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Comment by atleastoptimal | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much money I could make making "GPTs" full time. Barrier to entry is nonexistent so I imagine highest revenue ones if this becomes a serious thing people use will be advertised externally or have some proprietary info/access.

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> I wonder how much money ...

I saw that announcement and my immediate thought was "God yet another thing passive income youtubers will be shilling soon"

In general, I was a little confused by this. Sam's demo of creating a GPT didn't seem particularly exciting as well.

OpenAI in a weird way has mediocre marketing. The examples they use for Dalle-3 are way worse than the average ones I see people cooking up on Twitter/Reddit. They only seem to demo the most vaguely generic implementations of their app. Even their DevDay logo is just 4 lines of text.

Just the fact that they decided to stay with what is essentially a highly technical acronym i.e. GPT, as their major product line says a lot.

And yet in a way I find this refreshing

I think that's actually crucial in that they want to trademark this otherwise generic term

Omg… Thinking about their push for regulation with this… Are they after something like keeping advanced generative pretrained transformer LLM model technology to themselves, prohibiting others, at least in American economy where regulations can be applied?

To be fair, the name "ChatGPT" has quite a bit of mindshare and I've found many non-technical folks referring to any generative AI product as "ChatGPT" or "GPT". Yet, if you asked any single one of them what "GPT" stood for, they'd have no clue.

To be fair, I'm a dev who uses chatgpt on an hourly basis and I had no idea what GPT stood for until I googled it just now. I think it's kinda smart to make people strongly associate GPT with OpenAI

"Generative Pre-trained Transformers" for those who don't want to leave the page.

why would it be smart? people can advertise their own models as GPT because it’s a generic term and confuse people into thinking it’s an OpenAI thing

I've heard all permutations of "GPT" "GPP" "GTP" etc.

“You down with G P T?”

Yeah you know me

In a bad day GPT is GTP and Bard is Brad

GPT/IP

Several family members firmly believe GPT stands for Gepeto.

I think it might be the ubiquity of the term "GPT" as it relates to OpenAI from a public branding perspective.

Better that than do a silly rename ala X.

I don't recall which interviews I saw it stated in, but I believe Sam said in one or two of his world tour stops, where he stated they deliberately have gone with a technical name instead of a human name to help remind those using it that it's not a person. So I think that coupled with the mindshare (as others have stated) it already holds, makes a lot of sense to stick with it.

Doesn't seem like a problem to me. Many brands are acronyms that are meaningless, too technical or arbitrary. Very common for cars for instance, how about a BMW X5 V8 SUV?

Plus, "generative pre-trained transformer" sounds futuristic, which seems like a fitting brand image for OpenAI.

Before coming into mainstream I was always referring as GTP ..

Sam's "all our marketing is from word-of-mouth" was refreshingly honest.

Would be somewhat humorous to plug OpenAI into ad platforms, give it budget, and say "go market yourself as effectively as possible."

That would not be humorous -- that would be the AI equivalent of "The China Syndrome" </sarc>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Syndrome

Need some Boston Dynamics flair.

I would pay money for a GPT that was incredible at naming types in Swift

I’d pay for one that was good at programming rubber ducking

There are specific sub-tasks that everyone would pay for to make their lives easier. This marketplace is trying to make that efficient

I find NORMAL ChatGPT a good programming Rubber Duck and use it often.

How much would you pay for an actual Programming Rubber Duck ChatGPT terminal that you can talk to like Amazon Echo? With a bluetooth screencast input and keyboard and mouse output so it could see your screen and pair program with you, of course.

I suppose you're going to ask GPT to do Cache Invalidation eventually too?

> shilling soon

Study the Poe ecosystem, and look at YouTube or Reddit.

. . .

EDIT: adding the detail from my comment 2 below, I'm referring to...

Bot creator monetization:

https://developer.poe.com/resources/creator-monetization

Earn money when:

- your bot brings a user to Poe for the first time and they eventually subscribe

- your bot brings a user back to Poe and they eventually subscribe

- your bot’s paywall is seen just before a user subscribes users send messages to your bot (starting soon)

Out of loop on Poe. What's happening there?

