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A ChatGPT Pro subscription costs 38.6 months of income in low-income countries
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- largehotcoffee 1y agoOk
- v5v3 1y agoI think one step at a time. There are still many countries where digital literacy is very low. So first step is to ensure everyone has internet/mobile phone/laptop and knows how to use them.
- hdgvhicv 1y agoI take one look at our smartphone/social media addicted society and the damage that does and think of the parallels of forcing opium on a population in the 19th century Not that the rural third world don’t already have phones. Whether they are engineering to be as addictive as crack like in the west I’m not sure.
- alightsoul 1y agoOh, they are already as addictive as crack because Zuckerberg has successfully pushed his social media onto them. And it's very hard to compete with Zuck. The network effect is a very wide moat.
- EbNar 1y agoLuckily, a ChatGPT Pro subscription is not mandatory. It's not like one can't live without it.
- alightsoul 1y agofor now. Wait until you have to compete with those who do have it. It's like competing in a race with a ferrari without a race car. The same thing used to be said of the internet.
- latexr 1y agoNot everything is a high-stakes competition. Not every car is a Ferrari, precisely because not every car needs to be. Same goes for your other example, the local sellers at my local market don’t require an internet presence to sustain their businesses.
- catigula 1y agoI mean, they just released their major version and it's not a Ferrari, it's marginally better than what they had on the market 3 years ago.
- thefz 1y agoWhy? Will you have access to it during an exam? During an interview? Can't you pass a calculus exam without it?
- jama211 1y agoI can think of a few job related reasons you’d use it, you know, to make money. If those few specific ones you mentioned are all you can think of then…
- qsort 1y agoRegrettable, but did it take o3 mega pro to find out about real and nominal value? Even something a trivial as an iPhone is a far bigger purchase if you're not on a Bay Area salary.
- Aldipower 1y agoA pack of cigarettes in Norway is virtually unaffordable.
- can16358p 1y agoI don't think it's got anything to do with ChatGPT, especially given that it has a generous free tier too, let alone a about much cheaper (than the pro) plus tier. It's an international economy problem, not an AI problem.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- varbhat 1y ago> low-income someone has to pay for the servers at the end. are you asking for openai to subsidize ChatGPT Pro for low-income countries? Since OpenAI is for-profit entity focussed on profits, I don't think it might be a wise idea financially for OpenAI to do so.
- closetkantian 1y agoWell it was founded as a non-profit
- renewiltord 1y agoWell, technically they still haven't profited har har har
- alightsoul 1y agoIt might be better for OpenAI, but this disparity only increases immigration. If the US is serious about keeping immigrants out, they should subsidize access to AI.
- torginus 1y agoOne issue I have with the widely used metric of 'Productivity per hours worked' - if I have a second apt I rent out to Bob for $1000, I have a 'productivity' of $6.25 per hour 'worked', despite nobody producing anything and nobody working for any length of time.
- maratc 1y agoBut that's the same with GDP: if you and me are living on an uninhabited island and grow/catch all of our food for consumption, our GDP is $0. If however I rent out my bungalow to you and rent yours instead, and I sell you all my food and buy your food instead, somehow our GDP skyrockets.
- HPsquared 1y agoSame as cooking for youtself or family/friends, taking care of family/friends, exercising, anything that doesn't involve accounting transactions basically.
- torginus 1y agoThat's false equivalence. GDP being gameable does not mean the metric has anything to do with how valuable the output of each individual worker is, yet the metric suggests the opposite - if you made a metric like 'Number of Nobel laureates per large bodies of water', that would imply the presence of large lakes somehow aids or hinders top-tier scientific research, which is obviously a false premise.
- maratc 1y agoMy only argument is that both metrics are gameable in a way. > if you made a metric like 'Number of Nobel laureates per large bodies of water' That's a strawman argument.
- unmole 1y ago> if you and me are living on an uninhabited island and grow/catch all of our food for consumption, our GDP is $0 No. The imputed value of goods produced for self-consumption is included in GDP calculations. The UN SNA term of art is own final consumption: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/docs/SNA2008.pdf https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/docs/SNA2008.pdf
- lgsilver 1y agoA CS degree costs something like 124 yrs salary for someone in a low income nation—and it’s a much longer harder road. I’m not AI’s biggest fan, but arguably, this type of tech actually narrows the gap. Even if it’s expensive.
- epolanski 1y agoDo you have a source for this claim?
- ben_w 1y agoUK tuition fees £9,535/year - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/tuition-fees-and-student-support-2025-to-2026-academic-year/changes-to-tuition-fees-2025-to-2026-academic-year https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/tuition-fees-and-... £9,535/year * 3 year degree / 124 years ~= £231/year ~= 310 USD/year UN estimates GDP/capita of Yemen and Burundi were less than this, that Tajikistan has lower gross average monthly wages. Those are nominal, not PPP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w... The World Bank numbers here are adjusted for cost of living, say that 1.31% of the world population are living on a dollar a day: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=line&country=~OWID_WRL&Indicator=Share+in+poverty&Poverty+line=%241+per+day&Household+survey+data+type=Show+data+from+both+income+and+consumption+surveys&Show+breaks+between+less+comparable+surveys=false https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=li...
- epolanski 1y agoFor Yemen, you should look at the cost of a CS degree in Yemen, which is $ 700/year, not in a foreign country.
- ben_w 1y agoTo the earlier version of your comment: > Why would someone in Yemen have to go to UK to get a CS degree when they have multiple universities offering the same course. Same reason they'd be using an American AI company instead of a cheaper one that e.g. runs on their phone.
- FergusArgyll 1y agoWait till you find out how much an apartment costs!
