OpenAI is now offering its ChatGPT tool to businesses and developers for use in their own apps. ChatGPT, a popular chatbot that generates text and answers questions, was introduced to the public in November 2021. Companies such as Instacart, Shopify, and Snap are already using the ChatGPT API in their products. With paid access, customers can integrate their apps with ChatGPT’s application programming interface, providing them with the same version of the GPT 3.5 model that OpenAI itself uses, but at a cost 10 times lower than OpenAI’s existing models.

While OpenAI has garnered significant public interest in recent years, it must also figure out how to generate revenue to cover the significant cloud-computing bills for its massive AI models. To that end, the company negotiated an expansion of Microsoft’s investment in January, adding $10 billion. Last month, OpenAI started a waitlist for companies and developers wanting to use ChatGPT in their own apps, and it’s also selling a premium version to individuals.

To ensure the stability of production use cases, OpenAI’s engineering team is prioritizing companies and users running public applications on the platform, as ChatGPT has gone down too often recently. Instacart, Shopify, and Quizlet are using ChatGPT to improve the customer experience in their apps. Instacart will add ChatGPT to its shopping app, providing customers with the ability to ask for suggestions for healthy meals or how to make fish tacos, among other things. Shopify will offer product recommendations when shoppers search for a product. Quizlet is using ChatGPT for an AI tutoring experience, replicating the Socratic method, as well as for foreign language learning.

Snap, the maker of Snapchat, is another new ChatGPT customer, offering an AI-enabled chatbot to Snapchat+ members. Named My AI, it has a unique tone and personality and can make recommendations for birthday gifts, and dinner recipes, and even write a haiku about cheese. Eventually, it will be available to all Snap members.

OpenAI has also unveiled access to its Whisper speech recognition system, which can be used for transcription. With ChatGPT and Whisper, OpenAI is continuing to expand its offerings and drive revenue growth while providing businesses and developers with powerful AI tools to improve their products and customer experiences.