OpenAI, the company behind the popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, said it has put on hold new signups for the premium version of the AI tool, ChatGPT Plus.
The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, announced this Wednesday morning. According to him, new sign-ups are paused because the platform has exceeded its capacity, thus affecting users’ quality of experience.
Atman said the ChatGPT Plus has seen a surge in usage since OpenAI’s devday where it announced some new APIs about a week ago.
What Altman is saying
Announcing the suspension via a post on X, the OpenAI CEO said:
- “We are pausing new ChatGPT Plus sign-ups for a bit. The surge in usage post-devday has exceeded our capacity and we want to make sure everyone has a great experience.
- “You can still sign up to be notified within the app when subs reopen.”
100 million weekly users
At the company’s first developer conference in San Francisco a week ago, Altman announced that the chatbot had crossed 100 million weekly users. At the conference, the company also unveiled the GPT-4 Turbo, which is a “more powerful” and less expensive version of its flagship text-generating AI model, GPT-4. Altman also disclosed that over two million developers use the platform, including more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies.
API for developers
The company also announced ‘Assistants API’, which it described as a step toward helping developers build “agent-like experiences” within their apps. Using the Assistants API, OpenAI customers can build an “assistant” that has specific instructions, leverages outside knowledge, and can call OpenAI generative AI models and tools to perform tasks.
Use cases range from a natural language-based data analysis app to a coding assistant or even an AI-powered vacation planner.
Powering the new Assistants API is Code Interpreter, OpenAI’s tool that writes and runs Python code in a sandboxed execution environment. Launched in March for ChatGPT, Code Interpreter can generate graphs and charts and process files, letting assistants created with the Assistants API run code iteratively to solve code and math problems.
The AI war
For now, ChatGPT which made its debut about a year ago is holding the Ace even as the AI war among tech giants is getting hotter. With the likes of Google and Amazon pumping billions of dollars into different AI projects, OpenAI still has a lot of battles to fight ahead.
Most recently, American billionaire, Elon Musk, has also thrown his hat into the AI ring despite his initial description of the technology as being ‘dangerous to humanity’. Musk has launched his own AI tool called “Grok” and he is promoting it as the best among others.
