GPT Store launched… Now what?

OpenAI has finally launched the GPT store, a sort of “App store” but for GPTs built on top of their product. The GPTs don’t offer anything the generic ChatGPT doesn’t, however they might:

1.??????? Have an interesting prompt strategy.

2.??????? Some knowledge base you don’t.

3.??????? Make calls to external resources that you don’t have access to.

?????????????? Some of these GPTs really are great! GPTs such as the Consensus , a GPT I use all the time – going through tons of papers is useful in my line of work. There are other great ones, but mostly these come from OpenAI or a large company like Khan Academy. These GPTs are in category 3 from the list above and require consent when they reach out to their APIs. But is that anything new? These GPTs essentially use a large companies proprietary API and only use the GPT for some organizational tasks and the interface. GPT is hardly the main event here, it’s only a sidekick.

?????????????? But what about all the other GPTs made by individual contributors like you and I? Well, they are divided by categories: Dall-E, Writing, Productivity, Research and Analysis, Programming, Education and Lifestyle.

?????????????? Dall-E is the category for all the image shenanigans. Let's look at some of the popular ones:

This offering has 100k+interactions, putting it up there with the big players, but I wonder if it's just a case of clever SEO and search results hijacking? The offerings the GPT produces are no different than any other GPT, like my own Catventure Calendar or Calegendary. I can see how a generic name like "image generator" could direct the traffic to that particular GPT. Even more so considering that for a while the fake "GPT-5" was at the top of the charts. It has now been removed due to violating T&S.

The "Writing" category is filled with GPTs that make your writing Academic, or more popular, that write advertising copy or do SEO on your websites. This is a much less popular category. One that drew my attention, albeit not many people seem to have used it:

Grant writing is soul crushing and having this be automated would be incredible! That said, for academic grants that particular GPT is quite impotent. Still, the idea is good and perhaps an Acdemic Grant writing GPT could be a project for a university.

The "Research" category contains some of the GPTs I actually use as well as some that are very interesting in concept. I can definately highlight Consensus - it's quite a bit faster that just asking ChatGPT.

Some others like ScholarAI seem cool, but it's going to be a while before I actually trust AI to set-up my experiments for me. Wolfram and Video Summary GPTs can also be found there. All in all, a helpful, if not exciting category.

"Programming" is the next category. It's quite possibly the number 1 use for GPTs and LLMs in general. The leader of the category is "Grimoire" a fairly well fleshed out code helper.

Grimoire is well set-up with prompt shortcuts, project ideas as well as tutorials but in general does not seem to offer anything a ChatGPT prompt would not. Still, it is an example of how a custom GPT should be configured.

The "Education" category is a good one. Its ability to present knowledge and the boundless patience makes GPTs a top notch tutor. The leader seems to be this:

While I fully believe teaching to be GPTs best use, I have also been burned with it making trivial mistakers. While I can't claim to have tried all of the GPTs in store, but likely all of them will occasionaly make a massive brainfart like below:

Last category is "Lifestyle". I'd have to get a life to make use of the category...

So what have we learrned? Apparently SEO is King. But some GPTs do show a ton of care i.e. Grimoire, even if its outputs are entirely unremarkable. As for my self, I intend to experiment with bubble.io and GPT integrations. Wild creativity of GPTs can be more useful if reigned in with some constraints. Especially since API GPTs are not quite the same thing as the ChatGPT. More on that in another article!