To the surprise of absolutely no one, OpenAI wants to monetize the enormous success achieved by ChatGPT, the chatbot that has been giving so much talk in recent months. And it is that until October or the beginning of November of last year the whole world, in terms of artificial intelligence, seemed absorbed in the AI that generates images from text descriptions, the appearance of this surprising chat that speaks the same of theoretical physics that composes a rap immediately attracted all the spotlights.
It is understandable, of course, anyone who has tried it already knows that, although it is not perfect, it does go many steps beyond what the majority of the population has experienced in this regard, that is, in text-generating artificial intelligences. and in chatbots. Yes, it is true that we were already aware of GPT-3 and its predecessors before, but of course, they are paid services (although they offer some credit to prove it), so they are largely unknown, in terms of their operation, for the vast majority.
One of the keys to the success of ChatGPT is, without a doubt, that OpenAI has offered it completely free of charge for everyone. In this way they have achieved that everyone tries it, that everyone talks about it and, in this way, that it gains the relevance that it has obtained during these last two months. I have no doubt that if the service had been paid from the beginning, its popularity would have been much lower than it has achieved.
Now, fame does not pay bills or make shareholders smile, OpenAI must find a way to monetize the service and therefore, as we could already imagine and can now read on Engadget, OpenAI will soon test a paid version of ChatGPT. To this end, the company has already opened a waiting list for those who may be interested, although there is still no information on dates or price. What’s more, as we can read in said publication, the company is consulting the users themselves interested in the paid version of ChatGPT about what price they consider would be appropriate for the service, so we can understand that they have not yet made any decision on regard.
What we do know is that the paid version will always be available to users, unlike the free one, which is sometimes not available due to server overload, and will not have any limitation in terms of the volume of queries. With free accounts, after several queries in a row, the system asks you to allow some time (a few minutes) to pass before continuing with the conversation.
The good news is that it therefore appears that the free accounts will stick around, at least for now. And the even better part is that, with this funding channel, OpenAI will be able to stop resorting to services that abuse job insecurity in developing countries.
