OpenAI’s premium service, ChatGPT Plus, has temporarily suspended new sign-ups due to overwhelming demand following its recent milestone announcement and the OpenAI DevDay event. The decision to halt new registrations was made after the service experienced a substantial increase in customer demand. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, made the announcement on November 15, 2023. The event marked the first development conference held by the pioneering artificial intelligence technology company in San Francisco.
During the OpenAI DevDay, the company unveiled the GPT-4 Turbo model, a significant development for OpenAI. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, attended the event and emphasized the importance of artificial intelligence in relation to Microsoft’s services, such as Azure.
Following the event, OpenAI faced several challenges. On November 8, a service outage occurred initially attributed to the service’s popularity but was later identified as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This occurrence likely influenced the decision to suspend new sign-ups for ChatGPT Plus.
ChatGPT Plus, which was introduced in February, is a membership plan that costs $20 per month. It offers customers faster response times, priority access to new features, and continuous access during peak hours. The plan garnered significant interest, especially when it was announced that Plus customers would have access to unique features like GPT-4 that were previously unavailable to other users.
The capacity issue coincided with Microsoft’s Ignite event, anticipated to heavily focus on artificial intelligence technology. Microsoft has made a substantial investment in OpenAI, valuing the company at over $13 billion. Despite this investment and incorporating AI into Bing, Microsoft’s market share still lags behind Google.
The German Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) has confirmed that the collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI does not violate merger control legislation, which is positive news for both companies and indicates compliance with these regulations.
OpenAI has been aggressively improving its technological capabilities to maintain an edge over its competitors. This includes the introduction of a business tier and the launch of DALL-E 3, an image generator. At the DevDay event, OpenAI showcased the GPT builder interface, a tool that allows users to create customized GPT agents without coding knowledge. This breakthrough is part of OpenAI’s broader goal of building a GPT store, where users can share and trade individual GPT bots. OpenAI plans to share revenues with developers of the most popular and valuable general knowledge tests (GPTs).
To encourage developers to adopt ChatGPT, OpenAI has provided financial incentives, such as offering $500 credits to participants of the DevDay event. These incentives have attracted Fortune 500 organizations to the platform, resulting in over 2 million developers utilizing it. Within just two months of its launch, the messaging app ChatGPT had already amassed an impressive 100 million monthly users.
The high adoption rate and incorporation of new tools have placed a strain on the platform powered by Microsoft Azure, leading to the temporary suspension of new sign-ups for ChatGPT Plus. Users can rest assured that they will still be able to receive alerts from OpenAI when subscriptions become available again. This decision came shortly after the platform experienced a worldwide distributed denial of service attack, impacting users globally.
