Overnight, OpenAI announced a number of blockbuster news, attracting market attention.
TMTpost App reported on January 5 that this morning, OpenAI issued an email to all GPT developers stating that a customized "GPT Store" will be launched next week, which is expected to promote the continuous improvement of the ChatGPT developer ecosystem. It is reported that GPT Store is known as the Apple App Store in the field of large models.
In TMTpost Media's "What is 2023" year-end special dialogue "Zhao Hejuan talks to Wang Weijia and Zhang Hongjiang", Zhang Hongjiang predicted that with the opening of GPT-4 Plug-in, GPT will no longer be just a large model but a platform, and will be completely Replaces App store and Google play.
Zhao Hejuan
, like 2032
At the same time, The Information 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 news content for training. Licensing of the model; second, OpenAI is discussing the issue of supplementing board members and has selected two candidates, including Scale AI 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 to last year, and the company valuation is as high as 1,000 One hundred million U.S. dollars.
With the upcoming launch of GPT Store and GPT-5, OpenAI will become the most powerful "dark horse" in the technology industry in 2024.
Big model's 'App Store moment' arrives next week
On January 5th, Eastern Time, the US company OpenAI issued an email memo to all custom GPT developers, showing that OpenAI plans to launch the "GPT Store" 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 CEO Sam Altman officially announced the GPT Store store product. Users do not need any code and support visual click operations throughout the process. The company estimates that GPT Store will Available to paid Plus users. 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 GPT Store, and the final product was not launched online.
Sam Altman once said, "Some unexpected things keep us busy."
Now multiple sources have confirmed that GPT Store will arrive next week.
According to reports, the GPT Store 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 in the upper left to enter the custom build mode. ; Again, the platform will pop up a page, click "Create a GPT" to start building a customized GPT, or display other functions such as GPT Store; finally, click "Create" to customize the GPT assistant, or perform some more complex Specific operations such as uploading data and attachments, etc., and finally forming your own customized GPT assistant through GPT Builder, saving it as a private model or a public model, and putting it into OpenAI's soon-to-be-released customized 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 announced 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 GPT Store application store, it may threaten many AI startups that provide customized services similar to chatbots.
Mobvoi founder and CEO Li Zhifei once said that the OpenAI plug-in can connect ChatGPT and third-party applications to implement solutions such as real-time scores of sports 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 launch of the GPT 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 companies such as OpenAI, the Associated Press, and Politico parent company Axel Springer. Agreements have been reached and licensing fees have been proposed to some institutions ranging from US$1 million to US$5 million per year. 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, Tom Rubin, OpenAI’s chief of intellectual property and content, said: “We are having many negotiations and discussions with many content publishers. The negotiations are very active and very positive and are progressing well. You have seen what has been announced. Agreement, there will be more in the future." Currently, Axel Springer 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 they benefit from artificial intelligence technology and new revenue models." The company said, We are "surprised and disappointed" by the Times' lawsuit and "hopeful that we can find a mutually beneficial way to work together, as we have done with so 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, Conde Nast, the parent company of The New Yorker, and IAC, the parent company of The Daily Beast. Proposed to sign a multi-year agreement worth at least US$50 million; Google reached customized agreements with organizations such as the New York Times on content algorithms and advertising sharing.
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 a word-for-word statement to the court. example. With millions of registered articles, the New York Times ultimately wanted OpenAI to pay more than $750 million in damages.
In addition, The information pointed out in a report on January 5 that OpenAI has begun looking for board member candidates, including Scale AI CEO and co-founder Alexandr Wang, and former GitHub CEO and investor Nat Friedman , the two are likely to join the OpenAI company's 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 Scale AI and one of the youngest self-made billionaires. . At the age of 19, he dropped out of college and founded Scale AI. He previously held positions as a technical executive at Quora. Currently, Scale AI is 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 Y Combinator incubator led by Altman at the time. At the same time, OpenAI is also a Scale AI customer. In addition, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and Friedman have invested in Scale AI.
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 Scale AI.
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 Week reported that due to the strong growth of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s annualized revenue (ARR) has exceeded US$1.6 billion in 2023, an increase of more than 56 times from US$28 million in 2022, monthly It could generate at least $130 million in revenue. 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 an average monthly visit increase of 1070% ( 10.7 times), reaching 236.3 million times.
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 "State of AI in 2023" report produced by AI investor Nathan Benaich and the Air Street Capital team, as of September 19, 2023, the number of global AI unicorns reached 473, including 315 in the United States and 70 in China. , there are 27 in the UK, and the total value of global AI unicorn companies reaches US$7.5 trillion, of which the total value of US AI unicorn companies reaches US$5.9 trillion, and the total value of Chinese AI unicorn companies is US$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, “There are many large models in China, 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 be monopolized, and their development path will be more like PCs, which will be everywhere in the future; second, large models next year Not only are "big" parameters pursued, but "small" will also be pursued, 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 in 2024 We will also make efforts in the multi-modal direction; fourth, there will be many large vertical models in the country, entering hundreds of industries and developing in the direction of 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, but rather enhances existing technologies and processes. A solution. Therefore, in the future, whether it is To B or To C, all products will be reshaped by AI, but there may not necessarily be products that only rely on AI. AI still needs to be combined 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." Deputy Secretary of Zhongguancun Internet of Things Industry Alliance Yuan Shuai, executive director of the high-quality development promotion project for long-term, specialized and special new enterprises, said.
"We believe technology stocks will gain 25% in 2024," Wedbush technology analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note, adding, "Wall Street and The technology world is waiting for the 'Year of AI' to arrive."
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 at Insight Enterprises, said: “As we move into 2024, nearly every business leader is 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.