OpenAI on Monday unveiled a new feature for ChatGPT, the leading generative AI model with 800 million weekly users, enabling it to interact with everyday apps like Spotify and Booking.com.
Chief Executive Sam Altman announced the new tool to a crowd of enthusiastic developers gathered in San Francisco for the company's annual "Developer Day."
The new feature, Apps SDK, allows ChatGPT to interact with various apps to select music, search for real estate or explore hotel and flight booking sites.
Initial partners, including Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, Spotify and Zillow, launched Monday in markets where their services operate.
Additional partners, including Uber, AllTrails and DoorDash, are expected later this year.
However, the feature is not yet available in Europe, where regulations on the deployment of data-intensive AI tools are stricter.
The move marks a significant expansion of ChatGPT's capabilities, blending traditional interactive elements like maps and playlists with conversational AI.
Users could, for example, ask "Spotify, make a playlist for my party this Friday" and have the music streaming app intervene within the chat.
ChatGPT can also suggest apps when relevant to the conversation.
For example, if a user is discussing buying a new home, ChatGPT can turn to the Zillow app to browse listings matching their budget on an interactive map inside ChatGPT.
"We needed to let the models get better. The models are there now," he said, adding that the company had selected "a few active early partnerships."
Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, said the work that went into its models' self-claimed gold medal performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad would generate benefits for enterprises in other ways.
OpenAI and other tech giants, such as Alphabet and Microsoft, have courted enterprise AI deals to help justify massive spikes in spending, though the returns across the industry have so far failed to match investment, recent surveys showed.
The ChatGPT-maker outlined ambitious new plans in the last month to build $1 trillion or more of computing capacity and launched a viral AI-video-generating app called Sora, which has shot to the top of Apple's app rankings.
All this has made OpenAI a massive money-losing operation to date. Altman said it was "not in my top 10 concerns, but we obviously someday have to be very profitable," while Brockman underscored that OpenAI was "committed to building the best enterprise platform."
Monday's moves are the latest in a stream of announcements for OpenAI, which sparked the modern AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT about three years ago.
Many of Altman's ambitions are bold and expensive even by Silicon Valley standards, sparking some concerns among tech investors about whether or not AI investments are a bubble.
Altman said during the question-answer session that many areas of the AI industry are "kind of bubbly," but that "real value will get created."