OpenAI is launching ChatGPT on Apple’s app store as the company pushes forward with plans to expand its popular artificial intelligence chatbot to a wider consumer audience.
The new app will mirror the ChatGPT website, allowing users to ask questions and receive AI-written answers on their mobile devices. The app also incorporates OpenAI’s voice recognition technology called Whisper, allowing users to prompt the AI engine by speaking to it.
It is the latest in a series of product launches over the past six months, as Big Tech groups and start-ups race to bring generative AI tools to the market following the launch of ChatGPT last November.
The ChatGPT app will help Microsoft-backed OpenAI to further develop its large language models, the powerful technology that underpins chatbots, and make its research more consumer-friendly.
The app will initially be available in the US and will expand to additional countries, as well as to Android devices, in the coming weeks.
“With the ChatGPT app for iOS, we’re taking another step towards our mission by transforming state of the art research into useful tools that empower people, while continuously making them more accessible,” the company said in a blog post.
ChatGPT became an overnight internet sensation when it launched in November, breaking new ground as one of the first consumer AI applications widely available to the general public. The chatbot attracted more than 1mn users within its first three days and was estimated to have reached 100mn monthly active users by January.
The technology, which has a simple question-answering interface, has been hailed as a breakthrough moment for AI, threatening to disrupt markets from education and media to Google’s search engine.
Through its mobile app, the ChatGPT chatbot will reach a broader audience than on desktop alone, which can help accelerate the improvement of its technology.
Information that users put into generative AI software helps to train the models to be more powerful and safer, serving as a form of reinforcement and feedback.
The company’s ultimate aim, according to its chief executive, Sam Altman, is to create artificial general intelligence, a machine that is as intelligent as a human being.
The ChatGPT app comes amid growing scrutiny of the nascent field by regulators and governments around the world, as well as concern from some AI ethicists over the potential to abuse the technology.
Earlier this week, Altman appeared at a hearing before a US Senate subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law, calling for regulation of the fast-advancing technology he helped build.
While the aim of the ChatGPT iPhone app is to widen the availability of the tech to more users, tech groups are also rushing to find ways to run generative AI on mobile handsets rather than through cloud servers — in a move that would reduce high computing costs.
Google last week said it had managed to run a version of PaLM 2, its latest large language model, on a Samsung Galaxy handset. The shift could make services such as chatbots far cheaper for companies to run and pave the way for more transformative applications using generative AI.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 by some of the tech world’s most radical thinkers, including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, as a non-profit to develop powerful AI safely. It has since evolved into a for-profit corporation, with Microsoft confirming a multibillion-dollar investment in January in a move that reportedly valued the start-up at about $29bn.
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