Like all good technology columnists, in the first couple of months of 2023, the original plan for this month’s article was to ask the machine learning application ChatGPT to write it for me, and then add a few sentences at the end to marvel at its language abilities and opine about its shortcomings. Except that at the eleventh hour, with the deadline fast approaching, the dreaded words appeared on screen: ‘ChatGPT is at capacity right now. Get notified when we’re back’, along with a joke about a sea otter. Coincidentally, at the same time, news broke that the parent company, OpenAI, is testing a premium subscription for access at the Douglas Adams-inspired price of $42 per month.

As remarkable as ChatGPT is, it’s still a beta product open to the public for testing, and that will change as testing comes to a close. Last December, one academic estimated the cost to run the platform to be in the region of $3 million per month, so it seems safe to say that that figure will only go up as it increases in popularity, and even with big investments from the likes of Microsoft, there will certainly be a change in the business model as the product matures.