Bot creator monetization:

https://developer.poe.com/resources/creator-monetization

Earn money when:

- your bot brings a user to Poe for the first time and they eventually subscribe

- your bot brings a user back to Poe and they eventually subscribe

- your bot’s paywall is seen just before a user subscribes users send messages to your bot (starting soon)

not much based on what OpenAI has been doing lately, using their own customers as product research and then copying the best ideas. OpenAI pretty much has to keep a huge lead in model capabilities or developers are going to stop using them for this reason

basically copying the Microsoft strategy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Makes sense they took so much funding from Microsoft

I'm more confused how the revenue share works. Do they get part of my ChatGPT subscription fee? Am I paying extra? Per bot? Per amount of time I consult with the bot?

Yeah he didn’t explain at all how GPTs would be monetized.

I think it must be based on usage (some GPTs could be using more credits than others)

I'm certain of one thing...when I'm making a GPT, I save, I update and it completely disregards established rules, making me max out my requests very fast. It also gives general answers when I ask for specifics. I only have Plus. In regards to general answers...I then went to Bard and got exactly what I was looking for after 1 request-this is well known information that's been online for years, information that Bing certainly has...it was making me angry, basically charging me for doing nothing over and over.

For instance, my GPT is based on a list of 15 items. I had to repeatedly tell it not to deviate from the list because it kept doing so. I save and update every time, and it never matters.

I bet if you combined GPT creation with Zapier integrations you could help a lot of people and companies.

Thoughts on Zapier trying to become OpenAI faster than OpenAPI can become Zapier? There will always be a long tail of APIs that folks want integrating, but the most popular APIs are perhaps only a few hundred in number (Google Calendar and Slack, for example).

I feel like history has shown that those who own the platform end up winning and in this case OpenAI's platform of models seems much harder to recreate. My guess is this would lead to Zapier using OpenAI as a platform and eventually OpenAI would re-create Zapier's integrations before the other way around.

I think this perspective is fair and historically accurate wrt platform risk, but I also strongly believe Zapier has substantial value beyond what historically has been acting as a conduit between APIs. Customers don't want a pipe between their services, they want to automate their mundane work with a robot.

What is Zapier's value-add when GPT can chain an arbitrary number of flexible API calls? Imagine if the GPT plug-ins directory is fed as input to GPT...

The problem with Zapier is all the individual accounts and contracts you need with dozens of companies in order to have them all communicating for a real business. SaaS fatigue is a real issue.

Sounds like a call for them to partner with Venminder or a similar business to manage all your SaaS from a contractual perspective, as well as some CASB (cloud access security broker) to handle onboarding, offboarding, and governance of an org's SaaS inventory. Legit problem, but SaaS isn't going away.

So many zapier integrations are half baked. A lot of them are good for reacting to events but not for searching for data (i.e. you can use zapier to react to a jira ticket change but can't use zapier to query jira for ticket info)

You can, just have to use JQL. Zapier can create a conditional trigger if the JQL criteria are met and pool on a set cadence, such as 15 mins.

And seeing how OpenAI is moving up the value chain, what's the guarantee they won't come up with an in-house competitor to the bot that was built on their platform?

Guarantee? That's one of the most important aspects of bothering to build out a platform: eat the ecosystem to add incremental value to the platform, bolster the moat.

The guarantee is that they will clone and extinguish most of the best bots/tools/services riding on top of GPT. It's what platforms overwhelmingly tend to do.

If your thing is a near-touch to GPT, depends on it, is of medium complexity or lower, and is very popular/useful, they will build your thing into GPT eventually.

On the flip side, if you're Salesforce and using GPT to augment something about a major product, you're not facing a serious threat of OpenAI trying to become the next big CRM company.

This process will work similarly to how it did with Windows, Google, AWS, etc.

Their primary target is B2B and they want to get that market ASAP. Pretty sure any idea or anything that seems feasible will be copied and even improved upon.

The pattern will continue until no one needs anything. I am sure this company will eat everything. There will be no pie.

So, basically develop something, earn $$ early on, and then prepare to be assimilated by chatGPT.

Pretty much this.

Also not only for ChatGPT, but there will be a timespan between majority of people are automated out of jobs and a a forceful redistribution of wealth happens (let’s call it socialism). It’s always a good idea to have that $$ to bridge that gap.

