They Say GPT Store Is Like an App Store, but I See the Shadow of WeChat Mini-programs

Author: Li Baozhu

Editor: Sanyang

How does OpenAI's new cash cow make money?

Yesterday, GPT Store finally went online.

As early as the developer conference in November 2023,Sam Altman  The GPT Store was introduced to the public in the early 2000s, and the subsequent internal "palace fighting" obviously slowed down the progress of the GPT Store's "ribbon-cutting and listing". However, the popularity of GPTs has not subsided during this period, and users have created more than 3 million customized versions of ChatGPT .

Although only "premium paid members" can use it, GPT Store has still received great attention from users and media after its launch. For the former, netizens who surf the Internet quickly tried it online, and praised it with words such as "AI milestone", "crazy", and "powerful". For the latter, facing this company that has continued to lead the industry in the past two years, the media wanted to explore the deeper meaning behind OpenAI's move, and some even directly compared it with Apple's App Store.

However, upon closer inspection, there are actually many differences between the two - the application development process of developers does not rely on Apple, so the data involved in the development process has a certain degree of autonomy, while Apple holds the moat of hardware terminals.When users create custom GPTs, they still base them on the GPT model, perform fine-tuning, and input additional corpus and data. We don’t know what benefits this will bring to ChatGPT.

Perhaps, simply comparing OpenAI to the App Store is not accurate and comprehensive enough to guess OpenAI's intentions, so the HyperAI super neural editing team started a bold brainstorming session, hoping to find clues in the GPT Store, which is "like fog, rain and wind."

Who doesn’t want to make money while doing nothing?

The reason why everyone is keen to use the App Store's commercial model to analyze GPT Store is, on the one hand, because their ecological attributes are similar, both carrying millions of applications in different vertical categories; on the other hand, although Apple's easy profit based on the App Store has always been criticized, it is a good "role model" for OpenAI.

In January 2023, Apple announced that it has paid developers a total of $320 billion since the launch of the App Store in 2008. According to the App Store policy, Apple will take a commission of $30% from users' digital consumption, and developers can get $70% of users' consumption.

Roughly speaking, Apple has earned $130 billion from the App Store.

But this amount is not accurate. Apple has made adjustments for small and medium-sized developers, and developers with an annual income of $1 million only receive a commission of 15%. We cannot know exactly how many developers pay a commission of 15% and how many pay a commission of 30%.

What is certain is that Apple does not need to rack its brains to develop new apps, it can earn hundreds of billions of dollars just by operating and maintaining the App Store.Apple Tax"It once aroused public anger, and even Musk publicly criticized it, but no one has been able to shake this "profitable" business so far.

Let's look at OpenAI's profit model. According to the official website, its products are mainly divided into two categories - one is API-based products, including callable GPT models, DALL·E models, Whisper, and Chat, Embeddings, Analysis, and Fine-tuning functions provided to developers; the other is products with ChatGPT dialogue robots as the core, divided into personal and enterprise versions.

Of course, the GPT Store and ChatGPT Team have also been added - $25 per user per month (annual payment) or $30 per user per month (monthly payment).

In the past, API call charges and ChatGPT subscription charges have created extremely high revenue growth for OpenAI. Foreign media The Information predicted in August last year that OpenAI expects to earn more than $1 billion in revenue in the next 12 months by selling artificial intelligence software and its computing power. But at the same time, it also faces huge R&D cost pressure.

The first step for OpenAI to learn from Apple's "making money without doing anything" should be the "GPT Developer Income Plan" to be launched in the first quarter. It said that in the early stage, developers will be paid based on the user's participation in its GPT. Doesn't it have a bit of "Apple flavor"?

However, OpenAI does not have a hardware moat like Apple.Even after GPTs become universal, the mobile version of ChatGPT may still have to "pay taxes" to Apple.

In fact, in addition to iOS, Android and other consumer-oriented app stores, Microsoft's Azure Marketplace  It is even more worthy of OpenAI's reference.

The Azure Marketplace cloud application store was released globally in October 2014. Based on Microsoft's accumulation in cloud services, it has helped software developers complete the transformation into cloud service providers. It is more oriented towards enterprise users, building a platform for traditional companies seeking cloud solutions and software vendors that have developed usable solutions. In July 2021, Microsoft announced that it would only charge 3% for each tradable application.

Analogous to the GPT Store, Microsoft provides its cloud services to software developers, and OpenAI provides the GPT model to developers; users find suitable solutions on the Azure Marketplace and run them on Azure, and netizens find suitable applications on the ChatGPT page and still conduct conversations and calls based on the GPT model.

The essence of both is to help users make money with their own basic capabilities, namely cloud and big models. However, we do not know whether netizens' interaction with various applications based on the GPT model will provide more data for the GPT model.

Not just an app store, but more like a WeChat mini-program

Regardless of the profit model,The functions of GPT Store are similar to those of WeChat mini-programs to a certain extent.

I still remember that when the "Mini Program" function was first launched, some netizens even suggested that they could delete the APPs with low usage rates on their phones. Indeed, as an application that can be used without downloading, the biggest attraction of mini programs for users is its lightweight, while for developers, it is low development cost, large entry traffic, etc. According to the data disclosed in the 2023 WeChat Open Class PRO, the transaction scale of mini programs in 2022 reached trillions of yuan, and WeChat's revenue based on this must also be very considerable.

There is no need to elaborate on the functions of WeChat mini-programs, and if we regard ChatGPT as an application, we can find the similarities between them.

First, the entrance.WeChat can be said to be the most used APP by domestic users every day, and ChatGPT's traffic performance is also very impressive. The number of monthly active users exceeded 100 million two months after its launch. Even though it has declined in recent months, it can still be called "high traffic".

The second is the lightweight application experience.The WeChat mini program page can be accessed by simply pulling down, and you can also quickly enter it through search, dialog box sharing, etc.

As for the apps in the GPT Store, you can directly find related GPT apps through the search box. Under the popular recommendations, there are three sections: Featured, Trending, and By ChatGPT developed by the official. Each section has recommended apps. At the same time, the official also launched seven sub-sections such as writing, productivity, programming, and lifestyle.

In addition, WeChat Mini Programs have also further improved user stickiness and reduced the cost of ecosystem construction for Tencent. Similarly, GPT Store has once again moved closer to "open source" for OpenAI. More and more developers are developing applications based on GPT, which will inevitably feed back to the big model and bring more problem-solving ideas in terms of performance and innovative applications.

There are many experts among the people. Perhaps the developer who breaks through the shackles of the ChatBot application model is now recharging his Plus membership.

Final Thoughts

Whether it is Apple App Store, Microsoft Azure Marketplace, or WeChat Mini Programs, they have basically formed fixed revenue models and operating methods. The emergence of GPT Store, like the sudden emergence of ChatGPT, has no mature precedent in the era of large models. In the end, how Sam Altman will write the history of OpenAI's gold rush, we can only wait and see.

However, the developers and operators seem to be the same people. After all, the GPT Store has only been online for 2 days and the phenomenon of "ranking manipulation" has already appeared...