OpenAI launches ChatGPT on Apple’s App Store

OpenAI is launching ChatGPT on Apple’s App Store as the company moves forward with plans to bring 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 includes OpenAI’s voice recognition technology called Whisper, which allows users to give spoken prompts to the AI ​​engine.

It is the latest in a series of products launched over the past six months, as Big Tech conglomerates and start-ups race to bring generative AI tools to market following the launch of ChatGPT last November.

The ChatGPT app will help Microsoft-backed OpenAI further develop its large language model, the powerful technology that underlies 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 Android devices in the coming weeks.

“With the ChatGPT app for iOS, we are taking another step towards our mission by turning cutting-edge research into useful tools to empower people,” 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 over one million users in its first three days and was projected to reach 100 million monthly active users by January.

The technology, which features a simple question-and-answer interface, has been hailed as a breakthrough moment for AI, which threatens to disrupt markets ranging from education and media to Google’s search engine.

Through its mobile app, the ChatGPT chatbot will reach a wider audience than desktop alone, which could help accelerate the improvement of its technology.

Information that users feed into the generative AI software helps make the model more powerful and secure, serving as reinforcement and feedback.

The company’s ultimate objective, according to its CEO Sam Altman, is to create artificial general intelligence, a machine that is as intelligent as a human.

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 for misuse of the technology.

Earlier this week, Altman appeared at a hearing before the US Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, calling for regulation of the fast-moving technology.

While the ChatGPT iPhone app aims to broaden the availability of the technology to more users, tech groups are also racing to find ways to run generative AI on mobile handsets instead of cloud servers — in a move that could reduce high computing costs. Will do ,

Google said last week that it managed to run a version of its latest big language model, PaLM 2, on Samsung Galaxy handsets. This change could make services like chatbots significantly cheaper for companies and pave the way for more transformative applications using generative AI.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by some of the most radical thinkers in the tech world, including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, as a non-profit organization to safely develop powerful AI. It has since grown into a profitable corporation, with Microsoft confirming a multi-billion dollar investment in January that reportedly valued the start-up at around $29bn.