OpenAI, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence technology, recently made an announcement that it would no longer accept new sign-ups for its premium service, ChatGPT Plus. This decision was made in response to an extraordinary increase in customer demand. This decision, which was made public by OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman on November 15, 2023, comes in the wake of the first development conference that the firm has ever hosted, which was called OpenAI DevDay and took place in San Francisco.
OpenAI reached a big milestone by releasing the GPT-4 Turbo model and introducing the Copyright Shield as part of its indemnification strategy during the DevDay event that was conducted on November 6. This event was a significant milestone for OpenAI. Notably, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, was present at the event and emphasized the significance of artificial intelligence in connection to the company’s many services, such as Azure.
However, OpenAI had a number of difficulties in the days immediately after the event. On November 8, a substantial service outage occurred, which was at first ascribed to the popularity of the service and was subsequently recognized as the consequence of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assault. It is quite probable that this occurrence was a factor in the decision to suspend the process of signing up new users for ChatGPT Plus.
ChatGPT Plus is a membership plan that was released in February of this year and costs $20 per month. It provides customers with quicker response times, priority access to new features, and continuous access at peak hours. A considerable number of people signed up for the plan, particularly when it was announced that Plus customers will have access to unique features like GPT-4 that were previously unavailable to other users.
The capacity problem occurred at the same time as Microsoft’s Ignite event, which is widely anticipated to place a heavy emphasis on artificial intelligence technology. Microsoft has made a large investment in OpenAI, which is now valued at over $13 billion. Even after making this investment and incorporating AI into its search engine Bing, Microsoft’s market share is still much lower than that of Google.
The German Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) has issued a statement confirming that the collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI does not now come within the purview of merger control legislation. This is excellent news for both firms as it indicates that the collaboration does not violate these restrictions.
OpenAI has been aggressively improving its technological capabilities in order to keep its advantage over its competitors. This involves the introduction of a business tier as well as the debut of DALL-E 3, an image generator. During the DevDay event, OpenAI also demonstrated the GPT builder interface, which is a tool that allows users to generate bespoke GPT agents without the need for knowledge of coding. This new breakthrough is a component of OpenAI’s overall aim to build a GPT store in which users will be able to share and trade individual GPT bots. OpenAI has plans to split money with the developers of the most popular and valuable general knowledge tests (GPTs).
In addition to this, OpenAI has provided financial incentives to encourage developers to adopt ChatGPT, such as giving participants of the DevDay event a credit of $500. Because of these incentives, developers from Fortune 500 organizations have been drawn to the platform, and there are now over 2 million developers utilizing it. Within only two months of its inception, the messaging app ChatGPT had already achieved an amazing 100 million monthly users.
The very high adoption rate as well as the incorporation of new tools have placed a burden on the platform that is powered by Microsoft Azure, which has led to the decision to suspend the process of signing up new users for ChatGPT Plus. Users may be assured that they will still be able to sign up to be alerted by OpenAI when subscriptions are made available again. Shortly after the site was hit by a distributed denial of service assault (DDoS), which impacted users all over the world, new user registrations were halted.
Image source: Shutterstock
