In addition to GPT-4, the paid tier provides early access to new features. Introduced in the U.S. in February after being in early preview for a few weeks, the ChatGPT Plus subscription costs $20 a month, and lets you use ChatGPT during peak hours, grants priority access to new features and improvements, and gives you responses quicker.

OpenAI will also continue to offer the free version of ChatGPT, although with a few restrictions, on its website. You can also use ChatGPT through the Bing search engine.

Users were initially put on a waitlist to access ChatGPT Plus, but shortly after it was released, OpenAI made the service available to everyone. The service aims to help OpenAI monetize ChatGPT, which has gone viral for its AI-based conversational capabilities in recent months.

Understandably, OpenAI has also had to grapple with some controversies and bans due to ChatGPT’s nature and the sophistication of its human-like responses, which can often be mistaken for responses written by a person. Its capabilities even attracted OpenAI’s early investor Microsoft to integrate the experience within its services. Competitors, including Baidu and Google, have also started to build similar conversational AI experiences.