OpenAI considers paid version of its viral chatbot – “ChatGPT Professional”

OpenAI, the company behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT is considering introducing a paid version, called “ChatGPT Professional”.

This is possibly one of the ways the company is looking to keep the operations running as it seems to be burning cash to keep the chatbot free.

Innovation Village reported some days ago that the company is reportedly in talks with investors to sell existing shares in a tender offer that would value the company at around $29 billion so as to fund its operations.

In an announcement on the company’s official Discord server, OpenAI said that it’s “starting to think about how to monetize ChatGPT” as one of the ways to “ensure [the tool’s] long-term viability” as reported on Techcrunch.

This paid version of ChatGPT will be known as ChatGPT Professional.

The company also posted a waitlist on its Discord server asking some questions such as

• “At what price (per month) would you consider ChatGPT to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it?”
• At what price (per month) would you consider ChatGPT to be priced so low that you would feel the quality couldn’t be very good?
• At what price (per month) would you consider ChatGPT starting to get expensive, so that it is not out of the question, but you would have to give some thought to buying it?
• At what price (per month) would you consider ChatGPT to be a bargain—a great buy for the money?

It stated that ChatGPT Professional (experimental) is geared towards professional use with:

• Always available (no blackout windows)
• Fast responses from ChatGPT (i.e. no throttling)
• As many messages as you need (at least 2X regular daily limit)

The company however states that users should keep in mind that “this is an early experimental program that is subject to change, and we are not making paid pro access generally available at this time.”

OpenAI released its viral ChatGPT in November 2022. ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, and it is a chatbot developed by OpenAI that optimizes language models for dialogue. The application is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 family of large language models, and is fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.