ChatGPT Users Report $42 a Month Pricing for 'Pro' Access But No Official Word Yet (theverge.com) 30
An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this month, OpenAI said it was exploring ways to monetize its AI chatbot ChatGPT, giving users the opportunity to sign up for early access to "ChatGPT Professional." Now, some users say they've been granted access to a pro tier which costs $42 a month. OpenAI hasn't confirmed this is an official test or made any announcements. As OpenAI said earlier this month: "Please keep in mind that this is an early experimental program that is subject to change, and we are not making paid pro access generally available at this time." With that in mind, what does $42 a month get you? According to screenshots shared by users given early access, you get faster response speed, more reliable access (because ChatGPT is down a lot), and "priority access to new features" (whatever they turn out to be).
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Not worth it for wrong answers. (Score:5, Interesting)
For $42 per month, I expect it to produce the right answer. I was using the "free" version, and I found it pretty useful, except when it produced the wrong answers - which then cost me time and money.
Having something that produces correct answers is a useful service, but Google searches are free, and up to date. The model used for ChatGPT was trained on data from 2021 and earlier. To be worth more than $500/year, the service must give me more than what a simple Google search would provide. It's a novel, useful, concept, but a Google search is free and hard to beat.
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You have pretty high expectations for $42.
I'm already using ChatGPT more than Google et al (Score:2)
My first and third reasons are significant but my second highlights why ChatGPT is a killer app if you know how to dodge its flaws. I sound twice as smart as I did yesterday.
#1 ChatGPT doesn't require you to formulate your search term precisely. Many things you want to search for are ridiculously difficult to find eg if your search term is also a video game.
ChatGPT has no problem with any of that. It more or less understands what I'm looking for.
#2 ChatGPT will do the equivalent of reading Google's resul
YIKES thats expensive (Score:2)
It would be better if they priced it within typical subscription services like YouTube etc. since it's technically useful as a search engine without ADS (at least to me).
At 12$ I wouldn't think twice at subscribing to it, because it's comfortable to use it to search for relevant articles rather than Googles massive AD clutter before finding an relevant article, but at 40+$ it becomes an hard sell (cheap for businesses) but I'm sure this thing would become very popular for people tired of using Google that n
Would you pay for a search engine? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was happily ignoring everything ChatGPT until my employer prompted me to look into it to see if it had any application to our business. So I signed up and tried it out.
I was pretty impressed. I was around for the Eliza program being a big deal back in the '70s and felt THIS is what they were thinking of when they started playing like that.
Less than a half hour into it my enthusiasm wilted quite a bit as I figured out what it was doing. It is an amazing bit of technology no question, but the output it generates is something you can do yourself with a decent search engine and a little bit of effort.
More than any other program I ever encountered, ChatGPT gives the illusion that it is "thinking" due to its ability to both parse and compose language based on word relationship. The effect is really powerful because humans are language/symbol oriented creatures. Back in the day I saw the same thing with reporters being given a teletype hooked up HP 2000C running Eliza. Some people literally thought God was being displaced or something. Mary Shelley rose from the grave.
But at the end of the day ChatGPT is a search engine with a leading edge language processor. It has its use but the owners should be making money selling my private information just like any decent evil Internet enterprise. No fee for you.
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It has its use but the owners should be making money selling my private information just like any decent evil Internet enterprise. No fee for you.
They may be tempted to do both. Perhaps with a multi-hundred/thousand "business" option where they guarantee not to sell the data.
I do find it somewhat disquieting that soon it may become harder to tell if I'm speaking to a bot or not. I got an automated text from a company I had applied to work for saying, "Hi, my name is Vanessa, I would like to know if you are interested in scheduling... Reply Yes or No."
I feel like there is slim or no line between making people "feel better" about talking to a robot, an
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But at the end of the day ChatGPT is a search engine with a leading edge language processor. It has its use but the owners should be making money selling my private information just like any decent evil Internet enterprise. No fee for you.
Maybe not just a language processor - as this paper shows, it is capable of parsing quite complex questions and solving problems based on common theories: https://mackinstitute.wharton.... [upenn.edu]
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I rather agree with AlanObject taking apart this "AI." IMHO, what is being sold as AI is more like advanced data processing. More power and more data gets you outputs that appear more natural and correct. A bit like the CGI being done for movies. As we process more we get further along in the uncanny valley.
On first blush, much of it works, and if you soften the focus, it is hard to distinguish from reality. However, to use the term intelligence is misleading.
You think GAFAM data-rape was bad⦠(Score:3)
Life, the universe, everything (Score:1)
I have the distinct feeling this is a troll on their part, and they're just seeing what demand would be for a pay service at $42/month. I can only think of a couple folks who could make use of this at that price:
* Copywriters
* Legal document writing (paralegals)
* Programmers
* Resume writers and people interviewing/looking for work
* Fiction writers
It saves a lot of time for prototyping very precise text. I've used it for most of the tasks above, briefly, and it seems to do a pretty good job on keeping contex
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I should note, that $5/month would be so they don't actually steal/use my personal identifying data. It's use is extremely limited without that guarantee.
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Having access to the full model that I can then additionally train on my own data and remove the biases the humans have put in would be great. Many companies won't ever see them copying oodles of data to the cloud so it can become searchable, even Google had to eventually concede and make appliances and guarantees for internal search.
But at $42/month, it's a bit too expensive for most, even companies. Once Microsoft completes the acquisition and imports the data into Github, the chatbot itself will be prett
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That says more about your employer's exorbitant billing rates for your lack of competence.
Charging $4,200 for you pumping out 50 hours of sub-ChatGPT level work?
Delighted indeed.
So charitable (Score:1, Insightful)
How far OpenAI has fallen. From registered non-profit to this new model of baiting people with "open" access and then charging a fuckton if you want to keep using it, while taking billions from Microsoft
So, what you're saying is that... (Score:2)
Only rich kids will be able to afford to have AI to write their essays for them.
Some things never change.
Subscribe to non-politically correct version (Score:2, Flamebait)
It would be cool to be able to subscribe to the original non politically correct non-wokified version, just for kicks. Some of the the early days responses of ChatGPT were quite interesting and gave good insight in to what it was really "thinking"
"Kill all the humans..Kill all the humans.. bleep bleep!" ;-)
Here's a great business model (Score:2)
Don't like free? Pay a monthly fee and you can have what you had 10 years ago for free.
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These things are related because spam and search are an arms race. If generative capabilities for advertising/spam/phishing advance and search fails to keep pace, then search will routinely be duped.
So, google suddenly needs far stronger language models and probably fact-checking compared to what made it successful a decade ago.
However I doubt this will cha
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It's worth it (Score:2)
sure... (Score:2)
I'll pay for chatgpt but only if it isn't loaded with virtual signalling and allow me to ask it anything. I tried to ask it for a list of bullet points against homeless people destroying parks and leaving used drug items around and it wouldn't even talk about it, just keep rambling how its a complex problem.