Overnight, OpenAI announced a number of blockbuster news, attracting market attention. This morning, OpenAI issued an email to all GPT developers stating that a customized "GPTStore" store will be launched next week, which is expected to promote the continuous improvement of the ChatGPT developer ecosystem. It is reported that GPTStore is known as the Apple AppStore in the field of large models.
At the same time, Theinformation also exposed two important news about OpenAI last night and this morning: First, OpenAI is preparing to compromise and has offered some US news organizations US$1 million to US$5 million per year to obtain a license to use news content to train models; second, OpenAI is discussing the issue of supplementary board members and has selected two candidates, including ScaleAI co-founder and CEO Alexandr Wang, and former GitHub CEO and investor Nat Friedman.
In fact, with ChatGPT, a popular chatbot platform, OpenAI, a company established less than 9 years ago, has annual ARR revenue of US$1.6 billion in 2023, an increase of 56 times compared with last year, and the company valuation is as high as US$100 billion.
With the upcoming launch of GPTStore and GPT-5, OpenAI will become the most powerful "dark horse" in the technology industry in 2024.
Big model's 'AppStore moment' arrives next week
On January 5, Eastern Time, the US company OpenAI issued an email memo to all custom GPT developers, showing that OpenAI plans to launch the "GPTStore" store next week. The store will allow AI model developers to evolve into customized OpenAI chatbots for different purposes and forms, such as designing courses for middle school teachers.
As early as the first OpenAI Developer Conference held in early November 2023, the company's CEO Sam Altman officially announced the GPTStore store product. Users do not need any code and the entire process supports visual click operations. The company estimates that GPTStore will be open to paid Plus users that month. However, two weeks after this conference, OpenAI fell into a leadership crisis, and Ultraman was repeatedly dismissed and returned. This "CEO removal incident" affected the overall development progress of GPTStore, and the final product was not launched online.
Sam Altman once said, "Some unexpected things keep us busy."
Now multiple sources have confirmed that GPTStore will arrive next week.
According to reports, the GPTStore application store is a customized mode of ChatGPT. Users do not need any code and support visual click operations throughout the process. Users only need to submit dialogue instructions, additional knowledge data, and then choose whether they need developer products or functions such as web search, data analysis, and image generation, and can quickly develop GPT assistants in specific fields such as law, finance, and medical care.
Specifically, first, users need to log in to https://chat.openai.com/auth/login and register a Plus account; secondly, after logging in to the account, they need to click the "Explore" button on the upper left to enter the custom build mode; thirdly, the platform will pop up a page, click "CreataGPT" to start building a custom GPT , or display other functions such as GPTStore; finally, click "Create" to customize the GPT assistant, or perform some more complex specific operations such as uploading data and attachments, etc., and finally form your own customized GPT assistant through GPTBuilder, and save it as a private model or a public model, and put it into OpenAI's soon-to-be-released custom GPT store for sharing.
OpenAI said it plans to find a way to pay GPT creators based on API usage in the store, but it has not released any other details about the plan.
The specific content of the email is as follows:
Dear GPT developers,
We are excited to inform you that we plan to officially launch the GPT store next week. If you expect to display your GPT works on this platform, please note the following points:
Please carefully review and adhere to our newly updated usage policy and GPT Brand Guidelines to ensure your work meets our standards.
Please go to Settings > Developer Profile to verify your profile, which includes confirming your name or linking to a verified website.
Please set your GPT to "Public" status. Those GPTs set to be visible to "anyone with the link" will not be displayed in the store.
We thank you for investing your valuable time and effort in building GPT and look forward to seeing your great work go live.
Bloomberg pointed out that with the launch of the GPTStore application store, it may threaten many AI startups that provide customized services similar to chatbots.
Li Zhifei, the founder and CEO of Mobvoi, once said that the OpenAI plug-in can connect ChatGPT and third-party applications to implement solutions such as real-time scores of events, stock prices, the latest information, buying air tickets, wine and travel, online shopping, ordering takeout, etc. He believes that this new species may be a "freak" that integrates content generation, search and recommendation, but for AI, it is a huge turning point in any case. As this new species continues to evolve, people need to keep an open mind and not try to understand it through the eyes of the past.
"A few days ago, Jen-Hsun Huang announced that AI's 'iPhone moment' has arrived, and now someone is saying that ChatGPT has become a new operating system and already has its own app store." Li Zhifei said.
