ChatGPT Plus available in South Africa
OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT Plus is available in South Africa.
The company first announced its ChatGPT Plus subscription service at the start of February.
Initially, only users from the United States who had signed up for the waitlist were offered access.
In a notice on the ChatGPT website, OpenAI said that subscribers would receive the following features:
- General access to ChatGPT, even during peak times
- Faster response times
- Priority access to new features and improvements
ChatGPT uses Stripe as its payment gateway, and South Africans will pay the same price as subscribers in the US — $20 (R358) per month.
You need a credit or debit card to sign up.
OpenAI started experimenting with a ChatGPT subscription plan in January, when some users were offered the ability to sign up for ChatGPT Pro for $42 per month.
“Our goal is to continue improving and maintaining the service, and monetisation is one way we’re considering to ensure its long-term viability,” OpenAI said.
“We love our free users and will continue to offer free access to ChatGPT. By offering this subscription pricing, we will be able to help support free access availability to as many people as possible.”
The launch of ChatGPT Plus in South Africa follows shortly after Microsoft showed off integration between OpenAI’s language model and its Bing search engine.
Dubbed “new Bing”, Microsoft announced that it would use version 3.5 of OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT–3.5) to provide better search results.
This includes using the language model to upgrade Bing’s core search algorithm, in addition to generating text responses to queries.
“[This] led to the largest jump in relevance in two decades,” Microsoft stated.
“With this AI model, even basic search queries are more accurate and more relevant.”
The new Bing is not generally available, and Microsoft currently only has a set of canned queries people can try on the search engine’s front page.
Those interested in trying out the new functionality can sign up for a waitlist.
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