When OpenAI launched Astra last week — a model whose advanced abilities prompted OpenAI president Greg Brockman to call it the start of the “AGI era” — it only gave a handful of enterprise customers access to give the company time to scale its compute capacity.
But now that it’s available to paying users, demand for Astra has soared to the point where OpenAI temporarily won’t take your money for its $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro plan, where Astra is available, because there’s not enough capacity to go around.
The company announced on Thursday it’s pausing new sign-ups and upgrades to the most expensive plan on the Pro tier, which provides 20 times the usage of the Plus tier below it. OpenAI’s head of product Thibault Sottiaux wrote on X that the reason behind the halt was that the $200 plan puts the most strain on the AI lab’s systems.
“We wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest access possible,” he said, adding that OpenAI is “working on adding more capacity” and that existing Pro accounts are unaffected.
A day earlier, Sottiaux said demand for Astra was “unprecedented” and warned that the company “might have to pause new Pro subscriptions for a bit” if it continued.
