ChatGPT completes one year without being able to meet demand – 11/29/2023 – Tech

While the board ousted Sam Altman as head of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, and investors and employees pushed to return the chief executive to the role, the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot faced another problem: demand for subscriptions to the service. The platform’s premium premium was such that the company had to suspend the entry of new users to the US$20 (R$97) plan in order to continue to work well. All this in the last two weeks of November.

The technology that won over the public completes, this Wednesday (30), its first year of ‘life’. The free platform capable of providing responses with the appearance of creativity attracted a record 100 million monthly users in 60 days — the previous mark was set by TikTok, which took nine months, according to an estimate from the Swiss bank UBS.

Based in San Francisco, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the world as a test. The free platform capable of providing answers with the appearance of creativity, however, attracted one million registered users in just five days — a record in the history of the internet, which left behind Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other giants.

This popularity and Altman’s ability with the public, on the one hand, catapulted a startup with a history of losses to a market valuation of around US$90 billion at the end of 2022, according to the Bloomberg agency.

On the other hand, the high demand for ChatGPT’s abilities has thrown OpenAI into a race for computing power — in practice, for Microsoft’s Azure supercomputers and Nvidia’s graphics processing units.

Microsoft, in fact, is OpenAI’s biggest investor: at the beginning of the year alone it directed US$10 billion (around R$48 billion) to the startup, a large part of which was spent on Microsoft’s own computers.

It was these investments that ended the ChatGPT queue. At the beginning of the year, it was almost impossible to access the platform on the first try, due to server limitations.

For the free user of the text-generating artificial intelligence, this was the only significant change, besides updating the bot’s knowledge to facts up to January 2022. Initially, the data was limited to April 2021.

In an interview with Sheet, OpenAI vice president responsible for ChatGPT, Srinivas Narayanan, stated that there are no plans to update the free version of ChatGPT in the near term. “We are very happy to welcome millions of people every day, but our priority now is our customers.”

The non-subscriber user contributes data to the company about their interaction with the bot, which can be used to improve the service.

Today, the paid version of ChatGPT has gained several exclusive features. In addition to having more powerful artificial intelligence, better at mathematics and capable of delivering more succinct texts, the platform is equipped with audio and image understanding capabilities — you can see and listen. It also creates images, according to user instructions, and can read generated texts — conversation.

More than that, it was the announcement of the possibility of creating customized versions of ChatGPT that made the search for the platform’s premium package skyrocket. “The idea of ​​allowing people to create their own GPTs. The user can use their data and train their own artificial intelligence capable of more specific tasks”, says computer science professor at PUC-SP and AI specialist Diogo Cortiz .

The New York Times, for example, created a GPT that answers technology questions based on information from the newspaper.

In this context, the artificial intelligence startup managed to remain a prominent actor, even after Google, Meta and Amazon launched their own language models competing with ChatGPT — Bard, LLaMA and Amazon Q, respectively.

OpenAi, however, still needs to deal with criticism of the risk involved in developing artificial intelligence. The startup has already been poorly evaluated for processing excessive amounts of data, for outsourcing services in Africa, for the risk it poses to the job market and for disrespecting the copyrights of artists, film studios, music labels and newspapers.

You can’t say it was out of ignorance, given that Chief Executive Sam Altman wrote in 2021 that artificial general intelligence, with human capabilities, would transform the economy from head to toe.

Remember the history of ChatGPT below.