On March 1, OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence company, released API access to their insanely popular ChatGPT tool, along with Whisper, a speech recognition service.

Since the release of ChatGPT, developers have been using the platform to build all manner of custom tools, including apps like QuickVid AI, which automatically generates ideas for YouTube videos. The app’s creator, Daniel Habib, explained that until now, it was impossible to monetize software featuring chatbot AI.

“All of these unofficial tools that were just toys, essentially, that would live in your own personal sandbox can now actually go out to tons of users,” Habib says.

OpenAI’s API release could mark the start of a new AI gold rush. What was previously a series of industrious hobbyists creating apps in a licensing gray area could soon become an entirely new industry.

“What this release means for companies is that adding AI capabilities to applications is much more accessible and affordable,” notes Hassan El Mghari, who manages TwitterBio, a ChatGPT service that generates Twitter profile text for users.

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OpenAI has also updated its data retention policy and will now only hold user data for 30 days, promising it won’t use user-generated text inputs to train its AI models. This policy change means that companies will be in better control of their data rather than needing to trust a third party to manage where it goes.

In addition to better data-retention policies, API access to ChatGPT is now 10 times cheaper than OpenAI’s lower-powered GPT3 API, which launched in June 2020. The falling price of many of these large language models means there will likely be a plethora of AI chatbots to choose from in the near future.