You no longer have to sign up for an account before using the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, after a move this week by OpenAI, the company behind the tool. The change results in access to a new, more limited version of ChatGPT, and it’s meant to broaden the tool’s reach beyond its 100 million weekly users as OpenAI battles rivals and stakes out territory on the AI frontier. The change could lead to improvements in ChatGPT, but it raises concerns as well.
The new version of ChatGPT is the same model that was previously available in the free tier — GPT-3.5 — but with a few more restrictions, according to a company spokesperson. The change makes it easier to start conversations with the bot, the spokesperson said, adding that OpenAI’s mission is to “make tools like ChatGPT broadly available.”
That’s a mission presumably shared by the companies behind rivals like Claude, Copilot, Firefly and Gemini, which are also keen to convince consumers to give their tools a shot in a field without much, if any, oversight. As a result, it’s a moment in which we’re moving toward greater accessibility to generative AI — but also greater responsibility for users.
Andrew Frank, a distinguished analyst at research firm Gartner, called this the “land grab phase of AI adoption.”
“In that phase, with any technology, the idea is to get as many users as accustomed to using your product as you can, and price is no object,” he said. “You really just want to get the territory settled first and then figure out how to monetize it.”
Frank noted OpenAI dropping its account requirement signals that “they do perceive more of a competitive threat than they did a year ago when this all was so new.”
As of April 1, anyone can visit chat.openai.com and begin interacting with ChatGPT 3.5. OpenAI is rolling out the access gradually, the company said in a blog post.
Logged-in users will be able to do more with ChatGPT, like save and review chat history, share chats, and unlock features like voice…
Read the full article here