The company said that OpenAI’s AI app store, GPT Store, will not launch this year as previously announced, but rather on an unspecified date in early 2024. This delay is almost certainly due to the leadership change that occurred in November, Right after the initial announcement.
It was the news First reported by Axios, which got the memo sent to users and developers. It read in part: “We are now planning to launch a GPT store early next year. While we were anticipating its release this month, there are some unexpected things that have kept us busy! He also detailed some of the upcoming improvements to the new feature, such as a better configuration interface and debugging messages.
I’ve reached out to OpenAI and others for more information and will update if they respond.
The store’s launch this month raised eyebrows when it was officially announced at OpenAI’s Dev Day conference in November. Although there was a working model of the store itself and a few finely tuned models called GPTs available for examination, there were a lot of unanswered questions.
In a Q&A session with briefly ousted CEO Sam Altman and CTO Mira Murati, she asked about the company’s plan for the store in terms of charging customers and paying developers. Their answer was basically, “We’ll see.”
Given how loose the launch plan is, and the possibility that at least a full week of work will be lost in the short but intense battle between the board and CEO, the delay comes as no great surprise. With the winter break approaching, the idea of shipping a major product under duress while simultaneously navigating a new board and other priorities may have been a no-brainer.
For OpenAI customers, it’s still possible to create GPTs and share them with others directly, but they won’t be publicly listed or able to participate in any revenue-sharing scheme (if OpenAI decides how to implement that) until the store officially launches.