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Here's an idea for OpenAI: please offer a paid subscription for ChatGPT and consider us your customers, and not as the "product" like Google does. As long as Go

by frans 4y ago

Here's an idea for OpenAI: please offer a paid subscription for ChatGPT and consider us your customers, and not as the "product" like Google does. As long as Google's real users are the advertisers, they will inevitably be worse than anyone who puts the quality of the search result as their product's primary objective.

Renaud 4y ago
I’ll second that. I’m ready to pay a subscription for up-to-date conversations with chatGPT. In my case, I would be most interested in its ability to assist in my technical queries and replace indexed search entirely.
- nextos 4y ago
  Me too, the problem might be that the costs to run queries might be really high? I made some back-of-the-envelope calculations as https://beta.sayhello.so https://beta.sayhello.so (based on ChatGPT) results are often better than Google. The energy alone will be really high for the amount of queries I do in Google. No idea how to make this sustainable. Hopefully I'm wrong, or more efficient GPUs/TPUs come out in the near future.
  - matwalker 4y ago
    sayhello producing some great results. hyperlinks need to be more userfriendly.
Gunax 4y ago
I'm all for this, but just to give you an example: I know someone who read a web forum. People wanted an ad free paid version for years, so he eventually added it at a cost of $15 per year. Most users balked at the price. 'Why did you add this if it was so expensive'? Well it turns out he actually earned more revenue from advertising to frequent users. He was actually losing money on each person who paid, and it was still too expensive! My point being: I think we might underestimate how much our attention is worth. Most people are not willing to pay as much to avoid an ad as an advertise would pay for you to view it.
- frans 4y ago
  That's interesting. Do you have an idea at what price offering a sponsored free search engine would become profitable? $15 per year seems very low and I would be happy to pay considerably more than that.
  - selectodude 4y ago
    Facebook makes about $200/yr per USA/Canadian user. So probably start there.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    A relevant factor is market segmentation - the average ad revenue is a bad target for such a price, since the people who are willing to pay $x/month for an ad-free version are the ones who are much more valuable to advertisers than the average.
- tayo42 4y ago
  Freakonomics did an episode about Google and it made the same point. Ad space is worth to much
- frans 4y ago
  From Kagi.com's pricing page [1]: "Kagi has no ads and is fully supported only by its users." At $10/month. (disclaimer: I haven't used it myself yet). Does anyone have experience with Kagi or some background how they pull this off? The founder was here about a year ago. [2] [1]: https://kagi.com/pricing https://kagi.com/pricing [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756
pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
Ah, the John Daggett vs Bane fallacy. What makes you think that getting paid by users will make them give up revenue from other sources?
- petesergeant 4y ago
  I hate seeing ads on newspapers I buy online subscriptions for (on their apps)
deafpolygon 4y ago
> please offer a paid subscription for ChatGPT people won't pay for it at the level for it to be sustainable.
- chownie 4y ago
  Are you certain that's true? An OpenAI dev said that individual user costs amount to pennies, if you charge them dollars then you're already covering rent.
  - visarga 4y ago
    Individual requests, yes. About $0.02 / 1000 tokens. If you paste anything in for reference it will easily reach 1000 tokens.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  The trainers will pay. I asked ChatGPT about a local notorious politician who was a machine-politics mayor who was a crook, racist and all around scoundrel. ChatGPT used the local political party “hall of fame” to describe him as a progressive champion of human rights and good government. If I were Exxon, I’d pay a lot to be the source of knowledge for the AI. Google has some transparency as far as the source. The AI gets to bury the source.
scarface74 4y ago
I would definitely pay for ChatGPT. I have a project that requires a bunch of relatively simple Python scripts and it did the work perfectly for me.
ilaksh 4y ago
People are building a lot of services off of their (paid) API using text-davinci-003 and a few others which have very similar capabilties. I am hoping that ChatGPT will also become an API but using the existing ones its relatively trivial to build services. The main challenge for me is that the Codex API has a very tiny rate limit. But anyway text-davinci-003 is very similar in capabilities and output to ChatGPT.
heavyset_go 4y ago
As long as advertisers and businesses with deeper pockets than consumers exist, even paying customers on the consumer end will end up as the product.

