OpenAI’s recent announcement was made during their DevDay, and it was hard to avoid. At this point, I don’t think OpenAI needs a marketing department. One of these announcements was of GPTs and the GPT Store. On queue, the amateur futurists swarmed social media with bold claims and predictions, stating that this was an App Store moment just like we had for the iPhone. So, is this an App Store moment? Are the stars aligning? Are we entering a new era? Let’s take a look.

Quick Note

So, before we dig into this, I like the concept of GPTs and even the GPT Store, which may not be apparent from the content in this post. That’s because this is a post about innovation and impact. The point isn’t whether paying customers of ChatGPT will use GPTs; it’s whether GPTs will create new paying customers of ChatGPT as well as create an inevitable market that companies will need to consider as part of their strategy. This is what it would take to make an “App Store Moment” and is the primary perspective of this post. However, I will highlight a few additional issues as we go along.

My Initial Take

This post expands on my initial comment (or hot take) here where I made some claims and predictions of my own.
So, to summarize from my previous comment:

• They are creating additional attack surface
• They are inheriting the issues of an AppStore
• Influencers, not innovators, will drive use cases
• Most use cases will be inconsequential
• Malicious use cases will propagate
• Most interesting use cases will continue to be deployed outside the GPT Store

What Are GPTs?

GPTs are a custom version of ChatGPT that you can create for a specific purpose. Some examples they give are learning board game rules or teaching your kids math. You can create these with natural language without having to do any coding. The GPT Store will allow people to share and sell these GPTs to others.

In a nutshell, it’s a fancier way of selling prompts to others with additional features, such as adding data and connecting to the Internet.

GPT Store Use and Trajectory

Influencers will drive use cases, not innovators.

The GPT Store hasn’t launched yet, but it’s clear that influencers and AI hustle bros will drive the use cases, not innovators. Influencers will rush to fill the platform with chatbots where people can ask them questions based on previous content they’ve published. Being influencers, there’s absolutely no way they’d ever try to oversell the impact of these. (Feel the virtual eye roll.) There’ll also be a healthy dose of memes because you have to keep the world spicy 🌶️

There will also be a swarm of use cases where the only goal is to be first and a majority of use cases will be largely redundant or uninteresting (in the context of innovation), providing GPTs that basically do what anyone can do with ChatGPT themselves, only repackaged and marketed as something more capable. Newsreaders, page summarizers, document summarizers, and many similar GPTs will crop up. Mostly, these will be thought of as “throw-away” use cases.

Note: I’m not saying that these use cases are useless. Some may find them helpful, but once again, we are discussing these in the context of innovation and creating a culture of paying customers.

It’s likely we will see a host of celebrity and historical figure chatbots because they are easy to create. Maybe some celebrities will release branded chatbots themselves, primarily ones that don’t recognize the reputational risk. However, still, I wonder how many “Saylor Twift” type chatbots will crop up. These bots are allowed. You only need to mark them as “Simulated” or “Parody” according to OpenAI’s policies. That’s if their creators even bother.

Even with historical figures, there’s a huge problem with distilling them down into a subsection of their writing or public appearances and pretending that they’re somehow interacting with them or getting to the heart of what they actually thought about something, but this is a philosophical topic for another blog post.

We’ll see a familiar trajectory where you have a usage spike followed by a drop-off after people have checked it out.

99 Problems and an App Store is One

By providing the GPT Store, OpenAI inherits all of the issues associated with running an App Store. These issues should include providing proactive protection to protect users from malicious GPTs. In addition, another layer should be part of this in protecting the content of creators primarily from others using their work in an unauthorized way. This protection needs to be advanced and proactive to provide even a basic level of protection. Given the initial launch and announcement, there doesn’t appear to be anything like this.

OpenAI has its acceptable use policy and will most likely count on the community for reporting. In addition, they may do some basic scanning, using a prompt to an LLM in much the same way as they did for plugins, but this is not even scratching the surface and is only a minuscule touch better than doing nothing. This won’t be maintainable if the GPT Store grows at all, and with the ease of building and deploying GPTs, this will spin out of control quickly.

Content Theft

People will undoubtedly create GPTs with other people’s content and work. This will drive less traffic to the original creator’s funnels. This is stealing other people’s work in a more direct way was done for art.

Disturbingly, some see no problem with taking a book like Outlive and creating a chatbot out of it. Even more, find no issue with taking Dr. Attia’s public content and making a chatbot out of that. There seems to be this impression that it’s fair game since he put the content online. There is something rotten to the core with this mindset, especially in cases where you are monetizing someone else’s work.

To make matters worse, GPTs and the GPT Store make it much easier to build and deploy systems that use other’s content with less friction than a more standalone solution, which is why you’ll see more content theft with GPTs vs other methods.

GPTs and the GPT Store make it much easier to build and deploy systems that use other’s content

Don’t hold your breath for a solution here. OpenAI has a mindset that they are providing the tools, and if people misuse them, that’s on them, but there is a huge gaping hole in this logic regarding content. How would anyone go about this themselves? It’s difficult to identify in all but the most egregious cases, so yes, calling your GPT the Dr. Attia Bot or the Outlive Bot would certainly raise some eyebrows, but the real harm is behind the scenes. The Live Longer Bot, completely made up of Dr. Attia’s work, would be difficult or near impossible to detect from the average content owner’s perspective.

The responsibility for detecting this type of misuse can’t be thrust onto content owners. Creators can’t police the GPT store for all of the instances of usage of their content. Only OpenAI could do something like this and accomplish it in a way with breadth to have a chance of success. The fact that OpenAI isn’t even considering a real solution to this problem should tell you all you need to know.