AI content licensing battles proceed simultaneously
OpenAI is rumored to be negotiating with a price of up to US$5 million
In addition to the upcoming GPTStore store, OpenAI is negotiating licensing agreements with dozens of institutions to solve the problem of infringement of AI model training content.
On the evening of January 4th, Beijing time, The Information reported that OpenAI is negotiating with as many as 12 U.S. content publishers, including the New York Times and other institutions, hoping to finalize agreements similar to those reached between OpenAI and the Associated Press, Politico parent company Axel Springer, etc., and has proposed to some institutions annual licensing fees ranging from US$1 million to US$5 million. However, the report pointed out that since the fee amount given by OpenAI was less than expected, it may be difficult to finalize a final agreement.
According to Bloomberg, OpenAI Intellectual Property and Content Chief Tom Rubin said: "We are having many negotiations and discussions with many content publishers. The negotiations are very active and very positive, and the progress is good. You have seen the announced agreements, and there will be more in the future." AxelSpringer has received tens of millions of dollars in licensing fees over several years.
Earlier, the New York Times Company announced a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that Microsoft and OpenAI used content from the New York Times in their products, infringing copyright. The New York Times has attempted to negotiate an agreement to "ensure fair value for the use of its content," but talks have not yet reached a resolution. The Information quoted an executive as saying that it is expected that more such lawsuits may arise (in the future).
In response, OpenAI said in a statement that it respects "the rights of content creators and owners and is committed to working with them to ensure that they benefit from artificial intelligence technology and new revenue models." The company said it was "surprised and disappointed" by the New York Times lawsuit and "hopeful that we can find a mutually beneficial way to work together, as we have done with many other publishers."
At the same time, Apple and Google are also negotiating content licensing tools. According to The Information, Apple is finalizing AI agreements with 12 U.S. news organizations, including NBC News, CondeNast, the parent company of The New Yorker, and IAC, the parent company of The Daily Beast. It has proposed to sign a multi-year agreement worth at least US$50 million; Google has reached customized agreements on content algorithms and advertising sharing with organizations such as The New York Times.
For the generative AI industry, with ChatGPT being sued by the New York Times, this shows that large-model technology is becoming more and more important to obtain content authorization. Today, OpenAI is trying to adopt a broader approach to content authorization, hoping to use relevant content to train GPT models in future AI products.
Geoffrey Manne, president and founder of the Center for International Law and Economics, said that compared with other lawsuits, the New York Times case against OpenAI is more convincing because the New York Times submitted word-for-word examples to the court. With millions of registered articles, the New York Times ultimately wanted OpenAI to pay more than $750 million in losses.
In addition, Theinformation pointed out in a report on January 5 that OpenAI has begun looking for board member candidates, including ScaleAI CEO and co-founder Alexandr Wang, and former GitHub CEO and investor Nat Friedman, both of whom are likely to join the OpenAI board of directors. However, the negotiations between the two parties are still in the early stages, and the final result may also change.
On the left is Nat Friedman, on the right is Alexandr Wang
Alexandr Wang graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. He was once selected as one of the top 20 physics students in the country in the American Physics Olympiad. Now he is the co-founder and CEO of ScaleAI and one of the youngest self-made billionaires. At the age of 19, he dropped out of college and founded ScaleAI. He previously held positions as a technical executive at Quora. ScaleAI is currently valued at about US$7 billion.
Alexandr Wang and OpenAI have a long-standing and multifaceted relationship. It can be traced back to 2016, when Alexandr Wang participated in the YCombinator incubator led by Altman at the time. At the same time, OpenAI is also a ScaleAI customer. In addition, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and Friedman have invested in ScaleAI.
Nat Friedman was born in the United States and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In June 2018, after Microsoft announced that it would acquire GitHub for US$7.5 billion, Friedman became the CEO of GitHub in October of that year. He will step down in November 2021. After leaving Microsoft, Nat Friedman has mainly served as a venture capitalist and currently has invested in more than 100 startups such as ScaleAI.
As of now, OpenAI's board of directors includes former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Adam D'Angelo. Typically, OpenAI's board has nine seats, but it's unclear how many new members it is seeking to fill.
After more than 24 billion visits worldwide, will the generative AI industry cool down in 2024 or will it continue to boom?
On December 30, The Information Weekly reported that due to the strong growth of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s annual revenue (ARR) has exceeded US$1.6 billion in 2023, an increase of more than 56 times from US$28 million in 2022, and can generate at least US$130 million in revenue every month. Calculated at this growth rate, OpenAI management believes that by the end of 2024, OpenAI's annualized revenue may reach US$5 billion, or even more.
