OpenAI Temporarily Pauses New ChatGPT Plus Sign Ups

OpenAI has temporarily paused ChatGPT Plus sign-ups citing overwhelming demand. The American AI company's CEO Sam Altman made the announcement via an X (formerly Twitter) post.

According to the top executive, there has been an increased number of users signing up for OpenAI's paid ChatGPT Plus service after the company's recently concluded DevDay developer conference.

Apparently, the company is struggling to meet the needs and demands of the users who have signed up for the service. According to Altman, this doesn't align with the company's goal to provide users with a great experience.

While you can still sign up for the ChatGPT Plus service, you will need to wait without becoming annoyed until the company comes up with a resolution for this issue.

OpenAI said it will notify users via the app as soon as subscriptions are reopened. At its first-ever developer conference, OpenAI revealed that more than a hundred million users take advantage of its services and tools weekly.

Aside from this, the AI company noted that over a whopping 90 per cent of Fortune 500 businesses are currently developing AI-powered tools with the help of OpenAI's platform.

Notably, there have been a lot of controversies surrounding AI tools in the past few months. For instance, some scammers were using fake ChatGPT apps to trick users into paying for expensive subscriptions earlier this year.

Moreover, the word on the street was that OpenAI was edging closer to bankruptcy. Still, generative AI continues to get a lot of traction.

ChatGPT Plus: What is it?

ChatGPT Plus alludes to an optional subscription service which costs $20 (about £16) a month. The service gives you access to a wide range of advanced and sophisticated AI tools like GPT-4, ChatGPT plugins and Code Interpreter.

Aside from this, ChatGPT Plus membership comes with a new GPT feature, which can be custom-made for specific use cases. On top of that, OpenAI recently added new beta features to ChatGPT Plus.

What else is new?

OpenAI unveiled its latest generation model dubbed GPT 4 Turbo at its first developer conference in San Francisco. With an updated knowledge cutoff of April 2023, the model introduces a 128k context window, which is equal to 300 pages of text in a single prompt.

Furthermore, OpenAI says the model is 3X cheaper for input tokens and 2X cheaper for output tokens compared to the GPT-4 model. The company also announced a beta program for developers to fine-tune GPT-4 models.

This Custom Models program gave selected organisations an opportunity to team up with a dedicated group of OpenAI researchers to "train custom GPT-4 models to their specific domain".

The AI company is also gearing up to launch a GPT Store later this month, where people will be able to share their GPTs.