OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT on Apple’s app store, as the company moves forward with plans to expand its popular artificial intelligence chatbot to a wider consumer audience.
The new app will mirror the ChatGPT website, allowing users to ask questions and receive answers written by AI on their mobile devices. The app also incorporates OpenAI’s speech recognition technology called Whisper, allowing users to prompt the AI engine by speaking into it.
It’s the latest in a string of launches over the past six months, as big tech groups and start-ups race to bring generative AI tools to market, following the launch of ChatGPT last November.
The ChatGPT app will help Microsoft-backed OpenAI further develop its large-scale language models, a powerful technology that powers chatbots, and make its research more consumer-friendly.
The app will initially launch in the US and will expand to other countries as well as Android devices in the coming weeks.
“With the ChatGPT app for iOS, we’re taking another step toward our mission to turn state-of-the-art research into useful tools that empower people while continuing to empower people,” the company said in a blog post. They’re easier to get.”
ChatGPT became an overnight Internet sensation when it launched in November, breaking new ground and becoming one of the first consumer AI applications to become widely available to the public. The chatbot attracted more than 1 million users in its first three days and is expected to reach 100 million monthly active users by January.
The technology, which features a simple question-and-answer interface, has been hailed as a breakthrough moment for artificial intelligence, threatening to disrupt markets from education and media to Google’s search engine.
Through its mobile app, the ChatGPT chatbot will reach a wider audience than it can on desktop alone, helping to accelerate the improvement of its technology.
Information that users input into generative AI software helps train models to be stronger and safer, as a form of reinforcement and feedback.
According to its CEO Sam Altman, the company’s ultimate goal is to create artificial general intelligence, a machine as intelligent as a human.
The ChatGPT app comes amid growing scrutiny of the nascent field from regulators and governments around the world, and concerns among some AI ethicists about the potential for misuse of the technology.
Earlier this week, Altman testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, calling for regulation of the fast-growing technology he helped build.
While the ChatGPT iPhone app aims to expand the technology’s availability to more users, tech groups are also rushing to find ways to run the generative AI on phones rather than through cloud servers — a move that would reduce high computing costs.
Google said last week that it had successfully run a version of PaLM 2, its latest large language model, on a Samsung Galaxy phone. This shift could make it much cheaper for companies to run services like chatbots and pave the way for more transformative applications using generative artificial intelligence.
Founded in 2015 by some of the tech world’s most radical thinkers, including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, OpenAI is a nonprofit dedicated to safely developing powerful artificial intelligence. It has since grown into a for-profit company, and Microsoft confirmed a multibillion-dollar investment in January, a move that reportedly valued the startup at about $29 billion.