USC among top college users of ChatGPT, renews OpenAI contract for $2.5M

COLUMBIA — University of South Carolina students and staff gobbled up 30 million credits on Chat GPT last school year — 30 times what it was contracted for — making it one of the top college users on the platform in the country.

“The use has been through the roof,” said Brice Bible, the schools chief of information technology.

As a result, students will now find guardrails on how often they can use the more advanced features of this developing technology as they return to campus this fall.

“I can tell you the (USC) president loves it. The provost and the deans are like, go get ‘em. Our faculty are really at the cutting edge of using these tools,” Bible said. “We didn’t want to stop that.”

But as the school inked a new contract with ChatGPT, developer OpenAI had to make some changes.

Some 25,000 USC students and employees have signed up for a school ChatGPT Enterprise account.

That comes to about half of the school’s combined 40,000 students and more than 8,000 staff.

Most of the use involved basic prompts entered into the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot. Users of the platform’s free version can make 10 of those types of queries every five hours.

But between 3,000 and 5,000 users, about three-fifths of them students, used ChatGPT to conduct what’s known as “deep research,” Bible said.