the AI ​​star in subscription at 20 dollars per month

ChatGPT, the incredible conversational AI, continues to attract more and more Internet users. To cover its costs, OpenAI is launching a paid version. Called ChatGPT Plus, it offers several advantages for 20 dollars per month.

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s conversational AI, is experiencing insane success, and it doesn’t seem to be stopping! As a study by UBS reports, artificial intelligence has no less than 100 million monthly active users in January 2023, and it only took five days to pass the milestone of one million users. according to Statista. Thus, the new tool has the record for the fastest growth of applications for the general public, ahead of popular platforms such as Instagram or TikTok. But ChatGPT is a victim of its own success, and since AI costs millions of dollars a day to operate, its creators were quick to consider setting up a paid subscription.

And they wasted no time! OpenAI announced the 1^er february on his blog the upcoming launch of ChatGPT Plus, priced at $20 per month. For this tariff, subscribers will benefit from several advantages. The price could be worse, because ChatGPT itself thinks that, “given the high costs associated with training and maintaining a large language model like mine,” the minimum amount of a subscription should be “pretty high, potentially in the thousands of dollars a month.” But rest assured, Internet users will continue to have access to AI for free. “We love our free users and will continue to offer free access to ChatGPT. This subscription at this price will help support the availability of free access to as many people as possible,” explains OpenAI.

ChatGPT Plus: priority and more comfortable use

The ChatGPT conversational artificial intelligence has been making a lot of noise since its release in December 2022. It impresses with its ability to comprehensively and naturally answer questions and solve many problems, so much so that users have a lot of fun with it ask for essays, code, lists, articles, even assignments. For the moment, everyone can test the AI ​​for free by simply registering, and Internet users around the world have not hesitated to ask it a good number of questions, so much so that it is regularly overwhelmed with requests, and it is then impossible to access them.

Still, OpenAI 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 invested 10 billion of dollars. This is why she announced on January 11 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.

With ChatGPT Plus, subscribers will be able to access the AI ​​without any interruption whenever they want and will therefore have priority over other users, given that with the explosion of requests, it is regularly impossible to access it. Responses will also be faster and the request limit will 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 Plus customers. Finally, subscribers will get priority access to new features that will be added in the future. At this time, OpenAI is only available in the United States, where interested parties can s register on a waiting list before receiving an invitation “in the next weeks”but the firm plans to deploy it elsewhere in the world.

ChatGPT Plus: a paid subscription that could appeal

At the beginning of this idea of ​​a paid offer – initially called ChatGPT Professional –, OpenAI had asked for the opinion of users usinga Google Docs quiz. Indeed, the company had no idea what the price list was going to look like. That’s why she was asking 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 could register on a waiting list so that they could test the offer first when the beta version was launched. “If you are selected, we will contact you to set up a payment process and a pilot”, explained OpenAI. The firm had finally opted for a price of 42 dollars per month, a fairly substantial sum that it fortunately ended up lowering.

According to OpenAI, ChatGPT Plus would only be the first paid offer. Indeed, the start-up says “actively exploring” new, less expensive subscriptions, enterprise subscriptions, data packs and paid access to the AI ​​API, which is already available for a fee. “We plan to refine and expand this offering based on your feedback and needs”she explains.

ChatGPT being very useful for certain professions, there is no doubt that the paid offer should quickly find its audience. On the other hand, its price is likely to discourage students – and this is perhaps not worse –, who see in AI a great way to save time for writing their homework – moreover, it has already banned in New York universities and Sciences Po. Remember, however, that it still makes a lot of mistakes and that Sam Altman, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, has himself declared that it is “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.”