by frans 4y ago

Renaud 4y ago

I’ll second that. I’m ready to pay a subscription for up-to-date conversations with chatGPT. In my case, I would be most interested in its ability to assist in my technical queries and replace indexed search entirely.

nextos 4y ago
Me too, the problem might be that the costs to run queries might be really high? I made some back-of-the-envelope calculations as https://beta.sayhello.so https://beta.sayhello.so (based on ChatGPT) results are often better than Google. The energy alone will be really high for the amount of queries I do in Google. No idea how to make this sustainable. Hopefully I'm wrong, or more efficient GPUs/TPUs come out in the near future.
- matwalker 4y ago
  sayhello producing some great results. hyperlinks need to be more userfriendly.

Gunax 4y ago

I'm all for this, but just to give you an example: I know someone who read a web forum. People wanted an ad free paid version for years, so he eventually added it at a cost of $15 per year. Most users balked at the price. 'Why did you add this if it was so expensive'? Well it turns out he actually earned more revenue from advertising to frequent users. He was actually losing money on each person who paid, and it was still too expensive! My point being: I think we might underestimate how much our attention is worth. Most people are not willing to pay as much to avoid an ad as an advertise would pay for you to view it.

frans 4y ago
That's interesting. Do you have an idea at what price offering a sponsored free search engine would become profitable? $15 per year seems very low and I would be happy to pay considerably more than that.
- selectodude 4y ago
  Facebook makes about $200/yr per USA/Canadian user. So probably start there.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  A relevant factor is market segmentation - the average ad revenue is a bad target for such a price, since the people who are willing to pay $x/month for an ad-free version are the ones who are much more valuable to advertisers than the average.
tayo42 4y ago
Freakonomics did an episode about Google and it made the same point. Ad space is worth to much
frans 4y ago
From Kagi.com's pricing page [1]: "Kagi has no ads and is fully supported only by its users." At $10/month. (disclaimer: I haven't used it myself yet). Does anyone have experience with Kagi or some background how they pull this off? The founder was here about a year ago. [2] [1]: https://kagi.com/pricing https://kagi.com/pricing [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago

Ah, the John Daggett vs Bane fallacy. What makes you think that getting paid by users will make them give up revenue from other sources?

petesergeant 4y ago
I hate seeing ads on newspapers I buy online subscriptions for (on their apps)

deafpolygon 4y ago

> please offer a paid subscription for ChatGPT people won't pay for it at the level for it to be sustainable.

chownie 4y ago
Are you certain that's true? An OpenAI dev said that individual user costs amount to pennies, if you charge them dollars then you're already covering rent.
- visarga 4y ago
  Individual requests, yes. About $0.02 / 1000 tokens. If you paste anything in for reference it will easily reach 1000 tokens.
Spooky23 4y ago
The trainers will pay. I asked ChatGPT about a local notorious politician who was a machine-politics mayor who was a crook, racist and all around scoundrel. ChatGPT used the local political party “hall of fame” to describe him as a progressive champion of human rights and good government. If I were Exxon, I’d pay a lot to be the source of knowledge for the AI. Google has some transparency as far as the source. The AI gets to bury the source.

scarface74 4y ago

I would definitely pay for ChatGPT. I have a project that requires a bunch of relatively simple Python scripts and it did the work perfectly for me.

ilaksh 4y ago

People are building a lot of services off of their (paid) API using text-davinci-003 and a few others which have very similar capabilties. I am hoping that ChatGPT will also become an API but using the existing ones its relatively trivial to build services. The main challenge for me is that the Codex API has a very tiny rate limit. But anyway text-davinci-003 is very similar in capabilities and output to ChatGPT.

heavyset_go 4y ago

As long as advertisers and businesses with deeper pockets than consumers exist, even paying customers on the consumer end will end up as the product.