On Saturday, some users noticed a new "Upgrade plan" option in ChatGPT's web interface, which, when clicked, prompts you with two plans. The free plan allows you to continue using ChatGPT as before, but the new professional plan allows you to expand the capabilities of the AI chatbot for more consistent availability, faster response and priority access to new features.

At the beginning of January, we wrote about Microsoft's 10 billion investment in OpenAI, the company that owns the popular artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT. The new investment round roughly doubles OpenAI's valuation from the previous investment round completed in 2021, when OpenAI was valued at approximately $14 billion. OpenAI has already generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue, in part by selling its AI software to developers. Microsoft will reportedly get a 75% stake in the company's profits until its investment is recouped, after which it will take a 49% stake in the company.

According to Tom Goldstein, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, a single NVIDIA A100 GPU can run a model with 3 billion parameters in about 6 ms. This means that a single NVIDIA A100 GPU would take 350ms to write a single word on ChatGPT. However, since ChatGPT version 3.5 has more than 175 billion parameters, at least five A100 GPUs are required to load the model and generate the text. ChatGPT can produce around 15-20 words per second, so a server with at least 8 A100 GPUs is required. Therefore, according to his estimates, the cost of running OpenAI can exceed $100,000 per day or $3 million per month. So it was clear that the ChatGPT service would eventually be charged.

The subscription is supposed to cost $42 a month, which is more than a Netflix subscription, but on the other hand, the ChatGPT platform offers the potential for automation and service creation, which could attract many companies. According to SimilarWeb's estimate, ChatGPT has 75 million monthly users. If just 10% of them subscribe to the premium service, OpenAI could potentially earn $3.46 billion in its first year. At a 60% profit margin, that would mean an impressive $2 billion in annual profit.