There’s a great new book on how a lot of market leaders did exactly this; it’s called “Chokepoint Capitalism”. It’s from the guy who coined the term “enshittification”

I think something could be said for "virality" as well - could easily see some entertainment or lifehack themed templates blowing up on TikTok. No one wants to post the output of the lame, less popular template on their story!

> I wonder how much money I could make making "GPTs" full time

I don’t get why people are thinking along these lines at all. Like, if you don’t own and control the LLM yourself, what makes you so sure OpenAI will allow you to make money at all? They could make advertising externally or hosting external marketplaces against the TOS. They could copy your GPT and put their “official” version at the top of the store page. Just because a technology is powerful does not necessarily mean you can make money off of it.

> what makes you so sure OpenAI will allow you to make money at all?

They might not. But if they do, I'd imagine there are a lot of people who will try. And as long as you're not dependent on the income stream they provide, you don't have much to worry about if it gets shut off.

ChatGPT is the new iPhone. Dealing with a walled-garden app store is never a great experience, but we'll do it because that's where the users are

I just feel like the big tech companies have gotten better at capturing the value of their platforms. It’s not the same as it was in 2008. I don’t think we’re going to see anything like the “manage an indie app as a lifestyle business” boom we saw back then, and I expect the consolidation that killed off most of those indie devs will happen way faster this time.

The answer is because the bot market is a creator economy market.

It takes significant effort to come up with good use cases, build the prompts, and advertise the bots.

So a company can get a lot of value by going after this up and coming type of "content creator".

Right now, zero. They didn't say when it was rolling out or what percentage they would share. It might be something like 10%. Lol.

I will make a bot that makes GPTs, and a bot that makes other bots that make GPTs

Hoarding is so much more efficient and fun with technological assistance. </sarc>

I agree.

Anyone with factual data (proprietary or not) is now an input away to AI / GPTs.

Data (or a new foundational model) is now the moat.

What sort of data do you think will be the most valuable to input to AI?

Data has always been the moat no ?

How many people made any money from the plugins for ChatGPT?

Plugins failing was more due to lack of visibility, which a GPT Store does solve.

Depends on features. How much data can I give it and how much can I customize it?

How does the store solve visibility? In the demo it looked like there was a select list of Custom Assistants in the left panel which he manually had to click, so not much different from plug-ins?

Right he said something about promoting the best but what about the discoverability?

ChatWithPDF made a TON of money, for one.

Source?

I’m not clear who the market is? Why someone buy one?

Imagine a "GPT" that could generate websites and provide you with a live deployment as you change it using natural language. A website builder GPT that is primed to output and design in a decent way, that has all the prep beforehand to use particular libraries, and integrations with something like Render.

People would pay for that.

Sh--... I better build it!

All fun and games until someone sues because the "hallucinated" product description didn't match the product...

One can come up with all sorts of ideas like this, but building it will be a matter of slow iterations at prompt engineering in a mixture of natural language and data structures and will be at the whim of changing APIs, including the backing ChatGPT model. Sounds messy, hard to manage, hard to test...or am I missing what the actual process will be for creating one of these?

Worry not, surely there will be GPT for creating GPTs.

Good intuition, it was in the demo. Chat with an agent to config a new GPT. Then make the GPT available to others if you wish. Same functionality is exposed via API IIRC.

Yeah building a LLM get you to 92% in a week and then the rest of the 8% is years of slogging at corner cases.

ZipWP already does something close to this for WordPress sites.

You could farm the hell out of referral link before people catch up. Prob already too late, but there's a lot of market that's searching comparatives and would be fooled by this.

I'm not sure i understand?

The GPT's making the most money will be made by larger companies who advertise use of it and maybe make it a funnel to their in-app integration, or GPTs which are made effective by information that is proprietary.

This makes me think of the Alexa skills ecosystem which is full of low quality skills. Many of which have poor data practices abstracted away behind the scenes. How long until "Chat with your favorite character from [Intellectual Property]?" which is simply made to promote a new film or collect data.

A good paper on the state of the Alexa skills BTW

SkillVet: Automated Traceability Analysis of Amazon Alexa Skills https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9619970

Part of the announcement is that they'll open up an app store w/ revenue sharing of some kind. "In the coming months" or smtn

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