There is a caveat here, and that is, this is a hard problem, so I don’t mean to make it sound easy. It’s not like all you have to do is make a list and check against it as people deploy GPTs. There needs to be a thoughtful approach that considers the capabilities and tradeoffs and gives people concerned about their content some methods to check and recourses to take. But doing nothing isn’t an option either.

After all, it’s OpenAI deciding to launch a platform that allows for easy theft, deployment, and monetization of other people’s content. It should also be their responsibility to ensure they are at least taking some real steps to protect content owners and give them a process for checking if this is the case in a meaningful and effective way.

Time will tell, but there doesn’t seem to be an indication that this will happen, and it may only happen after a series of lawsuits.

How creators may change their behavior based on content theft is an interesting thought experiment. How are you supposed to promote your work if, through promotion, your work is stolen and used? It’s a conundrum, and we shouldn’t learn the wrong lessons.

Malicious GPTs

There will undoubtedly be malicious use cases. These will try and steal information and data from the user. They may even try to trick the user into installing malware. To stop this, there would need to be more robust checks in place and a process to catch these malicious GPTs before they are deployed to the GPT Store.

The popularity of this as a vector for attackers will be the popularity of the GPT Store. So, malicious GPTs will scale with this popularity and draw more attention from attackers as the attention grows.

Surprises

I do agree with OpenAI’s comment that interesting (not necessarily the most interesting) use cases will come from the community. It’s possible that creating this GPT Store opens an avenue for someone to create a meaningful app that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. There will undoubtedly be some of these use cases, and they will be pretty cool. We should expect some surprises like this. The ultimate question, though, is, will there be enough of these use cases where it’s interesting enough for people to continue paying not only for ChatGPT Plus but also any additional fees for the GPT? It’s possible, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Most Interesting Use Cases Remain Outside The GPT Store

The most interesting use cases of the technology will remain outside of the GPT Store and its ecosystem. This is for some reasons that are fairly obvious upon reflection. This mostly comes down to access and control. Organizations want to exercise greater control over their intellectual property and data. Conversely, open-source models are highly effective, and an organization could easily construct a more self-contained solution where none of the data has to leave its control.

It’s not just control. It’s also about the technical feasibility involved with GPTs architecture. If you have a fancy prompt, need a bit of data from the Internet, or want to chat over a document, then GPTs are fine. If you are trying to integrate LLMs into an actual solution, then the capabilities aren’t there.

Also, storage cost is steep for GPTs. By some estimates, as much as 260x more than something like S3.

Companies would also need to actively look at the GPT Store as a valid delivery source for their customers. This would only happen if this were a large, untapped market. So, only if the GPT Store is a smashing success will this force companies to consider creating GPTs on the GPT Store.

And Security… Always The Afterthought

I spend countless hours discussing LLM security, so I won’t continue beating that horse here. Let’s just say all of the current security issues still apply to GPTs, with a bit more consideration for your use case, and security will undoubtedly be a driving factor for any business use case. Just like trying to protect your system prompt, anything you put in a GPT can also be exposed.

https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1722846616896651336?s=61&t=qLEWkcAjomspZNvEroO87w

This vector means there are confidentiality and intellectual property risks with GPTs. And if you think, oh, that’s an easy fix. It’s not, and when this one is patched, another one will be found. Consider anything you put in a GPT as being public. If you have any IP or sensitive data, it must stay out of GPTs, and you’d be better served deploying independently.

If you have any IP or sensitive data, it must stay out of GPTs

The one thing you can count on is that things will be attacked and data will be lost. These are new technologies, and we are still poking around at them. I’ve said many times these systems represent a single interface with an unlimited number of undocumented protocols, which is bad for security.

These systems represent a single interface with an unlimited number of undocumented protocols, which is bad for security

Innovation Ripeness

Major disruptions caused by innovation, such as the App Store on the iPhone, aren’t just about the tech itself or its capabilities. It’s about how ripe the area was for innovation in the first place. This ripeness combines factors such as capabilities, social trends, and timing.

For those who don’t remember, phones were things people used to talk into… not to Siri but to another human being. You’d speak into the phone’s microphone, and magically, on the other end, someone would hear your voice and want to talk. For mobile phones, you’d have a certain number of minutes you could talk on your phone plan, and text messages were extra. That is, if you ever wanted to text at all on the phone’s number pad or if you were (un)lucky T9. People even had separate devices for listening to music. How ancient!

Then, the prices came down, and more and more people started carrying mobile phones while simultaneously getting data connectivity, keyboards, and storage. People started texting more than speaking, and the transformation of the phone into both a communication and entertainment platform began.

It was in the midst of this transformation of the phone into a more central part of our lives that the App Store arrived. People wanted more and more access while being mobile on a device that was more central to their daily lives. So, the capabilities of the platform, social factors, and timing all came together. The App Store drove companies to create apps based on this demand and tap new customers on the platform.

So, will the GPT Store be the new App Store? Given these factors, it’s highly unlikely. ChatGPT isn’t a central part of most people’s lives today, and there isn’t enough evidence to think that it will be in the future. OpenAI is trying everything it can to keep users paying for ChatGPT Plus with moves such as adding Dall-E 3 to ChatGPT Plus users. I’m not sure moves like this will be enough of an incentive to keep people paying, especially when there are other options and the space is so new.

Conclusion

GPTs and the GPT Store are a neat concept and a nice addition to ChatGPT. However, it is not well thought out regarding security and content protection. This will continue to be a constant tradeoff in the years ahead. This platform makes it much easier to steal other people’s work and monetize it as your own, and I hope that OpenAI takes some steps to help content owners detect and mitigate some of these risks.

Will it become as influential as the App Store? Highly unlikely. As always, play with this stuff yourself. See the features and capabilities for yourself.