According to OpenAI, users of their popular AI conversation platform ChatGPT will no longer require an account to use it. But this is limited to ChatGPT only; other OpenAI products, like DALL-E 3, will still require an account to access, highlighting the company’s dedication to democratizing AI while maintaining value for premium products.
In an earlier blog post, OpenAI stated, “We’re rolling this out gradually, with the aim to make AI accessible to anyone curious about its capabilities,” highlighting their commitment to increasing accessibility to AI technologies.
ChatGPT has captured the attention of users worldwide since its launch at the end of 2022, and it now requires them to create an OpenAI account. ChatGPT shot to the top of the list of services with the fastest growth rates in history due to its extraordinary popularity. Later, DALL-E 3 and advanced models became available through OpenAI’s subscription-based service, but features like chat history storage, conversation sharing, and voice interactions still required an account.
Over 100 million people use ChatGPT each week, according to OpenAI, with 185 countries represented. As Google’s Gemini makes clear, ChatGPT is still the most popular AI chatbot website. It had an estimated 1.6 billion visitors in February, slightly less than the peak of May 2023 (when visits reached over 1.8 billion). Still, it faces fierce competition.
Simultaneously with this declaration, OpenAI declared the deployment of “extra content protections for this encounter,” with the intention of reducing prompts in a wider range of categories—though the details of these categories remain unclear. Interestingly, users without accounts can still choose not to participate in model training, giving ChatGPT users control over how their interactions are used to improve OpenAI’s AI models.