In an effort to increase rivalry with rival Anthropic for supremacy in higher education, OpenAI has made its premium ChatGPT Plus membership free for all college students in the US and Canada through the end of May.
As they study for final exams, the offer grants millions of students free access to OpenAI's $20/month premium service, which offers features like voice interaction, image generation, GPT-4o (OpenAI's most sophisticated large language model), and sophisticated research tools that aren't available in the free version.
Students can use SheerID to confirm their enrollment status. Following confirmation, users will be taken to ChatGPT, where their account will instantly activate a two-month subscription.
A credit for the free period will also be given to eligible current ChatGPT Plus members.
The action is part of a larger trend in the way AI is being used in education. Habits are just as important as tools.
The timing indicates a calculated chess move in the competition for the education market by the AI sector.
Anthropic had just the day before introduced "Claude for Education," which included a dedicated "Learning Mode" that guides students through challenges using Socratic questioning instead than giving them straight answers.
To offer campus-wide access, Anthropic concurrently announced collaborations with Northeastern University, London School of Economics, and Champlain College.
These announcements are reminiscent of the browser wars of the 1990s, when Netscape and Internet Explorer competed for users' loyalty by providing free software.
Today's AI startups that are grabbing students' attention now could lead to workplace adoption later.
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Students who incorporate Claude or ChatGPT into their academic processes now will probably promote these same tools in their future workplaces, possibly influencing business decisions that might result in billions of dollars in recurring income.