HACKER Q&A
📣 behnamoh

Conspiracy Theory; OpenAI intentionally makes ChatGPT unresponsive/slow?


The paid version was announced a few days ago and one of the features got my attention:

    Available even when demand is high
I am now more confident that ChatGPT's "network error" or "exceptionally high demand" errors are in OpenAI's best interest as they motivate users to upgrade to the paid version.

  👤 catasaurus Accepted Answer ✓
The paid version probably includes better servers and hardware for your ChatGPT instance, but OpenAI intentionally creating demand errors? I would think its more along the lines of they are using cheap servers to allow everyone to use ChatGPT and thus when too many people are trying to use this massive machine learning model (175B parameters), the wait time goes up and up as the models have more and more inputs to respond to.

Also most freemium platforms do try to motivate their users to upgrade to paid plans.

Spotify: No downloading music without paid plan, etc

AWS: Free tier but then you have to pay

Youtube: Ads but if you pay no ads

And on and on

👤 sharemywin
If you mean they probably have a fixed budget for the cloud/hosting costs for they're free tier I would imagine yes.

But I also think the demand caught them off guard.

I've also gotten too many requests try again in an hour.

Too me I've gotten less and less of the network errors. so I'm not sure they aren't trying to figure it out.

But it would suck if they ran out of money and had to shut the thing down.

👤 yuppie_scum
Any cloud expense they pay for for a free user is nothing but a marketing expense.