Custom GPTs Are the Apps of AI

Now you can use them free.

A Custom GPT as provided by OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) is a version of the GPT 4o model which has been packaged for some special purpose such as doing research, playing games, teaching you bridge, making trip plans, or providing support for a specific product – to name a few. When you access either the paid or free version of ChatGPT 4o with your browser, you’ll now see “Explore GPTs” in the left sidebar. If you’ve used any Custom GPTs recently, they’ll show here as well.

If you click on “Explore GPTs”, you’ll be in the main menu of Custom GPT land. It’s OpenAI’s equivalent of the app store with the important difference that anyone can immediately create and add a GPT to the library (they can be taken down after the fact for guideline violations).

Even though access to Custom GPTs was initially limited to those who had a paid GPT Plus subscription, more than a million of them already exist. Now that anyone can access them free, the audience for custom GPTs has exploded and so will the number of Custom GPTs available. It is incredibly easy to write a Custom GPT, harder to write one that is more useful than just ChatGPT by itself. Like apps for your smartphone, most Custom GPTs are junk; but a few can be surprisingly helpful. There are already a number of Custom GPTs for finding Custom GPTs. Type “Find GPTs” in the “Search GPTs” box above and they’ll come gushing out.

Every Custom GPT includes custom instructions to ChatGPT (which is used to generate much of the answer). The value of the custom instructions, if they’re done well, is that you don’t have be a prompt expert or have a long discussion with ChatGPT to get the answers you need. Some Custom GPTs have their own data which supplements the training of ChatGPT; some access external services to bring in other data or capabilities.

You never have to pay for initial access to a Custom GPT.  Custom GPTs can’t be imbedded in smartphone apps or websites but they can be the front-end to a service which may be free or which you do need to pay for or which sells you things like travel reservations.

Featured Custom GPTs

I don’t know how the Featured GPTs got featured but I’ve tried out the ones that are shown here.

I asked Math Solver “how do you integrate a quadratic equation?”, something I used to know but have forgotten and you may not care about at all. It gave me an impressively good tutorial (here). I asked the same question to ChatGPT 4o and got the correct answer but no tutorial. If I asked, though, I would have gotten a tutorial.

SQL Expert did prove useful, especially for optimization and complex uses of SQL. Too nerdy so I won’t go into that here. It promoted a related commercial product: AskYourDatabase.com.

I asked Adobe Express to write a blog with the same topic as this post. Judge it for yourself.  I’m going with my version. I asked for an illustration, which Adobe should’ve been good at; it consulted express.adobe.io after asking for permission (Custom GPTs must ask before accessing other services) and suggested I use Adobe’s product for editing the picture. The picture options, which disappeared in the copied transcript I linked to, were dull but the words in their labels weren’t misspelled as almost always happens when ChatGPT generates an image.

A few others

Python is much, much better at writing Python code than 4o by itself. Granddaughter Lily and I have been working on an environmental simulation. 4o often coded bugs for us. When we asked it to fix the bugs, it often forgot its original instructions and left off features we had asked for. The GPT Python asked us questions when our spec was unclear and could recapitulate the whole spec and amendments at any point. So far it hasn’t hatched any bugs for us. It’s not surprising that this Custom GPT is rated #2 by users among English-language programming aids.

DeepGame is fun. Its blurb says “Play any story as a character. You decide what to do next. Type '/visualize' to get an image of the current moment of the story.” I wanted to play an historical game and it made me a junior delegate at Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence was being debated. Pretty soon we were into the tricky issue of slavery and Thomas Jefferson was explaining, not very well, why, despite his love of freedom, it wasn’t quite time to free his slaves. I appreciated that the game didn’t feel compelled to be gratuitously politically correct, even on this issue. A lot of PCness has been built into ChatGPT. My history as a delegate and the chat with TJ are here.

Scholar GPT, ranked #1 for English-language Research and Analysis, IS politically correct. Its blurb says: “Enhance research with 200M+ resources and built-in critical reading skills. Access Google Scholar, PubMed, JSTOR, Arxiv, and more, effortlessly.” I asked “what are the range of forecasts for global warming by 2100 in the latest UN IPCC report?” It couldn’t access the report but answered from its training (not good because answers may be out-of-date). When I pressed it for sources which posit that there are significant factors for present day climate change in addition to burning fossil fuels, it couldn’t bring itself to find anything except more and more on how important it is to decarbonize. That’s not how research is supposed to work. With some prompting, it managed to admit that Covid may have originated in a lab in Wuhan; but it seems not to have gotten the message that it is now socially OK to concede that possibility.

Framework Finder is by Ethan Mollick, the Co-director of the Generative AI Lab at Wharton Business School and author of the excellent AI blog One Useful Thing. He insists his students write GPTs as an essential part of their course work. Framework Finder says it “Helps locate and apply frameworks to your problem”.

I asked what frameworks are and it said “Frameworks are structured approaches or models that help organize and analyze information, identify problems, and develop solutions. They provide a systematic way to break down complex issues into manageable parts, enabling clearer thinking and more effective decision-making.” It listed a bunch of examples such as SWOT Analysis, Porter’s Five Forces, Root cause Analysis, Pestle Analysis, and Smart Goals. We ended up having an interesting chat about how I can best promote my own Custom GPTs seeing they have no business model. The advice was pretty good. Professor Mollick would be displeased but not surprised to hear that, in a later chat, Framework Finder hallucinated that it had documentation on a website somewhere and gave me a non-existent URL for the site.

Speaking of my Custom GPTs

I’ve already blogged about Fact or Fiction which provides verification with live links of assertions, documents, or web pages. A new capability in GPT 4o allows Custom GPTs to be invoked in the middle of a conversation by typing”@” in the chat window. If you do this and select Fact or Fiction, you can have it check whatever the last answer GPT 4o or another Custom GPT gave you as in this example. Double checking is a very good way to avoid hallucinations.

Also blogged about Meeting-Reporter, a human-in-the-loop application which use ChatGPT (but is not a Custom GPT) to collaboratively create news reports, summaries, or minutes from transcripts of meetings. You need a paid OpenAI API key to use this application. However, I’ve now created a Custom GPT version, collaborative meeting reporter, which anyone with either a free or a GPT Plus account can use free. Sample session here.

Who Killed Kenny? is for my grandson Leo who taught me the game. I don’t know how to whittle toys from wood but I can write Custom GPTs.

Predictions

Within a year, use of Custom GPTs will be as natural and becoming as prevalent as use of apps on smartphones. Organizations from stores to news outlets to clubs to social media providers will have their own Custom GPTs just as they have their own websites and apps today. Today Custom GPTs are accessible only through ChatGPT and use ChatGPT as their underlying intelligence. Other AI vendors – especially Google – will add a similar capability, probably called something else, and a store of their own. A few Custom GPTs will be standout hits for the functionality they provide; often that capability will then find its way into the underlying AI service. Some Custom GPTs will be used for fraud – look out! Most will be forgotten almost as soon as they’re written.

Oh, yeah. Someone will become a billionaire by figuring out how to make money from Custom GPTs.

See also: More posts on AI