OpenAI has revealed plans to launch a new subscription tier for ChatGPT, its AI-powered chatbot. The new tier, named ChatGPT Business, is aimed at enterprise customers and professionals who require more control over their data. OpenAI has promised that end users’ data won’t be used to train its models by default, and the offering will follow API data usage policies. The company plans to launch ChatGPT Business in the coming months.
OpenAI previously announced that it was exploring additional paid plans for ChatGPT due to its rapid growth. The first subscription tier, ChatGPT Plus, launched in February and costs $20 per month. According to reports, ChatGPT had 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after its launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history.
To explore new lines of revenue, OpenAI released plug-ins for ChatGPT in March, which gave the chatbot access to third-party knowledge sources and databases, including the web.
Despite controversy and bans, ChatGPT has proved to be a successful venture for OpenAI, attracting significant media attention and inspiring countless memes on social media. However, the cost to operate ChatGPT is high, with the company’s CEO Sam Altman describing it as “eye-watering.”
In addition to ChatGPT Business, OpenAI has announced a new feature that allows all ChatGPT users to disable chat history. Conversations started with chat history disabled won’t be used to train and improve OpenAI’s models and won’t appear in the history sidebar. However, they will be retained for 30 days and reviewed “when needed to monitor for abuse.”
As of today, ChatGPT users can export their data by requesting it to be sent as a file to the email address associated with their OpenAI account. This new feature arrives at a time when OpenAI’s data practices are facing increased regulatory scrutiny. In fact, last month, Italy banned ChatGPT due to possible privacy violations, alleging that OpenAI unlawfully processed users’ data and failed to implement safeguards to prevent minors from accessing the platform. France, Spain, and Germany have also initiated investigations into OpenAI and its commercial services, with a particular focus on ChatGPT’s adherence to the GDPR.
OpenAI launches ChatGPT Plus
Aiming to monetize what’s become a viral phenomenon, OpenAI today launched a new pilot subscription plan for ChatGPT, its text-generating AI that can write convincingly human-like essays, poems, emails, lyrics and more. Called ChatGPT Plus and starting at $20 per month, the service delivers a number of benefits over the base-level ChatGPT, OpenAI says, including general access to ChatGPT even during peak times, faster response times and priority access to new features and improvements. The free ChatGPT tier is here to stay — it’s not going away. As for ChatGPT Plus, it’s only available to customers in the U.S. at the moment. OpenAI says it’ll begin the process of inviting people from its waitlist in the coming months and look to expand Plus to additional countries and regions “soon.” “We launched ChatGPT as a research preview so we could learn more about the system’s strengths and weaknesses and gather user feedback to help us improve upon its limitations,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “Since then, millions of people have given us feedback, we’ve made several important updates and we’ve seen users find value across a range of professional use cases including drafting and editing content, brainstorming ideas, programming help and learning new topics.” ChatGPT Plus might be the first of several plans to come, OpenAI hints. In the blog post, the company says that it’s “actively exploring” options for lower-cost plans, business plans and data packs in addition to an API.
ChatGPT to the internet
OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, can now browse the internet — in certain cases.
OpenAI today launched plugins for ChatGPT, which extend the bot’s functionality by granting it access to third-party knowledge sources and databases, including the web. Available in alpha to ChatGPT users and developers on the waitlist, OpenAI says that it’ll initially prioritize a small number of developers and subscribers to its premium ChatGPT Plus plan before rolling out larger-scale and API access.
Easily the most intriguing plugin is OpenAI’s first-party web-browsing plugin, which allows ChatGPT to draw data from around the web to answer the various questions posed to it. (Previously, ChatGPT’s knowledge was limited to dates, events and people prior to around September 2021.) The plugin retrieves content from the web using the Bing search API and shows any websites it visited in crafting an answer, citing its sources in ChatGPT’s responses.
A chatbot with web access is a risky prospect, as OpenAI’s own research has found. An experimental system built in 2021 by the AI startup, called WebGPT, sometimes quoted from unreliable sources and was incentivized to cherry-pick data from sites it expected users would find convincing — even if those sources weren’t objectively the strongest. Meta’s since-disbanded BlenderBot 3.0 had access to the web, too, and quickly went off the rails, delving into conspiracy theories and offensive content when prompted with certain text.
