a faster version… but paying

ChatGPT, the incredible conversational AI, is attracting more and more Internet users. To cover its significant operating costs, OpenAI plans to use a paid subscription, dubbed ChatGPT Professional, which would offer better performance.

The ChatGPT conversational artificial intelligence has been making a lot of noise since its release in December 2022. Accessible for free to everyone on the Internet, it impresses with its ability to answer questions in a comprehensive and natural way and to solve many problems, so much so that users have a lot of fun asking it for essays, code, lists, articles and even homework. Still, OpenAI – the company that developed AI – needs to find the necessary funds for its development, especially since the computing costs are exorbitant – it can fortunately count on the financial support of Microsoft, which is very interested in this technology and has just invested 10 billion dollars in it. That’s why she announced on his official Discord serverits intention to monetize ChatGPT for “ensure the long-term viability of the tool”. Indeed, she could not forever leave her wonderful chatbot in free access, especially since the latter currently has more than one million active users. To ensure its proper functioning, it must constantly spend a lot of money – even if there are many bugs and the interface is not always very stable. The time has therefore come to think about a long-term strategy – it does not currently intend to adopt an advertising model.

ChatGPT Professional: priority and more comfortable use

According to the first information provided by OpenAI, the future paid offer would be called ChatGPT Professional – but its name could change between now and its release. Subscribers would be able to access the AI ​​without any interruption whenever they want and would therefore have priority over other users, given that with the explosion of requests, it is regularly impossible to access it. Responses would also be faster and the request limit would be pushed back, with “at least twice the daily limit“only for the free solution. Greg Brockman, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, promises on Twitter”higher performancefor ChatGPT Professional customers. Thus, the paid subscription would – for the time being at least – not offer new functions, but greater comfort.

This idea of ​​a paid offer is only in its infancy for the moment and the start-up has not yet clearly defined its contours. That’s why she asks for the opinion of users with the help ofa Google Docs quiz. She has no idea yet what the fee schedule will look like. That’s why she asks questions like “at what price (per month) would you consider ChatGPT to be so expensive that you wouldn’t consider buying it?”, “at what price would you consider the price of ChatGPT to be so low that you would feel the quality can’t be matched?” or, on a scale from 1 to 5,“How upset would you be if you couldn’t use ChatGPT anymore?” Users also have the option of joining a waiting list so that they can test the offer first when the beta version is launched. “If you are selected, we will contact you to set up a payment process and a pilot”, says OpenAI. Note that the functions included can still evolve and that you will have to be patient so that ChatGPT Professional is available to everyone.

ChatGPT being very useful for certain professions, there is no doubt that the paid offer should quickly find its audience, especially among students, who see in AI a great way to save time for writing their homework – moreover , it has already been banned from New York universities and cases of cheating have already been spotted in Lyon. Remember, however, that it still makes a lot of mistakes and that Sam Altman, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, himself declared that it was “incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a deceptive impression of grandeur” and that would be “a mistake to rely on it for anything important right now.”