OpenAI has just introduced the ChatGPT for Academic Researchers program, bringing free access to the company's AI models to 100,000 researchers from selected universities and research institutes.
Participants will receive direct support from OpenAI, the right to use the latest GPT-6 Sol Pro model, and can also invite up to 4 collaborators from the same unit to participate in the program.
According to the plan, the first phase will have 10,000 researchers participating right in this summer, before expanding to 100,000 people by 2027. OpenAI said this is part of a commitment to invest more than 250 million USD by 2027 to support research and scientific discovery activities outside the company.
Currently, many researchers have used AI to analyze data and synthesize documents. The new program is considered a step to officialize the relationship between OpenAI and the academic community, similar to the ChatGPT Edu platform for educational institutions.
Faced with concerns that OpenAI may take advantage of research data to train AI, the company affirms that by default, participants' data will not be used to train models.
This is also not the first time OpenAI has targeted the academic community. In January, the company launched Prism, an AI tool to support working with scientific articles, helping to check citations, format documents and support the development of lesson plans for lecturers, which is now available to all ChatGPT accounts.
