the end of free AI with ChatGPT Professional?

ChatGPT, the incredible conversational AI, is attracting more and more Internet users. To cover its costs, OpenAI is launching a paid version. Called ChatGPT Professional, it offers better performance for $42 per month.

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s conversational artificial intelligence, is a victim of its own success! For the moment, everyone can test the AI ​​for free with a simple registration – and Internet users around the world have not hesitated to ask it a good number of questions. To so much so that the AI ​​is regularly overwhelmed with requests, and it is then impossible to access it. But, since it costs millions of dollars a day to operate, its creators quickly considered setting up a paid subscription, dubbed ChatGPT Professional. And they wasted no time! A hand-picked list of users already have access to it, even though the project is still in its infancy. And as much to say that the fixed price will cool more than one: you will have to pay 42 dollars per month to take advantage of the premium offer – OpenAI can still adjust the price, including by increasing it. Something to cool off all the students who already saw the end of homework! But it 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.” Let’s hope the company doesn’t listen!

ChatGPT Professional: priority and more comfortable use

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. 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.

The future paid offer is currently called ChatGPT Professional – but its name could change between now and its release. 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 performance” for ChatGPT Professional customers. Finally, subscribers will benefit from priority access to new functions that will be added later.

ChatGPT Professional: an expensive subscription that could appeal

At the beginning of this idea of ​​a paid offer, OpenAI asked for the opinion of users usinga Google Docs quiz. Indeed, she had no idea what the fee schedule 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 still have the option to respond and join a waiting list so they can test the offer first when the beta launches. “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. On the other hand, its high price is likely to discourage students – and this is perhaps not a bad thing –, who see in AI a great way to save time for writing their homework – moreover, it has already been banned in 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.”