OpenAI, the creator of the widely-used AI chatbot ChatGPT, has announced a temporary suspension of new signups for ChatGPT Plus, its premium version. While the fans of the AI chatbot wouldn’t feel glad about this news, the company has announced that it was forced to make this decision following a significant surge in the usage of the platform after OpenAI’s DevDay event.
CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, made the announcement on X(formerly Twitter), where he said that the platform’s exceeding capacity is the reason for pausing new registrations on November 15.
OpenAI announced the introduction of new application programming interfaces (APIs) during DevDay, which caught the attention of many ChatGPT users. As a result, the platform was bombarded with new signup requests. Sam Altman announced that the halting process of the new signups is only temporary as the company is focusing on providing the best user experience without facing any delays and interruptions in response to their queries made on the platform. He also said that people can still sign up to be notified regarding when the services will be resumed.
This temporary pause follows a period where many users witnessed interruptions in services, including outages and distributed denial-of-service attacks affecting ChatGPT. While the culprit behind the DDOS attack isn’t identified yet, the company is actively pursuing the source behind these attacks and is also trying to piece out the motive behind it so that it can actively counter such attempts made in the future.
The pause should mean that the developers who are utilizing generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) and the API may experience fewer issues enhancing the stability of the service. However, it may also result in a temporary reduction in new users accessing GPTs, as they are currently exclusive to ChatGPT Plus subscribers.
Since the introduction of GPTs, developers and companies have employed them for various purposes, such as graphic design on Canva, search marketers subscribed to ChatGPT Plus can explore GPTs for content assessment and learning SEO.
An important fact that should be noted here is that while ChatGPT boasts about having a huge user base with over 180 million active users, they are facing increased competition from rival firms who plan to take more share of the market. Platforms like Google’s Bard and Anthropic’s Claude 2 are some of the names that are coming up that can give tough competition to the OpenAI product, and most recently, Elon Musk has also announced the creation of his company’s new AI chatbot called Grok.
OpenAI has been expanding its horizons, recently partnering with startup Humane to launch Ai Pin, a physical AI device functioning as a wearable AI virtual assistant.
