OpenAI is pulling no punches as it expands beyond its humble roots as a mere AI chatbot purveyor, embarking on an ambitious plan to turn ChatGPT into a wide ranging App Store like empire.
With a huge user base already under its watch, the company is laying the foundation for a new digital economy that could potentially rival existing giants like Apple.
At the heart of this grand plan is the vast reach of ChatGPT. The platform has now grown to more than 800 million users, a population greater than most countries.
There are many other companies doing this, of course, but few are as well positioned to leverage productivity tools into a communication platform, at least not yet another Silicon Valley messaging one that has to convince people to come.
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All is the captive audience that can form the critical mass needed for an actual platform. There is no free candy in there; there are just humans getting things done.
The plan is to turn ChatGPT into a super app, a single interface that users can control their entire digital lives from. The chatbot’s question and answer days are behind it.
Now, users can take tangible action in the real world within a conversational interface itself, circumventing mobile apps entirely.
Most importantly, the platform has already incorporated important features from other major third party services.
Now, a user can accomplish more complex tasks, such as shopping for groceries on Instacart to last the week, building new music playlists on Spotify, or searching through AllTrails for the best hiking trail to go find.
Smooth it in for a core change in application use. Instead of the need to travel through a phone’s home screen, open various applications, and comprehend different graphical interfaces for each operation, it is possible to express what you want directly in plain language.
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The command is interpreted by ChatGPT, and the relevant service gets invoked in the background to perform the action.
This is a direct shot across the bow of the walled garden that Apple’s App Store has become so good at.
OpenAI is trying to redefine the map of the mobile economy altogether by creating a parallel ecosystem in which services are discovered and accessed through conversation instead of app icons.
Should ChatGPT emerge as the dominant gateway for digital services, the world where classical app stores were relevant could dwindle out of favor, introducing a new paradigm where conversational interfaces become the mainstream operating layer of interconnected devices online.
