OpenAI, the company behind breakthrough technologies such as GPT-3, GPT-4, DALL-E, and DALL-E2, is developing mobile apps for ChatGPT, their chatbot that has gained immense popularity since its public release less than six months ago. The San Francisco-based company is currently looking to hire founding engineers for iOS and Android platforms to join their ChatGPT team, as indicated by two job postings on their careers website.
The iOS engineer, according to the job posting that was published very recently, will be responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the first set of iOS products built internally on top of OpenAI models. The engineer, the posting notes, will work closely with the product, design, and research teams to design, iterate, and safely bring OpenAI’s models to the world through mobile-first experiences. They will also lay the technical foundation for future mobile development at OpenAI. The Android engineer will also have a similar role for the Android platform.
Typically, companies take anywhere between six to eighteen months to go from hiring their first mobile engineers to launching live mobile apps. However, given the rapid pace at which OpenAI has been shipping products over the last few months, we can expect them to deliver faster than what is considered the norm.
Launched towards the end of November 2022, ChatGPT reached 100 million users in January earlier this year, becoming the fastest internet consumer app to get to this milestone. For context, TikTok previously held this record, but it took them nine months to achieve it. WhatsApp took 40 months, and Instagram took 28 months.
The chatbot is being used by millions of people worldwide on a daily basis for a variety of use cases ranging from personal assistance and entertainment to education and business communication. It can be used to generate personalized recommendations, articles, jokes, poems, and even code. As its mobile apps become available over the next few months, we can expect its popularity to soar even higher.
Until the mobile apps become available, anyone looking to use ChatGPT on their phones can obviously access it through a web browser (creating a shortcut for the homescreen really helps). Another option is to use the app on WhatsApp or Telegram, with the assistance of a third-party service such as BuddyGPT. However, the free plan offered by BuddyGPT is limited, and users will need to spend a little over $4 to enjoy unlimited usage.
