OpenAI Suspends ChatGPT Plus Sign-Ups

OpenAI has suspended sign-ups for its premium ChatGPT service amid a surge demand.

CEO Sam Altman confirmed the news on X (Twitter) saying the pause was due to a surge in signs up to ChatGPT Plus in the wake of its DevDay event last week.

Altman said the wave of new users “exceeded our capacity” and that the pause was to “make sure everyone has a great experience.” The premium version of ChatGPT gives users access to OpenAI's most powerful language models, new beta features like image generation and has faster generation.

OpenAI did not say when it will be accepting new subscribers again for ChatGPT Plus. Altman only said the closure would last “for a bit,” but new users can still sign up and will be notified when the subscription reopens.

The news comes after OpenAI faced a swathe of new users that wanted to try out new features, including building your own custom ChatGPT, called GPTs, and the new GPT-4 Turbo model.

Last week, an attack from a reported Russian hacker group caused a two-day service interruption of ChatGPT.

OpenAI rolled out its $20-a-month ChatGPT Plus earlier this year in addition to the free version. There is also an Enterprise model and coming soon is a service in which OpenAI will work directly with companies to build custom large language models.

Related:OpenAI DevDay: GPT-4 Turbo, Custom ChatGPT and API Updates

To potentially help the running of its models is the news that OpenAI is using Microsoft’s new AI chips, called Maia.