Understand why OpenAI blocked new subscriptions to ChatGPT Plus

For more than a week, ChatGPT Plus subscriptions have been blocked and are not expected to return. When we take into account that this suspension happened days after the announcement of a series of new features for the artificial intelligence model, the story begins to take shape: the great interest on the part of the public caused an overload on OpenAI’s side, which suspended the arrival of new subscribers.

The ChatGPT Plus subscription costs US$20 per month, approximately R$100 in direct conversion at today’s rate (21). However, anyone who wants to pay to have access to extra resources must join a waiting list that has no scheduled start date.

It hasn’t been a very easy November for OpenAI. After drawing attention to the news and additional capabilities of its AIs, it dominated technology news last weekend due to drastic changes in its management, with the dismissal of then-CEO Sam Altman being just the trigger for a series of changes sudden riots and even a workers’ riot.

New features for ChatGPT had the opposite effect

It was Sam Altman himself, in fact, who announced the suspension of subscriptions on November 15th. The then CEO of OpenAI cited as the reason for the measure the additional interest of users in the platform’s extra features and the large volume of use, both consequences of the announcements made by the organization the previous week.

During the first edition of DevDay, an event aimed at artificial intelligence developers, ChatGPT’s biggest update was announced to the world. The GPT-4 language model can now be used to create robots fed by specific data, which after training can be used for purposes beyond their initial capabilities.

Among the examples displayed by OpenAI are a therapy chatbot, a specific model for using the image editing platform Canva, robots capable of writing books, generating QR Codes or even helping to formulate recipes.

OpenAI also announced the ability to access the web through GPT-4 to generate updated results in real time, a chatbot store and integrations with other artificial intelligence models. All paid features, of course, which explains people’s excitement to become subscribers.

“We are pausing new ChatGPT Plus subscriptions for a while 🙁 The high volume of usage following Devday has exceeded our capacity and we want to ensure everyone has a great experience. You can still sign up to be notified in the app when subscriptions reopen.”

What should have been a rain of money, however, ended up reminding us of the early days of ChatGPT, when the tool presented instabilities and downtime due to overload of users. The Plus package, in fact, also emerged as an alternative to keep the platform working even in these cases.

Use of the paid version remains active and appears to have supported the high flow of people following the announcements, but the same cannot be said for the payments platform itself. During DevDay, OpenAI announced that 100 million people access ChatGPT weekly and, although it is not yet possible to know what increase was recorded after the announcements, it seems significant and capable of affecting the company’s operations.

Parallel account market

An old cybersecurity problem gained even more strength with the disruption of subscriptions, fake applications and criminals’ interest in insecure profiles on the AI ​​platform. While it is not possible to become a new paying user, old users continue to have trouble-free access to the platform, including its new features, which has led to an increase in the sale of profiles by third parties.

“ChatGPT Plus subscriptions were paused by Open AI. A parallel market of subscriptions for sale on eBay quickly exploded. Some people are paying up to three times more than selling directly. We live in interesting times.”

This parallel market involves everything from “renting” accounts for lower amounts, on a temporary basis, to shared accounts or permanent access. In some cases, prices can reach triple what is officially charged by OpenAI, which prohibits this type of commerce in its terms of use. Therefore, profiles that did this can be blocked at any time, not to mention the risk of possible exposure to scams.

When will ChatGPT Plus return to normal?

There is still no forecast for the return of the option to subscribe to ChatGPT Plus. Above this, however, is reputational risk, with a possible breach of trust in OpenAI caused by the events of this extremely difficult November.