OpenAI has been making headlines in recent days for a variety of reasons.
First of all, because at DevDay last November 6th it announced important news (which we will return to). Then because on Wednesday 8 November ChatGPT suffered a hacker attack. And also because on the same day the software was blocked from Microsoft employees for security reasons.
Now Sam Altman’s company has a new problem, which is ultimately a problem of abundance and therefore entirely relative. New subscriptions to ChatGPT Plus, the paid version of the software, have been suspended. The reason? Too many requests. Let’s find out what happened.
New registrations for ChatGPT Plus are suspended
The news was given by the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, in a post published on X on Wednesday 15 November.
In the message we can read: “We are suspending new subscriptions to ChatGPT Plus for a while 🙁
The increase in usage post-development has outpaced our capabilities, and we want to make sure everyone has a great experience.
You can still sign up to receive a notification on the app when subscriptions reopen.”
Sam Altman
DevDay
A renewed enthusiasm for OpenAI products was certainly seen after DevDay, a day dedicated to developers. In which, as we were saying, some innovations for the near future were presented.
The two most important are GPT-4 Turbo and GPT. The first is an evolution of GPT-4, the company’s most advanced conversational chatbot. GPT-4 Turbo is faster, more powerful, and its contents will be updated in April 2023.
GPTs are customizable artificial intelligences. Each user will be able to integrate the software configuration with some documents relating to the areas of knowledge of their interest. This will result in a tailor-made chatbot, capable of helping in a particular area of knowledge.
GPT-4 Turbo, le GPT e ChatGPT Plus
It is no coincidence, we were saying, that the boom in access to ChatGPT Plus, and the company’s subsequent decision to suspend new registrations, occurred close to DevDay.
The innovations presented during the day dedicated to developers are already available to subscribers of the paid version of the chatbot, ChatGPT Plus.
What is ChatGPT Plus
ChatGPT Plus launched in February, initially in the United States, at a cost of $20 per month.
The paid version provides faster responses and early access to new features and improvements. Access is guaranteed even at times of maximum congestion, when (and this will have happened to many of our readers) the free version is temporarily unavailable.
Among the most advanced tools available only to ChatGPT Plus subscribers are the Dall-E 3 model, which creates images starting from a textual description, and the surprising Vision function, which we talked about in another article.
Vision allows you to analyze an image through AI. Concretely, you can photograph an object and ask the software for a description. And by highlighting one detail, Vision focuses its attention only on that. There are many possibilities for its use, despite fears related to privacy (even if the software does not provide descriptions of human faces or explicit sexual scenes).
OpenAI e ChatGPT
ChatGPT’s first birthday is approaching (launched on November 30, 2022) and its numbers are increasingly remarkable.
Just at DevDay, Sam Altman announced that weekly active users are around 100 million.
If it took ChatGPT less than a year to reach these numbers, Instagram needed two, Facebook four and a half and Twitter five.
Microsoft has invested more than 10 billion dollars in OpenAI, and will invest more for the development of GPT-5, scheduled for 2025 but which has already been talked about for months.
Meanwhile, the competition is increasingly fierce, and in recent weeks Elon Musk also presented his (bizarre, and how could it have been otherwise) artificial intelligence, Grok. Which was announced like this on the xAI website: “Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use him if you hate humor!”