CEO Sam Altman’s sudden departure from OpenAI weekend isn’t the only drama happening with ChatGPT. Due to high demand, paid subscriptions to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus have been put on hold for about a week.
The company has a waiting list for those interested in registering for ChatGPT, who will be notified when the text-to-speech AI generator is once again available.
Interest in ChatGPT Plus surged after OpenAI’s inaugural DevDay developers conference, which took place earlier this month and unveiled several new features for the paid version of the AI chatbot. Some of these features include being able to create custom bots with the GPT-4 language model that can be trained on particular data to perform specific tasks. Some custom GPTs include a model for Canva, a therapist model called TherapistGPT, and a Tweet Enhancer for X. According to ZDNet, more common models include book creators, SEO assistants, photo reviewers, QR code generators, and birthday cake designers.
OpenAI also shared more details on GPT-4 Turbo, a supercharged version of the language model that can process 128k of context, double that of standard GPT-4. Other functions enable multimodal GPT-4 access, DALL-E 3 image generation, and web-browsing capability for advanced data analysis, while being able to remain within the existing model.
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Excitement over the new features coming to ChatGPT Plus prompted users to sign up for the service, which costs $20 per month. CEO Sam Altman then shared on
This appears to reflect the early days of ChatGPT, when the chatbot experienced capacity issues, causing it to experience random downtime. This is what prompted the company to institute a paid membership tier in the first place. In April 2023, researchers indicated that it costs $700,000 per day, or 36 cents per query, to keep ChatGPT running. In addition to various enterprise endowments, paid accounts have helped keep chatbots incident-free for some time. ChatGPT in particular supports 100 million weekly users – it also has over 2 million developers on its platform – which helps it outpace competing organizations like Meta (formerly Facebook).
There was a service outage following the DevDay conference in early November, leaving ChatGPT and its API inaccessible to free and paid users and developers for more than 90 minutes. OpenAI said that the excess traffic that caused the crash was due to the DDoS attack, not an inability to support users.
November 14 brought several changes to ChatGPT. In addition to the waitlist for ChatGPT Plus, which is still enabled as of Monday, people who have not logged in recently will be greeted with a notification of updates to the chatbot’s terms and services and privacy policy. Some of the main features of the Terms and Services include explanations on registration and access, details about how the service can be used and the information and content. Similarly, the updated Privacy Policy explains in more detail what information the Company may collect, how it is used, and what rights you have when using the Service.
there is a new one too Tips to get started A notice to those who have not logged in for a while indicates that you should not enter personal information into ChatGPT and that you should double-check the information for inaccuracies.
Amid the ChatGPIT Plus registration halt, users have been found reselling paid accounts on eBay for a premium. While a ChatGPT Plus subscription directly from OpenAI costs only $20, resellers are offering access to the service for two to three times that amount. Mashable notes that while not entirely illegal, such actions are often a violation of terms of services for many businesses.
OpenAI states in its recently updated terms of use that users registering for ChatGPT “must provide accurate and complete information” when registering an account and acknowledge the authority to register the account on behalf of another. Violations of the Terms of Use may result in account suspension or termination.
Users who successfully gain access to a resale account advertised as “one-year” may also find that OpenAI may expire the account in less than that time. Mashable said, it recommends the waitlist update as the best way to gain access to ChatGPT Plus.
Currently, there is no telling how the leadership change at OpenAI will impact when ChatGPT Plus will once again be available to users. The free version of ChatGPT has been functional throughout this process.