Microsoft-backed OpenAI has released a paid version of its popular AI chatbot ChatGPT.  Known as ‘ChatGPT Professional’, it is now available at $42 per month. The research lab announced its plans to monetize ChatGPT a week ago. 

The upgraded ChatGPT paid version is an experimental paid version that offers several benefits. These include availability during high demand, no blackout windows, priority access to new features, a faster response rate, no throttling, and increased API request limits. The features and pricing of the plan may vary depending on user needs and agreements made with OpenAI. The ChatGPT Professional plan is not publicly accessible and interested users can join a waitlist by visiting the provided link on OpenAI’s Discord server.

Since its release last November, the LLM-based ChatGPT has garnered widespread popularity for generating texts and ideas from scratch, including explaining complex concepts, writing code, crafting poems, etc.

In a recent interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed that the team is working on launching a video model soon, though he emphasized that he “wouldn’t want to make a competent prediction about when”

AI War: ChatGPT Vs Google

A month into ChatGPT’s release in December 2022, Google expressed concern over the growing popularity of the model and its potential impact on its ad revenue. According to Sridhar Ramaswamy, a former leader of Google’s ad team, the use of ChatGPT could lead to fewer clicks on Google links that include ads, which is a significant source of revenue for the company. In 2021, Google’s ad revenue was reported to be $208 billion, representing 81% of Alphabet’s overall revenue.

According to reports, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been in conversation about the company’s response to ChatGPT. They reportedly plan to release more than 20 AI-based products this year, with a demonstration of an AI search chatbot being one of them in its annual I/O event in May. 

Read more: ChatGPT is Great, but Competing with Google Takes More than That