The premium offering is the newest iteration of OpenAI’s evolving strategy for the chatbot, that it released as a research preview. — AFP
OpenAI, the research lab behind the ChatGPT chatbot that’s become a viral hit, will offer a premium subscription to use the service for US$20 (RM85) 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 Feb 1.
The chatbot, which was released in a public preview in November and attracted a million users in a matter of days, has frequently been overloaded with traffic as users piled on to the site all at once. OpenAI, which last month signed an investment deal with Microsoft Corp said to be worth US$10bil (RM42.44bil), 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, that it released as a research preview. It met with surprising demand from a public that quickly began trying it for a wide 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 like ChatGPT rather than a human, although OpenAI cautioned it isn’t 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 and companies to embed its functionality into their own apps. The company started allowing people to sign up for a waitlist to access that two weeks ago.
OpenAI also said it’s looking at “options for lower-cost plans, business plans, and data packs for more availability”. – Bloomberg
