The San Francisco-based technology startup OpenAI has introduced a premium membership with additional features after quickly attracting a record number of customers. Particularly during periods of high user activity, the US$20 monthly membership level provides extra features and complete access to the website. The advantages include priority access to new features and improvements as well as unfettered access to ChatGPT even during peak hours.
“ChatGPT Plus is now available to clients in the United States,” the company said in a statement. “We will begin the process of admitting people off our waitlist in the coming weeks.”
The business has hinted that other parts of the world will soon adopt subscription-based services.
We soon intend to offer access and support to other countries and regions. By offering this subscription cost, we will be able to help making free access available to as many people as is practical, according to OpenAI.
By the end of last year, ChatGPT was available to the general public. The company stated that since then, “millions of people have provided us with feedback, we’ve made several significant updates, and we’ve seen users find value across a range of professional use cases, including drafting and editing content, brainstorming ideas, getting assistance with programming, and learning new topics.”
Additionally, the company plans to launch the ChatGPT API waitlist. In the statement, the company also said, “We are actively looking into options for more inexpensive plans, business programmes, and data packs.
The business just announced a brand-new technology that enables consumers to distinguish between articles written by real humans and those produced by artificial intelligence.
An additional announcement was made by the US-based technology corporation Microsoft that it will collaborate with Open AI and provide a sizeable sum of money to the initiative.
Microsoft has stated that it plans to invest $10 billion in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and plans to integrate it into its productivity products.
Even the dormant behemoth Google has been jolted awake by the arrival of ChatGPT, and it is now working extra hard to create a superior AI chatbot that can be incorporated into its search engine and other services.
It should be noted that ChatGPT is powered by Transformer, a neural network architecture developed by Google Research and made available as open-source software in 2017.
Using the same Transformer code, the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Google chatbot LaMDA was introduced in 2021. However, because it needed to be reinforced and made more factual, the company did not offer public access. Despite being addressed, ChatGPT still has this issue.
At this time, Google is working nonstop to develop more than 20 comparable AI bots that will be displayed at the upcoming I/O 2023 conference in May.
Sam Altman, the CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, hinted that a commercial edition might be available in December.
Altman claims that ChatGPT’s operating expenses, which amount to a few cents for each chat on average, are “eye-watering.”
What goals does the company have for the future?
The company has stated ambitions to enhance and expand this product in response to user feedback and desires. OpenAI stated, “We are now exploring at ideas for lower-cost plans, commercial plans, and data packs for broader availability.” The ChatGPT API queue will soon be introduced.
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