OpenAI- the maker of popular ChatGPT chatbot has begun rolling out the paid version of the chatbot. The company, almost a week ago, announced its intention to launch a premium ChatGPT version for users and now is reportedly rolling out the same to some users.

According to a LinkedIn post from Linas Beliūnas (first spotted by Interesting Engineering), the OpenAI is now rolling out the premium version at $42 a month. The pro version is said to offer exclusive benefits like no downtime, faster response speed and priority access to new features.

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This could prove to be a significant source of revenue for OpenAI which is believed to be spending over $100,000 a day to only run ChatGPT. According to SimilarWeb(mentioned in Linas’s post), ChatGPT has 75 million unique monthly users and even if 10 per cent of them sign up for the premium version, it would generate a revenue of $3.6 billion  which is a profit of $2 billion a year at 60% profit margin.

Calling ChatGPT as the “best investment in tech ever” by Microsoft, Linas says that this profit is more than what companies like Uber, Spotify, Twitter and Airbnb made last year.

OpenAI, a week ago, announced that it was looking at a paid version of ChatGPT. While it did not talk about the pricing or availability of paid version, the announcement had a link to waitlist form for the paid ChatGPT hinting that the launch may not be very far.

“We’re starting to think about how to monetize ChatGPT (early thinking, nothing official to share yet). Our goal is to continue improving and maintaining the service, and monetization is one way we’re considering to ensure its long-term viability. We’re interested in chatting with some folks for ~15 min to get some early feedback. If you’re interested in chatting, please fill out this form (takes ~10 min to fill out),” read the announcement.

For the unawares, ChatGPT is a chatbot developed by OpenAI and backed by Microsoft. It is an AI chatbot that can conduct more “human-like” conversations over complex topics and across various verticals. The abbreviation stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer and was launched in November 2022.