It has several advantages over the basic ChatGPT.
Aiming to monetize the viral service, OpenAI has today launched a new pilot subscription plan for ChatGPT. The text generator’s artificial intelligence convincingly produces human-like essays, poems, emails, song lyrics and more.
According to OpenAI, the service, called ChatGPT Plus, which starts at $20 per month, offers several benefits over basic ChatGPT, including general access to ChatGPT even during peak hours, faster response times, and priority access to new features and improvements.
The free ChatGPT tier will also remain. As for ChatGPT Plus, it is currently only available to US customers. OpenAI says it will begin a waitlist invitation process in the coming months and will expand Plus to additional countries and regions “soon.”
“We launched ChatGPT as a research trailer to learn more about the system’s strengths and weaknesses and to gather user feedback to help us push the limits. Since then, millions of people have given us feedback, we’ve made several major updates, and we’ve seen the users will find value in a variety of professional use cases, including content drafting and editing, brainstorming, programming assistance, and learning new topics,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post.
ChatGPT Plus could be the first of several plans to be implemented by OpenAI. In the blog post, the company says it is “actively exploring” options for lower-cost plans, business plans and data plans in addition to the API. “We love our free users and will continue to provide free access to ChatGPT. By offering this subscription price, we can help support the availability of free access to as many people as possible. We plan to refine and expand this based on feedback and demand the supply,” the company wrote.
OpenAI already foreshadowed the launch of ChatGPT Plus in early January, announcing that it had “started thinking about ways to monetize ChatGPT” and published a survey outlining potential pricing and features for the “ChatGPT Professional” package. Then a few weeks ago, several ChatGPT users reported that they were getting access to a $42/month pro tier, which in retrospect appears to have been a mistake.
Despite the controversy, ChatGPT proved to be a publicity win for OpenAI, garnering a lot of media attention and spawning countless memes on social media. The number of daily users of ChatGPT has reached 10 million, which is an enviable user base in every respect. However, operating the service is very expensive. According to Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, ChatGPT’s operating costs are “eye-popping”, with the total computational cost amounting to a few cents per chat.
OpenAI is under a lot of pressure to turn a profit from products like ChatGPT after Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar investment. OpenAI expects to earn $200 million in 2023, which is a pittance compared to the more than $1 billion invested in the startup so far.
The Semaphore according to Microsoft is working to integrate OpenAI’s text generation technology into Bing in the coming weeks, which would make the search engine more competitive with Google. Regardless, OpenAI plans to introduce a mobile ChatGPT application in the future.
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