Beware: OpenAI is going after the global engagement-economy
OpenAI is expanding beyond nifty products like ChatGPT and has announced that it is following through with its pledge to distribute AI’s benefits to all of humanity. Just kidding! It’s actually launched a ‘store’ to monetize its language model technology and share that wealth with other businesses. And it’s using an incentive structure that has a history of unpleasant side effects on, yes, humanity.
The ‘GPT Store’ is available to OpenAI’s enterprise customers and anyone who pays $20 a month to use ChatGPT Plus, offering a selection of specialized versions of the tool for research, education, design, etc, that are created by third-party developers. Think of them like apps you can talk to. For instance, I asked AllTrails GPT to recommend running routes and it gave me a list of ideas with links to maps.
Coloring Book Hero generated pictures of copyrighted characters for my kids to scribble over and Books GPT churned out a list of wilderness survival novels after I told it that I’d re-watched The Revenant. OpenAI says developers have already created more than 3 million of these GPTs, which led The Atlantic to point out that this was ChatGPT’s “FarmVille Moment." Indeed, it harks back to when Facebook allowed other software engineers to create apps for the site in 2007. But OpenAI’s store is similar to Facebook in a more disturbing way too: It has an engagement-based revenue structure.
Builders “will be paid based on user engagement with their GPTs," OpenAI has said, which means that the more popular and potentially addictive a GPT service is, the more money its developers can make. OpenAI might be the world’s leading AI firm, but it is harnessing one of the oldest business models on the internet. Companies from Facebook to
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