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OpenAI GPTs Store was supposed to be the "iPhone moment" which it changes everything and upends the App Store. ...Or so I was told by the AI bros. So what real

by rvz 3y ago

OpenAI GPTs Store was supposed to be the "iPhone moment" which it changes everything and upends the App Store. ...Or so I was told by the AI bros. So what really happened? Most likely little quality control, garbage copy cats running around and now there is an insurmountable amount of spam. That is nothing like the quality of the Apple App Store.

duskwuff 3y ago
> So what really happened? Most likely little quality control, garbage copy cats running around and now there is an insurmountable amount of spam. That, and there isn't a lot of space for real innovation within the "GPT" framework that OpenAI provides. Most of what's available in their store is literally just prepackaged prompts, and there's only so much that can accomplish. You can ask a chatbot to pretend to be an expert in a topic all day, but that won't actually make it into one. If Apple's App Store were just a form you filled out to release versions of Flappy Bird with new graphics or whatever, that'd fail too. Developers need conceptual "space" to innovate; I'm not convinced that's possible when the interface (a chat window) and the back end (a language model) are both set in stone by the platform.
jart 3y ago
It was doomed from the start, because monetizable computing platforms that target consumers can't succeed if they don't have high barriers to entry. Low quality Atari games were responsible for the 1983 video game crash. Anyone could publish an Atari game. So what ended up happening was people made games about things like raping Native American women (Custer's Revenge) and they were sold just like any other Atari cartridge. Nintendo pioneered the closed platform. No one was allowed to build games for Nintendo without Nintendo's permission. Microsoft and Apple did things a bit differently, by making their platforms as difficult to develop for as possible. WIN32 is byzantine. Making iPhone apps when the App Store was launched required learning Objective C, which was an entirely new language to most developers at the time. OpenAI on the other hand created an app store which, in their own words, "is simple and doesn't require any coding skills." https://openai.com/blog/introducing-the-gpt-store https://openai.com/blog/introducing-the-gpt-store
- nextworddev 3y ago
  Yep. And watch “no code / low code” movement do the same for SaaS
- hackerlight 3y ago
  Every GPT I've tried has been GPT-4 plus or minus an imperceptible difference in quality. It's like Atari publishing a game, and thousands of clones show up that are functionally the same, and zero other original games. They should scrap this failed idea and just give us MedQA, AlphaCode, etc. Specialized GPTs based on custom RAG or symbolic reasoning overlay or whatever, that actually do something that base GPT-4 can't do, in the sense of having an unmistakable step-change in quality for one type of task.
ecronant 3y ago
I think it has a fundamentally different problem. Any GPT I have tried, I could just ask chatGPT4 the same thing so I haven't bothered exploring much. I am still waiting to hear of a GPT that is obviously better than chatGPT4 by itself. Maybe it exists but I haven't heard of it. Short of GPT5 powered GPTs while I can only still talk directly to GPT4, I don't think I am going to be that impressed with anything using the chatGPT API compared to just asking chatGPT4 directly or using the API for my own needs. I don't need an interface for what I want to do with the API. ChatGPT4 can help me write that myself quite easily. I think the future looks much more like this than some app store knockoff.

by rvz 3y ago

duskwuff 3y ago

> So what really happened? Most likely little quality control, garbage copy cats running around and now there is an insurmountable amount of spam. That, and there isn't a lot of space for real innovation within the "GPT" framework that OpenAI provides. Most of what's available in their store is literally just prepackaged prompts, and there's only so much that can accomplish. You can ask a chatbot to pretend to be an expert in a topic all day, but that won't actually make it into one. If Apple's App Store were just a form you filled out to release versions of Flappy Bird with new graphics or whatever, that'd fail too. Developers need conceptual "space" to innovate; I'm not convinced that's possible when the interface (a chat window) and the back end (a language model) are both set in stone by the platform.

jart 3y ago

It was doomed from the start, because monetizable computing platforms that target consumers can't succeed if they don't have high barriers to entry. Low quality Atari games were responsible for the 1983 video game crash. Anyone could publish an Atari game. So what ended up happening was people made games about things like raping Native American women (Custer's Revenge) and they were sold just like any other Atari cartridge. Nintendo pioneered the closed platform. No one was allowed to build games for Nintendo without Nintendo's permission. Microsoft and Apple did things a bit differently, by making their platforms as difficult to develop for as possible. WIN32 is byzantine. Making iPhone apps when the App Store was launched required learning Objective C, which was an entirely new language to most developers at the time. OpenAI on the other hand created an app store which, in their own words, "is simple and doesn't require any coding skills." https://openai.com/blog/introducing-the-gpt-store https://openai.com/blog/introducing-the-gpt-store

nextworddev 3y ago
Yep. And watch “no code / low code” movement do the same for SaaS
hackerlight 3y ago
Every GPT I've tried has been GPT-4 plus or minus an imperceptible difference in quality. It's like Atari publishing a game, and thousands of clones show up that are functionally the same, and zero other original games. They should scrap this failed idea and just give us MedQA, AlphaCode, etc. Specialized GPTs based on custom RAG or symbolic reasoning overlay or whatever, that actually do something that base GPT-4 can't do, in the sense of having an unmistakable step-change in quality for one type of task.

ecronant 3y ago

I think it has a fundamentally different problem. Any GPT I have tried, I could just ask chatGPT4 the same thing so I haven't bothered exploring much. I am still waiting to hear of a GPT that is obviously better than chatGPT4 by itself. Maybe it exists but I haven't heard of it. Short of GPT5 powered GPTs while I can only still talk directly to GPT4, I don't think I am going to be that impressed with anything using the chatGPT API compared to just asking chatGPT4 directly or using the API for my own needs. I don't need an interface for what I want to do with the API. ChatGPT4 can help me write that myself quite easily. I think the future looks much more like this than some app store knockoff.