OpenAI has revealed that users will no longer require an account to access ChatGPT, their popular AI conversation platform. However, this change only applies to ChatGPT, as other OpenAI products like DALL-E 3 will still require an account for access. This decision underscores OpenAI’s commitment to making AI accessible while maintaining value for premium offerings.
In a recent blog post, OpenAI stated, “We’re rolling this out gradually, with the aim to make AI accessible to anyone curious about its capabilities.” This highlights their dedication to expanding access to AI technologies.
Since its launch at the end of 2022, ChatGPT has garnered a global audience, requiring users to register for an OpenAI account. Its immense popularity has made ChatGPT one of the fastest-growing services in history. As a result, OpenAI introduced subscription-based access to premium products like DALL-E 3 and advanced models, while account registration remained necessary for features such as saving chat history, sharing conversations, and engaging in voice interactions.
OpenAI revealed that ChatGPT has a weekly user base exceeding 100 million individuals across 185 countries. Despite facing competition from platforms like Google’s Gemini, ChatGPT remains the most visited AI chatbot site, with an estimated 1.6 billion visitors in February. However, there was a slight decline from the peak in May 2023, when visits surged to over 1.8 billion.
Alongside this announcement, OpenAI also introduced “additional content safeguards for this experience,” aimed at reducing prompts across various categories. However, the specifics of these categories were not disclosed. Notably, users, including those without accounts, can still opt out of model training, giving them control over the use of their interactions in refining OpenAI’s AI models.
