To absolutely no one’s surprise, OpenAI wants to cash in on the huge success achieved by ChatGPT, the chatbot that has been talking so much in recent months. And so it is that until October or early November of last year, the whole world, in terms of artificial intelligence, seemed to be absorbed by AI that generates images from text descriptions, the appearance of this surprising chat, which says the same about a theoretical physicist who composes rap, immediately attracted all the spotlights.

It’s understandable, of course, those who have tried it already know that it’s not perfect, but it exceeds what the majority of the population has experienced in this regard, that is, in text-creating artificial intelligences. and in chatbots. Yes, it’s true that we’ve known about GPT-3 and its predecessors before, but of course these are paid services (even if they offer some credit to prove it), so they’re largely unknown in terms of how they work, for the vast majority.

Undoubtedly, one of the keys to ChatGPT’s success is that OpenAI has made it completely free to everyone. That’s how they got everyone to try it, that everyone was talking about it, and that’s how it got the relevance it’s had over the 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 what it has achieved.

Now that fame doesn’t pay the bills or bring smiles to shareholders, OpenAI has to find a way to monetize the service, and therefore, as we’ve already been able to 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 potential applicants, although there is still no information on dates or prices. In addition, as we can read in the mentioned publication, the company consults with the users themselves who are interested in the paid version of ChatGPT, what price they consider appropriate for the service, so we can understand that they have not yet made any decision to consider.

What we do know is that the paid version will always be available to users, unlike the free version which is sometimes unavailable due to server overload, and will not have any query volume restrictions. For free accounts, after several questions in a row, the system prompts you to wait a while (several minutes) before continuing the conversation.

The good news is that it looks like the free accounts are here to stay, at least for now. And even better, with this funding channel, OpenAI will be able to stop using services that exploit job insecurity in developing countries.