ChatGPT: That's why the creators will soon charge 20 euros per month

In the first few months, millions of people have played around with the AI, and now the company behind it is launching a subscription model.

The creators of ChatGPT are making the platform chargeable in future. For 20 US dollars a month, paying users will have reliable access to the software and get results faster than free users - especially when the AI chat platform is busy. There will also be new functions for paying users, according to a company blog post. The offer will initially only be available in the USA and will only be expanded to other countries after that.

With the subscription model, the creators presumably also want to capitalize on the hype surrounding the text robot, which claims to have 100 million monthly users. If only a fraction of these opt for the paid version, this could bring OpenAI, the platform operator, a huge windfall. Since its release, the program has been the subject of many newspapers, magazines and TV shows almost every day and is considered highly controversial.

Although the text robot can summarize the content of texts extremely quickly, write cover letters for job applications or even compose birthday speeches and rap lyrics, the texts are often incoherent in terms of content or logic or the source references are incorrect. For example, when asked who the German chancellors have been since 1949, ChatGPT responds with a list that ends with Olaf Scholz and Armin Laschet, the latter of whom lost the last federal election. There is also a dispute about whether the text robot could possibly infringe copyrights with its answers.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and investor Sam Altman, among others. Microsoft also invested one billion US dollars in the organization - the company wants to link its Bing search engine with ChatGPT's technology. The chatbot can imitate human conversations and has already sparked debates about the future of academic assignments, for example, thanks to its good results.

The algorithm is not the only well-known project to emerge from the research lab. The AI Dall-E, which created images from text-based user input, also became a viral success. According to OpenAI, its aim is to develop artificial intelligence on an open source basis in order to benefit society. It is divided into the non-profit company OpenAI Inc. and the for-profit subsidiary OpenAI LP.