When Sam Altman founded OpenAI in 2015, he did so with a clear message: this was a non-profit organization. For some time now, things have changed, and the success of his projects —DALL-E 2, ChatGPT— has forced this entrepreneur to pivot. With a project with this potential, the question was not whether they were going to start charging money to use those platforms. The question was when they would.
The API was already paid. Access to the OpenAI API is already in fact based on a payment model: for occasional queries there is no cost, but if a user or company needs more volume, they can contract more “conversation capacity”.
Here’s how ChatGPT Pro works! A lot of users were asking me for proof, so I decided to make a video. pic.twitter.com/QYNn3pRnxI
– Zahid Khawaja (@chillzaza_) January 21, 2023
But ChatGPT Pro is coming. Altman already commented a long time ago that each consultation costs a fraction of a dollar, and for now they are assuming that cost. That will change in the future, and rumors point to a version called ChatGPT Pro that will have advantages such as faster responses or constant availability, something that is not guaranteed in the current version.
$42 a month? That will be the price of the subscription to ChatGPT Pro. At least, that is the filtered data by a user who theoretically has already had access to the service. At the moment there is no public access or official announcement of OpenAI, and it seems that simply They are enabling that option on some accounts.
ChatGPT does not know the future of ChatGPT. But of course, it is trained with already somewhat outdated data.
How expensive (or maybe how cheap). A priori the price seems very high, but the truth is that the capacity of ChatGPT can be especially profitable for professionals and companies. It is in those cases when that monthly fee does not seem so high: well used, it seems feasible to think that ChatGPT saves a lot of time and can be worth those 42 dollars a month. And perhaps many more.
The free version of ChatGPT will continue to exist. Let’s not pull our hair out: the current platform, free and publicly accessible, will continue to exist. In OpenAI they have no intention to block the free use of the chatbot even if a new version is released. Those responsible explained it on their Discord server, where they highlighted that they were simply “reflecting on how to monetize ChatGPT”.
The dilemma is not so. Microsoft’s recent multi-million dollar investment is clear proof that the current philosophy of OpenAI with ChatGPT had to change. Microsoft invests to recoup its investment with a vengeance, and the emergence of a pay stream seems inevitable. Now all that remains is to wait for an official announcement that seems imminent. What of course is is inevitable.
Image: Luca Bravo
