“At Capacity” Is this the end of ChatGPT free lunch?

Perhaps the free lunch for ChatGPT is “while supplies last”.

PSA has a free ChatGPT account, but of late, it’s often not been possible to pose prompts after logging in, because there’s a message saying it’s at capacity/ check back later.

This quote below was on their landing page today after logging in. Seems to say: people are waiting in line, so take your free prompts and then move right along to the pay function, so others can “give it a try”. As with other “free samples”, eventually the supplies run out.

Explain the status of ChatGPT as a pirate:

 

Ahoy mateys! We be havin’ a lot of scurvy dogs checkin’ out ChatGPT right now, and we be doin’ our best to make sure every landlubber gets a chance to give it a try. We be sorry for any inconvenience this be causin’, but we promise it’ll be worth the wait. Hang tight, and check back soon, ye swashbucklin’ scallywags! We be eager to see what ye think of our chatbot. Arrr!

 

It should be noted, that there’s a way to setup a pay ChatGPT account, which it seems many will be gravitating to now that free is often “fail”.

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Microsoft was an early VC funder of OpenAI, and is currently upping their investment by billions. Microsoft wants to integrate ChatGPT into their apps and while not publicly saying so, may try to also leverage their operating system install base.  Shades of long ago battles when Microsoft attempted to leverage placement on their OS startup screens to boost their “Internet Explorer” app?

As some have noted, ChatGPT requires ginormous server processing power to create it’s “answers”, and that is hugely expensive, and so this initial taste of using ChatGPT has been burning through OpenAI/ Microsoft cash while establishing its bonafides, and creating demand for its use. Where we go from here to get to an affordable AI-for-all practical business model is TBD, but OpenAI and Microsoft have been making plans.

But of course, so has Google, and other GiantTech entities: Is Apple eyeing an AI GPT version of “Ask Siri”? Amazon already has in-place ginormous server capacity/ processing power/ networks in the AWS .

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a comprehensive, evolving cloud computing platform provided by Amazon that includes a mixture of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and packaged-software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.