OpenAI Reopens ChatGPT Plus Subscriptions to New Users

OpenAI has reopened its ChatGPT Plus subscriptions to new users after suspending sign-ups for a month.

However, subscribers choosing to use GPT-4 are limited to 40 messages every three hours. It is also unclear when users can access OpenAI’s latest and most powerful language model, GPT-4 Turbo.

The AI startup paused new subscriptions after it experienced soaring demand for the service following its first developer’s conference, DevDay. At last month’s event, OpenAI had announced new products, including building your own custom ChatGPT (GPTs) and the new GPT-4 Turbo model.

ChatGPT Plus, a premium service that costs $20 a month, already gives subscribers access to GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 as well as multimodal capabilities: it can accept and generate text, image and voice. OpenAI’s latest image generation model, DALL-E, is available through ChatGPT Plus, as are plug-ins from third parties such as Expedia and Instacart to give the AI chatbot added functionalities. Recently, OpenAI added speech capabilities to the free version of ChatGPT during the chaotic week in which CEO Sam Altman was fired and rehired.

OpenAI’s $10 million in safe AI grants

The AI startup, along with former Google Chair Eric Schmidt, also announced $10 million in grants for research on making AI safe for humanity. OpenAI believes AI superintelligence, in which AI systems surpass human intelligence, is achievable within 10 years. But these systems will not only bring benefits but “potentially pose large risks,” the company said in a blog post.

Related:OpenAI Suspends ChatGPT Plus Sign-Ups

Existing ways of curbing these risks – a so-called ‘alignment’ problem – will no longer be sufficient when it comes to dealing with superintelligence. For example, current techniques such as RLHF that depend on human supervision may no longer be sufficient, the researchers said.

The grants would fund research in areas including weak-to-strong generalization, interpretability, scalable oversight, among others.

For academic labs, nonprofits and individual researchers, the grants range from $100,000 to $2 million.

For graduate students, OpenAI is offering fellowships of $150,000 for one year (half as a stipend and half in compute and research funding).

Applicants do not need to have any experience in alignment. Apply by Feb. 18 and OpenAI promises to respond within four weeks after the deadline.