Have to assume they literally can't get enough GPUs to respond to demand. Wonder if $20/mo is even profitable for them?
It probably is. I'd bet for 99.99% of their users, simply using the API directly would be much cheaper. The ChatGPT premium subscription is overpriced if you compare it to the cost of each API call.. at least according to OpenAI's pricing.
It’s pretty easy to spend a couple of dollars with a few interactions with the API. I tried one of those langchain type agents and it spent $2 in 10 minutes. My guess is they make more money per user from the API than they do from ChatGPT.
I have found Bing and Bard a lot more efficient for tasks where you need to look stuff up on the web, probably because they both have local access to a crawler index. They do tend to need more guidance though.