OpenAI is delaying the launch of its GPT Store, a marketplace of customizable GPTs, until 2024, according to a memo seen by Axios. Sam Altman told an audience at DevDay that the GPT Store would launch in November.
“In terms of what’s next, we are now planning to launch the GPT Store early next year,” said OpenAI in an email to GPT builders seen by The Verge. “While we had expected to release it this month, a few unexpected things have been keeping us busy!”
A few unexpected things keeping them busy could be a reference to Sam Altman’s firing, over 700 employees threatening to quit, reinstating its CEO and replacing the old board that fired Altman, and figuring out the future for its chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever. That’s a lot. Research this month from Adversa AI also showed that vulnerabilities in GPTs could jeopardize the security and intellectual property of developers. However, the major delay for the GPT Store pushes against a narrative from OpenAI that its leadership shakeup has not stalled progress.
“Throughout this whole thing, we did not lose a single employee, a single customer,” said Altman in an interview with The Verge this week. “Not only did they keep the products up even in the face of very difficult-to-manage growth, they also shipped new features. Research progress continued.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
That all may be true, but the GPT Store was promised to come out weeks after DevDay, and now it’s going to take months. Two developers who requested anonymity to speak freely told Gizmodo that OpenAI has “lacked clear communication” in the last month, and its behavior is “frustrating.” One of the developers building GPTs said they never received this email about the delay of the GPT Store and found out from a news article.
On OpenAI’s developer forum, one post from this week asks OpenAI to offer information about any potential delays with the GPT Store. “If OpenAI indicates there might be some delay, then our coders won’t need to work overtime every day for fear that their GPT won’t be ready for the same day as the GPT store launch,” the post continued. Several other posts on the forum are from developers wondering when the GPT Store would launch.
The store is a big opportunity for developers to share GPTs broadly, and OpenAI has even said it will share revenue from ChatGPT Plus subscriptions with the best GPT creators. Currently, GPTs are only available to premium users, which OpenAI paused signups for in November. Details on the GPT store have been light, however. OpenAI ended its email by thanking developers for building GPTs and notified them that new ChatGPT features were coming soon.
