OpenAI started rolling out the ChatGPT chatbot’s premium edition

The developer of the well-known ChatGPT chatbot, OpenAI, has started releasing the chatbot’s premium edition. A premium ChatGPT version that the business promised users will be released about a week ago is now being rolled out to certain users.

Financial technology expert Linas Belinas said in a LinkedIn post “OpenAI is now releasing the premium version for $42 per month. According to reports, the pro version has special advantages including minimal downtime, quicker reaction times, and priority access to new features.”

For OpenAI, which is thought to be spending more than $100,000 per day just to run ChatGPT, this could prove to be a sizable source of income. ChatGPT has 75 million unique monthly users, according to SimilarWeb (also noted in Linas’ post), and even if 10% of them choose to upgrade to the premium version, that would result in $3.6 billion in revenue and $2 billion in profit annually at a 60% profit margin.

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Linas refers to Microsoft’s investment in ChatGPT as the “greatest tech investment ever,” noting that this profit exceeds that of businesses like Uber, Spotify, Twitter, and Airbnb from the previous fiscal year.

A week ago, OpenAI disclosed that it was considering a premium version of ChatGPT. The announcement featured a link to a waiting form for the premium ChatGPT, implying that the debut may not be too far away even if it did not mention pricing or the availability of the paid version.

“We’re beginning to consider ways to make money from ChatGPT” (early thinking, nothing official to share yet). Our objective is to keep the service up-to-date and functional, and one strategy we’re thinking about is to monetize it. We’d want to have a 15-minute conversation with a few people to obtain some preliminary input. The announcement stated, “If you’re interested in chatting, please fill out this form (which takes around 10 minutes to fill out).

For those who don’t know, ChatGPT is a chatbot created by OpenAI with support from Microsoft. It is an AI chatbot that can have more “human-like” discussions across a variety of verticals and complex subjects. It was introduced in November 2022 and stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer.

Image Credit: alliance / NurPhoto / Jakub Porzycki