Nick Turley

But we realized that to be a product, you can't take the product down every time you're at capacity.

So we shipped subscriptions simply because it could shape the demand.

was a way of gracefully turning users away when we had to turn away someone and it felt like the fairest and most equitable way of doing so is saying, hey, you know, if you really need this product, pay a subscription fee and you got it.

Then we figured out how to make the product stable and we had the choice of do we keep the subscription thing or do we go back to free and we realized we had consistently more tech that we couldn't scale, GPT-4 being the first example because we had way too many free users to serve GPT-4 and we put it behind the plus plan.

And so the way we stumbled into subscriptions was sort of accidental by trying to just solve for the user.

And it felt like the right way at the time to provide maximal access to our tech.

Since then, we've had so many other breakthroughs, including test time compute, where you can scale up intelligence kind of as much as you want, more or less.

And it took us in the entire industry a little bit of time to turn that into product value, but we're here now.

Our power users want to use more and more and more intelligence.

yeah it's possible that you know in in the current era having an unlimited plan is like having an unlimited electricity plan you know it just doesn't make sense because like you know people may need a lot a lot of electricity and they're getting a lot of value out of that uh there's a reason you can't buy that right so um obviously i want to be really thoughtful about the way that we evolve our our plans and skews and subscriptions but yeah be incredibly subs

as mentioned you know our business model is will evolve in the north stars access right yeah we we would like to pick a um way of of of you know providing an off we want to provide an offering that maximizes um the number of people can who can access our most powerful tools i think for the longest time that has been subscriptions

Subscriptions are the downside of the fact that in many markets people don't have credit cards or they don't use credit cards to subscribe to software.

We're interested in other ways that can maximize access of the tech.

Our ads pilots are in that spirit.

We really view it as a tool of bringing ChatGPT and our intelligence most broadly to anyone around the world.

And it is an example of how we constantly need to evolve and figure out the best way to, you know, bring the demand in line with what we are able to offer.

I think we've talked about this several times in my history at OpenAI, and every time it came up, we said, if we were to do ads, we'd have to be really thoughtful about the way we do it.

So the first thing we did, you know, starting, you know, end of last year was to really engage the company on

If we put ads in ChatGPT, how should we approach it?

What should the principles weigh?