OpenAI launched an App Store in Nov 2023. A 23 month turnaround from major feature launch, to deprecation, to relaunch is a commitment to product longevity that’d put Google to shame.
Of course, part of it was due to the fact that the out-of-the-box models became so competent that there was no need for a customized model, especially when customization boiled down to barely more than some kind of custom system prompt and hidden instructions. I get the impression that's the same reason their fine-tuning services never took off either, since it was easier to just load necessary information into the context window of a standard instance.
Edit: In all fairness, this was before most tool use, connectors or MCP. I am at least open to the idea that these might allow for a reasonable value add, but I'm still skeptical.
> I get the impression that's the same reason their fine-tuning services never took off either
can you share anymore info on this. i am curious about what the usecase was and how it improved speed (of inference?) and accuracy.
Disclaimer: this was in the 3.5 Turbo "era" so models like `nano` now might be cheap enough, good enough, fast enough to do this even without FT.