OpenAI starts ChatGPT subscription service

OpenAI, the research laboratory behind the ChatGPT chatbot that has become a viral hit, will offer a premium subscription to use the service for $20 a month.

ChatGPT Plus will offer paying customers access to the chatbot, even during peak times, faster responses to their typed queries and early access to new features, OpenAI said in a blog post on Wednesday.

The chatbot, which was released in a public preview in November and attracted 1-million users in days, has frequently been overloaded with traffic as users piled onto the site.

OpenAI, which signed an investment deal with Microsoft said to be worth $10bn in January, is also trying to find viable business models to cover the high cost of running its products and generate profit.

The premium offering is the newest iteration of OpenAI’s evolving strategy for the chatbot, which it released as a research preview. It met with surprising demand from a public that quickly began trying it for an array of uses from the casual and mundane to the professional, as well as more alarming tasks like cheating on homework and misinformation.

On Tuesday, the company released a tool to help readers check if content is authored by an AI program such as ChatGPT rather than a human, though OpenAI cautioned it was not flagging nearly three-quarters of cases of bot-generated content.

Next up, OpenAI said, is the release of an application programming interface for ChatGPT, which will allow users to embed its functionality into their apps. The company started allowing people to sign up for a waiting list to access that two weeks ago. OpenAI also said it was looking at “options for lower-cost plans, business plans and data packs for more availability”.