OpenAI to Monetize ChatGPT Soon, Opens Waitlist
OpenAI will soon start monetizing its wildly popular AI-driven chatbot, ChatGPT. The company opened a waitlist for users to avail of ChatGPT Professional, a no-limit chatbot service for work use.
Noticed by TechCrunch, OpenAI said it is “starting to think about how to monetize ChatGPT” in its official Discord channel. The company posted a link to a Google form that requests details such as email address, country of residence, the purpose of use, the price they’d be willing to pay for the professional service, and more.
“Our goal is to continue improving and maintaining the service, and monetization is one way we’re considering to ensure its long-term viability. We’re interested in chatting with some folks for ~15 min to get some early feedback,” OpenAI said.
ChatGPT Professional chatbot would entail the following:
- It would always be available and thus would have no blackout windows
- It wouldn’t throttle, so faster responses from the chatbot
- Unlimited number of chat messages or “at least 2x the regular daily limit”
In his reply to Elon Musk, ChatGPT co-founder Sam Altman noted that the tool costs the company a few cents in the single digit per chat in computing costs. So when millions of users ask millions of questions, it ends up costing OpenAI, well, millions of dollars against its expectations of a $200 million revenue in 2023.
Launched in late November 2023, ChatGPT is unique in that it can answer long-form questions. It is based on a large language model, Generative Pre-trained Transformer or GPT-3.5, which is an upgrade over GPT3, was unannounced and received a quiet rollout in December 2022.
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The model is trained on text and code published before the fourth quarter of 2021 and can generate human-like text responses, essays, articles, and computer programs.
ChatGPT gained immense popularity in the days succeeding its release. In just five days, the general-purpose chatbot garnered over one million users. For comparison, Facebook took 10 months, Instagram 2.5 months, and Apple took 74 days to sell its one-millionth iPhone.
fun creative inspiration; great! reliance for factual queries; not such a good idea.
we will work hard to improve!
— Sam Altman (@sama) December 11, 2022
Altman downplayed ChatGPT’s prowess. Nevertheless, the tool has some serious capabilities, enough for one of the bigger AI conferences, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), to ban authors from leveraging tools like ChatGPT.
“Since how we answer these questions directly affects our reviewing process, which in turn affects members of our research community and their careers, we must be careful and somewhat conservative in considering this new technology. OpenAI released the beta version of ChatGPT at the end of November 2022, which is less than two months ago,” ICML stated.
“Unfortunately, we have not had enough time to observe, investigate and consider its implications for our reviewing and publication process. We thus decided to prohibit producing/generating ICML paper text using large-scale language models this year (2023).”
Besides ICML, New York City’s Department of Education, the country’s largest school district, banned it outright from school WiFi networks and devices over concerns of hampering students’ learning. Los Angeles and Baltimore public schools followed suit shortly after.
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in July 2019. The company also provides computing power for the chatbot and is reportedly considering an additional investment of $10 billion in OpenAI. The company is also reportedly mulling over the integration of ChatGPT with its Office suite of productivity apps and the Bing search engine.
Join the ChatGPT waitlist here.
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