OpenAI, the company whose ChatGPT brought AI chatbots to mainstream awareness, said Monday that it’ll let you build your own special-purpose version of its artificial intelligence technology.

You don’t need to know how to program to make a new GPT, as the company is calling the special-purpose bots. You have to give it plain-language instructions along with some of your own knowledge, then steer its purpose in the right direction, like creating images or searching the web.

“GPTs are tailored versions of ChatGPT for a specific purpose,” OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said. He demonstrated the technology at OpenAI DevDay in San Francisco, telling the build system to create an advice-giving app for startups that draws from videos of his own talks that he uploaded.

If you’re curious, you can try the custom GPT technology out on OpenAI’s website. And next month, OpenAI will publish many of these chatbots through a new GPT store interface. OpenAI didn’t reveal pricing details, but it said it’ll share revenue with those who build the custom GPTs.

OpenAI is at the cusp of the AI revolution, training an enormously complex large language model to recognize patterns on vast swaths of text like internet chat forums. The AI technology can accept prompts like “explain the concept of hell in Dante’s Inferno” and generate its own response. OpenAI also offers generative AI that can create images through its Dall-E technology. More than 100 million people use ChatGPT each week, Altman said.

AI systems aren’t trustworthy when it comes to facts, which is why AI proponents like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Anthropic often position chatbots as assistants or co-pilots that still require human supervision. But their abilities to do things like create illustrations or summarize legal documents are powerful enough to have spooked many that AI could replace human employees.

OpenAI is revamping its core large language model to be more powerful. Next on the priority list will be making it faster, Altman said. That’ll be good news for anyone who’s stared at ChatGPT’s interface waiting for a response.

GPT-4 Turbo arrives at developer event

At OpenAI’s first developer event, hundreds of programmers gathered to hear the latest developments about building their own services on the company’s GPT technology.

Among the new abilities OpenAI will offer developers, and thus to all of us who use those developers’ tools, is a new large language model called GPT-4 Turbo. It’s capable of much larger, more complex prompts and it’s also been optimized so it’ll cost less for developers to use.

When hearing of the more powerful prompt abilities, developers at the event cheered loudly. But it’s not just for developers: GPT-4 Turbo is now also the brains behind the ChatGPT service.

GPT-4 Turbo also is trained on more recent data, including information published up to April 2023. That’s a big improvement over the first version of GPT-3 and its ChatGPT chatbot interface, which were years out of date when they arrived a year ago.

And GPT-4 Turbo can accept images as input, which means OpenAI’s technology can be used to perform tasks like identifying objects in a photo or generating a caption. As for creating images, the new model can do so with the new Dall-E 3 technology.

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create some stories. For more, see this post.