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Update
  • Added update on new subscriptions

"Thanks for your patience while we found more GPUs," said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. The company is once again accepting new subscribers to ChatGPT Plus.

Just under a month ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a short-term freeze on accepting new subscribers to ChatGPT Plus. Shortly after the announcement of new features and the GPT 4 Turbo model, demand had increased so much that there was not enough GPU capacity.

Today, back at the helm after a few days of being OpenAI's former CEO, Altman has announced that the company has re-enabled ChatGPT Plus subscriptions.

Image: Twitter.com, Sam Altman

New GPUs have been found, jokes Altman. In addition to access to GPT-4-Turbo, ChatGPT Plus also offers access to DALL-E 3, the code interpreter, and other advanced features. A few days ago, OpenAI also promised to investigate the growing number of complaints that GPT-4 has become "lazy".

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Original article from 13 December 2023

Altman announced on Twitter.com that following the announcements made at the Dev Day developer conference, demand has increased to the point that it is currently exceeding capacity.

As a result, new subscriptions to ChatGPT-Plus are currently unavailable. Only the Plus subscription provides access to OpenAI's new GPT-4 Turbo model.

Image: Twitter.com, Sam Altman

Immediately after DevDay, OpenAI experienced outages. According to the company, a DDoS attack on the service also played a role.

ChatGPT traffic recovers and approaches record-level

After a decline over the summer, ChatGPT's web traffic has recovered and is now within ten percent of its April 2023 peak worldwide and within four percent in the US.

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According to Similarweb, this could be related to the resumption of school in the US, as students are increasingly using ChatGPT to help with homework. Another possible reason could be the improvements that OpenAI has made to the product.

In May 2023, ChatGPT peaked at 1.8 billion visits worldwide before dropping to 1.4 billion in August. In September, the number rose again to around 1.5 billion, and based on the last few weeks, it could reach 1.7 billion in October.

ChatGPT is far ahead of Google Bard and the chat platform character.ai, in which Google is likely to invest, in terms of weekly traffic. | Image: Similarweb

Usage of the Android app is also growing globally every month. The app recently received an update for voice recognition and playback, making it a competitor to Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant.

Access to the OpenAI Android app is also increasing. | Image: Similarweb

In the US, ChatGPT's web traffic peaked in April with 187.5 million visits, fell to 137.4 million in June and rose again to 164.3 million in September. Based on the last few weeks, traffic could rise to over 195 million visits in October, setting a new record.

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The data shows that ChatGPT is no longer on the steep growth path of the first few months.

However, ChatGPT is by no means in decline, as was sometimes assumed after the brief summer dip. In the medium term, it remains to be seen whether new features such as the GPTs or the new GPT-4 Turbo, which is faster but not necessarily more capable than the original GPT-4 model from March, can generate new growth.

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Summary
  • Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, reported in November that demand for ChatGPT had exceeded the company's capacity. OpenAI is now accepting new subscriptions to ChatGPT-Plus.
  • ChatGPT web traffic has recovered from a summer dip and is now approaching the record levels of April 2023 globally and in the US.
  • The increased demand could be due to the resumption of school in the US and product improvements as students increasingly use ChatGPT for homework help
Online journalist Matthias is the co-founder and publisher of THE DECODER. He believes that artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the relationship between humans and computers.
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