In the past year, the emergence of ChatGPT not only set off a new round of AI craze, but also ushered in the next era, and the whole world was crazy about it. Simply put, AI may be the biggest theme, or even the only theme, in the entire technology industry in 2023.
Recently, the research organization Writerbuddy released more than 3,000 data and finally selected the top 50 AI tool products in the world to reflect more than 80% of the traffic in the AI industry.
The report shows that from September 2022 to August 2023, the top 50 AI tools alone generated more than 24 billion visits, with an average monthly visit of 2 billion, and the average monthly visits increased by 1070% (10.7 times) to 236.3 million.
Among them, ChatGPT contributed 14.6 billion times, ranking first, accounting for more than 60% of the analyzed traffic. At the same time, Americans contributed 5.5 billion visits to AI software, accounting for 22.62% of the total visits, while European countries contributed a total of 3.9 billion visits. In addition, more than 63% of users of artificial intelligence tools access it through mobile devices. In terms of gender data, among AI tools, 69.5% are male users, while 30.5% are female users.
According to the "2023 State of AI" report produced by AI investor Nathan Benaich and the AirStreet Capital team, as of September 19, 2023, the number of global AI unicorns reached 473, of which There are 315 in the United States, 70 in China, and 27 in the United Kingdom. The total value of global AI unicorn companies reaches $7.5 trillion, of which the total value of U.S. AI unicorn companies reaches $5.9 trillion, and the total value of Chinese AI unicorn companies is $1.3 trillion.
As the big model explosion period in 2023 has passed, the generative AI (AIGC) industry faces two expectations in 2024: it will either become colder or there will be a wave of applications.
Among them, the reason why the AIGC industry will become colder is that there is still a gap between domestic and foreign large models, and large models also need to face a "cooling off period." Recently, Robin Li, founder, chairman and CEO of Baidu, said, "China has many large models, but there are very few AI native applications developed based on large models. Continuous and repeated development of basic large models is a huge waste of social resources."
On the other hand, the industry generally believes that in 2024, the productization, industrialization and commercialization of AI technology will be the top priority for the development of large models. Fu Sheng, chairman and CEO of Cheetah Mobile and founder of Orion Star, recently said that 2024 will be a wave year for the application of large AI models.
Zhou Hongyi, founder and chairman of 360 Group, gave four trends in the development of large models in 2024: First, large models will not monopolize, their development path will be more like PCs, and they will be everywhere in the future; second, next year, large models will not only pursue "big" parameters, but also pursue "small" , and small parameter models will soon be installed on mobile phones and various Internet of Things devices; third, multi-modality will become the standard configuration of domestic large models, and efforts will be made in the direction of multi-modality in 2024; fourth, there will be many vertical large-scale models in China, entering hundreds of industries, and developing towards industrialization. In addition, he believes that the AIGC large model's Vincent picture and Vincent video capabilities will achieve breakthrough growth next year. As for what kind of C-side killer applications will be produced in 2024, it remains to be seen.
"I have been thinking recently. If you look carefully at what Adobe, Microsoft and Google are doing, you will find that AI in the future may not be a technology that independently produces killer apps (killer applications), but a solution to strengthen existing technologies and processes. Therefore, in the future, whether ToB or ToC, all products will be reshaped by AI, but there may not necessarily be products that only rely on AI. AI still needs to be integrated with traditional businesses and products." Zhou Hongyi said.
In addition, this trend will also affect the investment in domestic AI large models in 2024. "In the field of AI large models, technological leadership and differentiation will become the key to competition. Investors should pay more attention to technological innovation and R&D capabilities, and look for projects that can provide better products and services." said Yuan Shuai, deputy secretary-general of the Zhongguancun Internet of Things Industry Alliance and executive director of the High-Quality Development Promotion Project for Specialized and New Enterprises.
"We believe technology stocks will rise 25% in 2024," Wedbush technology analyst Dan Ives wrote in a report. He added, "Wall Street and the technology community are waiting for the arrival of the 'Year of AI.'"
Ives believes that 2024 will be the "Year of AI" and technology stocks will rise by at least 25% and possibly 35%.
David McCurdy, chief technology officer of Insight Enterprises, said: "As we enter 2024, nearly all business leaders are looking at how AIGC technology can reshape their operations and create new business models."
Yuan Shuai emphasized that in 2024, investment in China's large AI models will pay more attention to the project's commercial application prospects and business model innovation, looking for projects that can bring actual benefits and market share growth. At the same time, the expansion of commercial application scenarios will become another important direction for investment.