OpenAI is releasing a new feature that will let corporate customers use their own company data to customise the artificial intelligence start-up’s most powerful model, GPT-4o.

The move comes as start-ups face rising competition for their AI products for business, and businesses face growing pressure to demonstrate the gains from investment in AI.

OpenAI plans to roll out the customisation capability, known generally in the AI industry as fine-tuning, on Tuesday. Fine-tuning allows existing AI models to be trained on additional information about a particular sort of task or subject area. For example, a company that makes skateboards might fine-tune an AI model so that it could be used as a customer-service chatbot able to address questions about wheels and the specifics of caring for a board.

The capability is new for the OpenAI flagship model — fine-tuning hasn’t previously been available on GPT-4o or its predecessor GPT-4. However, the company has allowed users to fine-tune many of its other models, including GPT-4o mini, which is a cheaper, more streamlined version of GPT-4o.

Many tech companies offer the ability to customise AI models big and small. OpenAI is banking on making it easier for customers to tweak its most powerful model by working directly with the company, rather than using an outside service or a less powerful product, said Olivier Godement, the head of product for OpenAI’s API.

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“We’ve been extremely focused on lowering the bar, the friction, the amount of work it takes to get started,” Godement said.

To fine-tune a model, customers must upload their data to OpenAI’s servers. The training takes, on average, an hour or two, said John Allard, an OpenAI software engineer who works on customisation. Initially, users will only be able to fine-tune the model with text-based data, Allard said, not images or other content. — Rachel Metz, (c) 2024 Bloomberg LP