. Knowledge is a collection of resources you upload and make available to the GPT as an extension to its model. Capabilities are tools the GPT can use. Actions are calls to external services.
GPTs are available to users paying for the ChatGPT Plus subscription and also require enabling the "Beta options" setting.
As mentioned, OpenAI has also announced its GPT Store, which makes it possible to share GPTs publicly. According to the company, the GPT Store should be available starting late November 2023, with support for monetary transactions coming in the next few months.
Previously, ChatGPT offered ChatGPT plugins as a mechanism to modify ChatGPT behavior through integration with third-party applications. While GPTs seem to obsolete plugins in that regard, OpenAI says they are promoting Actions, that build upon the foundations provided by plugins, to leverage many of the core ideas of plugins.