A few months back during OpenAI's DevDay conference event, it was revealed that OpenAI was working on an online marketplace where publishers could share their custom GPT creations and potentially earn some kind of revenue depending on popularity and usage.
And it looks like we won't have to wait much longer to see it live. Per an email sent by OpenAI to developers, the marketplace should be going live sometime next week, with the following highliteghted points for anyone looking to create a custom GPT:
Review our updated usage policies and GPT brand guidelines to ensure that your GPT is compliant.
Verify your Builder Profile (settings > builder profile > enable your name or a verified website).
Publish your GPT as ‘Public’ (GPT’s with ‘Anyone with a link’ selected will not be shown in the store).
Since the release of the custom GPT feature, many developers have trained and shared their custom GPT's through various online forums, but there hasn't been any kind of formalized process.
And while custom GPT's have been in the media in the past for their privacy and security concerns, hopefully much of that can be improved upon with an official curated marketplace.
And if you aren't too familiar with the concept of custom GPT's, here is a brief breakdown of what they are and how you can create your own as well.
What are GPT's
Let's start with a formal definition of a GPT to start things off. A GPT, or "Generative Pre-trained Transformer", is a model that has been designed for understanding natural language and for generating it as well.
These models are "trained" on huge amounts of data and essentially work by predicting what the next most-likely to occur word will be in a sentence.
The "pre-training" essentially allows them to understand human grammar rules and syntax. These models can then further be "fine-tuned" for very specific cases, such as acting as chatbots or for translation.
At least that's the general in a very non-technical way.
What are custom GPT's
In the past, if you discovered something useful that ChatGPT was good at and you wanted to share that with someone else, you essentially had to share the prompts that you used to generate that response with that individual.
And depending on where you were in the conversation chain with ChatGPT when you discovered that ability, you could end up having to paste alot of prompts. You also had no real way of continuously nurturing a specific conversation thread long term as it would eventually get lost in a long list of conversations.
Custom GPT's solve that issue by allowing you to create a standalone models with a default prompt and which can be trained on a specific set of data that you (the creator) can upload. Developers can also integrate their own API's with their models for added functionality.
You can find a more thorough walkthrough on how to create your own custom GPT's over on this article.
Walter Guevara is a software engineer, startup founder and currently teaches programming for a coding bootcamp. He is currently building things that don't yet exist.
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