ChatGPT makes its debut as a smartphone app on the iPhone

ChatGPT now has a smartphone app, which could be good news for those who love using artificial intelligence chatbots and bad news for all the clone apps that have tried to profit from the technology.

The free app became available on iPhone and iPad in the US on Thursday and will be available later on Android devices. Unlike the desktop web version, the mobile version on Apple’s iOS operating system also enables users to speak to it using their voice.

The company that created it, OpenAI, said it would remain ad-free but “sync your history across devices.”

“We are starting our rollout in the US and will expand to additional countries in the coming weeks,” said a blog post announcing the new app, which is described as an “Official App” by OpenAI in the App Store. Has been done

It’s been more than five months since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public, sparking excitement and alarm over its ability to generate human-like essays, poems, form letters and conversational answers to almost any question. But the San Francisco startup has never seemed in any rush to bring it to phones — where most people access the Internet.

“We’re not trying to get people to overuse it,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told US senators this week at a hearing about controlling AI systems such as those built by his company.

Delays in getting the product to phones helped spur the rise of clones built on similar technology, some of which security firm Sophos described in a report this week as “fleeceware” because they offer users a free trial. I push for enrollment that gets converted. A recurring subscription, or use intrusive advertising techniques.

Another privacy researcher, Simon Migliano, said the official ChatGPT app may eventually starve similar-looking apps of new users, but it may take a while because many of those apps are designed to intentionally mislead people into thinking they are. Named for they already have the official app. , Migliano, head of research at Top10VPN.com, said they were also “hyper-optimized” to rank highly in Apple’s App Store search results.

“For many of those people who have already downloaded a clone, it is likely that they will stick with the pre-existing ChatGPT app and continue to harvest and sell their personal data,” Migliano said.

Altman told Congress this week that his company doesn’t try to maximize engagement because it doesn’t have an advertising-based business, and because it trains and runs its AI models on computer chips known as graphics processing units. is costly.

“In fact, we are very low on GPUs, the fewer people use our products, the better,” Altman said.

The new app includes the option to pay for the premium version of ChatGPT with additional features. With those subscriptions, the company makes money from developers and corporations who pay them to integrate its AI models into their apps and products.

Its main partner, Microsoft, has invested billions of dollars in the startup and has integrated technology like ChatGPT into its own products, including chatbots for its search engine Bing.

The ChatGPT app will now compete with the Bing chatbot already available on iPhones, and could eventually compete with a mobile version of Google’s chatbot, a rival called Bard. Versions of OpenAI’s chatbot technology can also be found in other apps, such as the “My AI” feature on Snapchat.

© 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in any way without permission.