Guys and gals, this is huge. If you forgot, back in November at OpenAI’s Dev Day, Sam Altman announced a store full of trained assistants set with personalities and fed with data of your liking that the creators could charge for. That was quickly shelved after a crazy holiday week, but now the company is ready to launch its GPT store.

With this, an author or expert can write a GPT and feed it the contents of books, notes, essays, or whatever information they might think is valuable to create knowledgeable GPTs others can tap into and pay to use.

I have to say I’ve been super impressed with the ability of OpenAI’s assistants to do a lot with little actual development – and you can see my own examples of bots on my AI playground and lab at labs.jasonmperry.com. I have a fuller write-up on each of these assistants on my blog, but it’s worth testing out to see how powerful these things can be.

Next week, companies with vast amounts of data can put that data to work as assistants; others can plug them into their systems for a price to gain immense amounts of knowledge into their applications. Just imagine an internal HR assistant powered with all the contents of SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management for HR, or an assistant for doctors powered by scholarly articles from the American Heart Association – and these associations can earn money for sharing this data.

This is a fascinating next step in our collective AI journey, and it has the potential to let experts monetize their knowledge if they choose to.

OpenAI will open its custom ChatGPT store next week

The store opens after a monthslong delay.