OpenAI’s App Store Moment; VCs’ Love Affair with AI, By the Numbers

OpenAI's new GPT Store. Photo via OpenAI.

After a two-month delay, OpenAI’s long-awaited chatbot store is finally here.

As I previously reported would happen, the model developer on Wednesday opened its GPT app store, which allows software developers to distribute customized OpenAI-powered apps for everything from lesson planning for middle school teachers to researching academic papers to practicing new languages.

Because the apps are powered by ChatGPT, they can understand users’ commands and questions in a conversational way and connect to outside sources of data, such as email—all of which gives them a leg up over traditional apps. If Apple isn’t already doing so, it now has another reason to hurry up its own generative AI plans.

Judging by the error message I got when I tried to open the web-based GPT Store the first time, it’s getting swamped with people trying it out. Developers have created more than 3 million private and public GPT-powered apps, OpenAI has said.