OpenAI Makes ChatGPT Available for Companies to Integrate in Apps

Instacart, Snap and others are incorporating the popular chatbot

The OpenAI logo on a laptop.

Dina Bass

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OpenAI is making its ChatGPT tool available to companies to incorporate into their own apps as it seeks commercial uses for the wildly popular chatbot.The company, which introduced ChatGPT to the public in November, is now offering paid access for businesses and developers who want to use the software's ability to answer questions and generate text in their own applications and products. Customers will be able to hook their apps into ChatGPT's application programming interface, giving them the same version of the GPT 3.5 model that OpenAI itself uses at a cost 10 times lower than OpenAI's existing models. Instacart Inc., Shopify Inc. and Snap Inc. are among companies already using the ChatGPT API in their products, San Francisco-based OpenAI said in a blog post on Wednesday.

While OpenAI has generated huge public interest in the best-known artificial intelligence systems of the past year — ChatGPT, which creates text, and image generator DALL-E — the company also needs to figure out how to accelerate revenue growth and pay for the huge cloud-computing bills these massive AI models rack up. In January, OpenAI negotiated an expansion of Microsoft Corp.'s investment in the company, adding a reported $10 billion. Last month, OpenAI started a waitlist for companies and developers who want to use ChatGPT in their own apps and is selling a premium version to individuals.