ChatGPT has been the hottest ticket in tech for almost an entire year now, but OpenAI keep scoring new hits with their updates and upgrades. Their latest success story may also be their greatest, with the newly announced GPT Store rumored to not only offer users the opportunity to roll their own powerful “GPT” chatbots, but also the opportunity to take home a cut of OpenAI’s profits in a revenue sharing scheme. Demand for the GPT Builder that will power this store has been so great in the first week that ChatGPT was briefly taken offline due to high demand, and OpenAI have subsequently suspended all new signups to its ChatGPT Plus subscription service while it manages the unprecedented server demand. 

So! What are these “GPTs”, how do you create them, and what are they for? Read on for essential tips!

Setting up shop

First of all, at the time of writing the GPT Store is very much a subscriber only feature, and with the promise of profit sharing on the horizon, it’s likely to remain that way. Even when you’re subscribed, it’s not immediately obvious where to go to start building your own GPTs; the service is not currently available on mobile apps, but if you’re a subscribe, you can access the GPT Builder through a web browser, by clicking the whimsically named “Explore” button on the top left menu of the website. This brings you to a screen listing “My GPTs”, as well as the fascinating “Made by Open AI” GPTs we discussed last week. Hit the “Create a GPT” button to finally arrive at the GPT Builder screen.  

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The GPT Builder is split into two halves, with a preview window on the right allowing you to interact with your fledgling chatbot, even as you fiddle with its internal workings in the left hand panel. As you’d expect, the default interface on that left hand panel is also a chatbot, eagerly asking you for directions, and you can answer its question to create a custom chatbot with ease. If you want to get more hands-on, however, you can switch from the “Create” tab to “Configure”. This page allows you to tinker with the guts of the custom GPTs directly in various ways, ranging from the trivial - the “conversation starters” that appear above the prompt window - to the actual instructions that govern the bot’s behavior. 

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ConciseGPT

So, what to build? We suggest starting with a few modifications to the basic ChatGPT experience. For example, despite all its many strengths, most people would agree that ChatGPT is a little too chatty for its own good. It may seem a strange thing to chastise a chatbot for, but ChatGPT is notorious for providing extremely long answers to very short questions, and the pace gets bogged down even more when the bot starts browsing and/or analyzing before providing its answers. Nip this in the bud by setting up a ConciseGPT; feed the prompt below into GPT Builder and let it work its magic. 

‍Create a "ConciseGPT" designed for rapid and focused responses. This GPT should directly address only the question asked, omitting additional context or explanations unless explicitly requested. Web browsing and plugin use must be disabled by default, activated only upon specific user permission. Ensure that the responses are succinct, prioritizing clarity and brevity, and avoid elaboration beyond the scope of the user's inquiry.

It’s worth taking a look at what this prompt generates in the “Instructions” field of the “Configure” page. Despite the requests for concision, ChatGPT will generate a thorough and detailed schema for the new GPT to follow, and it really works; the new bots outputs will be brief, even if the inputs are wordy. It’s a great demonstration of the Builder’s power, but it’s just a starting point…

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Art Roulette

It’s hard to exaggerate how much the addition of DALL-E 3 has improved the basic ChatGPT experience, but GPT Builder gives a great example of that power in action. The scope for customizing bots that create imagery on demand is near limitless, but our goal here is to illustrate GPT Builder’s power, not DALL-E 3. To that end, here’s a cool trick for spicing up an image bot’s output that will keep things varied without stepping on any copyright toes; add a list of art styles for the bot to choose from at random when generating images.

The bot will use DALL-E 3 to generate wide images illustrating the prompt provided by the user, choosing one of the following styles at random for the outputted art: {"Baroque Art", "Rococo Art", "Neoclassicism", "Romanticism",  "Realism", "Pre-Raphaelite", "Impressionism", "Post-Impressionism", "Symbolism", "Art Nouveau", "Fauvism", “Vorticism”, "Expressionism", "Cubism", "Futurism", "Dadaism", “Art Deco”, "Surrealism", "Abstract Expressionism", "Pop Art", "Minimalism", "Conceptual Art", "Op Art", "Photorealism", "Postmodernism", "Street Art", "Digital Art"}. The output should consist of the generated image and also text in the following format: “ALT TEXT [description of image]”

Our attempts to persuade GPT Builder to neatly handle alt text generation have a limited success rate; if the chatbot fails to generate the instructions perfectly at the first attempt, you can always fix them manually. 

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Brain Training

Creativity and/or random chance are all well and good, but GPT Builder also shines with more practical challenges. One key way that custom GPTs differ from “custom instructions” -  OpenAI’s first attempt at making your ChatGPT experience configurable - is that you can now upload files that ChatGPT will incorporate into what it calls “training”. It’s important to note here that this is a misleading name; the files you upload are not used in any traditional machine learning “training” process, they’re simply static files that the bot will be able to reference when generating answers. Nonetheless, this is a powerful tool!

Another ace up GPT’s sleeve is the integration of Code Interpreter, allowing you to use code without having to learn coding. Feeding GPT Builder the simple instruction “I would like a GPT with some Python code that will enable accurate arithmetic calculation“ demonstrates the power of this tool, allowing the chatbot to create simple task-focused bots that do things vanilla ChatGPT cannot. Combine these two new abilities and GPT Builder allows you to create a bot that can excel at nearly any purpose!