- renewiltord 1y agoYes, obviously. It's advanced technology. Are we just dividing two numbers now? Median people from the Democratic Republic of Congo will have to work for 6 years to pay a PG&E bill.
- alightsoul 1y agoTheir power bills are at least an order of magnitude cheaper. Pricing is relative. They also consume fewer kilowatts of energy.
- epolanski 1y agoNonsense. Albeit I'm no economist, I'm quite sure you should compare salaries to costs, not gdp/capita. Whether unemployed/retirees and children can afford a ChatGPT pro subscription seems irrelevant. Let's take Madagascar, GDP per capita is $ 538. But the average salary is above $ 150/ month. What interests us really though is not really the average salary in the country, rather the white collar (the end user's) worker's one. In Madagascar software engineering salaries seems to range from an average $ 850/month for junior roles to well beyond $ 2000 per senior/specialized roles. And this further ignores that such expenses are generally paid by employees, often with bulk discounts compared to B2C customers. Which leads us to conclude that if ChatGPT Pro is such a performance multiplier, it is worth the price even in the poorest of the poorest countries in the world.
- sebzim4500 1y ago>I find this very troubling for two reasons. First, while Claude and OpenAI are new, Google has been around for a long time. It should have thought better about pricing so that the tool is within the reach of the developing world. Why? I don't see a practical argument for why Google would want to offer this service at a massive loss.
- niek_pas 1y agoThe author is making a moral argument, not a practical (from Google’s perspective) one.
- xvector 1y agoI feel like this is a huge problem with the progressive movement in the US. Morally sound arguments that rarely make practical or economic sense - and no, "tax the rich" doesn't get us there: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/ten-myths-about-the-u-s-tax-system/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/ten-myths-about-the-u-s-tax...
- alightsoul 1y agoIt is now US policy to push US AI onto the rest of the world. They can either lower prices to make it affordable in those regions, or, get ignored and use Chinese models which are an order of magnitude cheaper, like Deepseek, or just immigrate.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Smeevy 1y agoThat's not an unfair assessment, but I would pose additional questions: Why does doing the morally sound thing always have to be easier, better, and cheaper than ruining the world and creating human misery? Why must the morally superior argument be financially unassailable? I'm getting older and angrier and I've grown tired of meeting greedy, disingenuous adversaries halfway just to have my hand slapped away after they get what they want. Since we've established that conservatives will absolutely put up with pain to harm outgroup bogeymen, I don't listen to their appeals for things that I hope will reduce human misery in the world. With that in mind: Tax the rich like it's the 1950s, healthcare for all, stop burning fossil fuels, etc. Do it all and see what works, darn it.
- the_mitsuhiko 1y agoSo a handful of things here. One is that you can actually at the moment at least use a lot of it for free. Secondarily, I think when it comes to access to ChatGPT and other services, in a lot of low-income countries there's a much bigger hurdle than the money, which is a combination of language and device that is capable of connecting to ChatGPT. There are a lot of countries still where you're limited to feature phones or not even having a phone at all.
- alightsoul 1y agoThere's 5 billion people with a smartphone worldwide. The device hurdle is gone. ChatGPT is worse in languages other than English, but it's still so much better than searching on Google. The alternative before ChatGPT was watching time consuming videos on Youtube.
- the_mitsuhiko 1y ago> There's 5 billion people with a smartphone worldwide There are more than 8 billion people on this world. By your own account, 3 billion of them do not have smart phones. > The device hurdle is gone. Evidently not. There are a lot of countries that still have a smartphone penetration rate of <50%. We're talking about people with low income here. We're talking about people that cannot even afford bicycles for transportation.
- rfoo 1y ago> There are a lot of countries still where you're limited to feature phones I thought China fixed this for most of the world, at least for Africa it's fixed. It's the Internet access being the bottleneck now.
- the_mitsuhiko 1y ago> at least for Africa it's fixed How is it fixed for Africa? Africa has a ton of phones, but it does not have a lot of smart phones. There is a reason that SMS and USSD are corner stones of the african digital economy.
- energy123 1y agoA warning about ChatGPT Pro. The 128k tokens context claim is deceptive advertising. Messages above ~65k tokens are rejected. Messages between about 50k-65k are accepted, but the right-side of the text is pruned before the LLM call is made. Messages just below ~50k are accepted, but are then partly "forgot" on any follow up questions (either the entire first prompt is excluded, or the left-side of the text is chopped off). Realistically, it's a 55-65k token limit (40k token question, 15k token response). They want you to attach your context so they can use RAG. I can't even be bothered filing a bug report, because I know this shit is intentional. The mistakes always run in a favorable direction. (GPT-5-Pro is a genuinely good model however, and usage limits are generous)
- the_real_cher 1y agoThe running tech bro narrative is that Americans are lazy and not snart. But tbe chart on that page shows very high productivity
- bradley13 1y agoPeople in low-income countries have low incomes. News at 11:00. Seriously, what is the point of this observation? Few if any workers earning low wages have any use for a ChatGPT Pro subscription?
- District5524 1y agoI believe it's more about witnessing a deepening AI-divide between rich and poor countries. Or the maturing of the AI market. But in the end, this will only matter if we see these more expensive tools/subscriptions actually having a market advantage that cannot be mitigated by low income countries. (Certainly no new startup will be able to train new models in low income countries, hire world class AI professionals etc.)
- yapyap 1y ago… who cares? 1. the companies don’t get any cheaper compute because a user is from a low-income country. 2. this is an AI subscription, it’s purely a luxury product. We do not need this to survive. If you can’t afford it, don’t buy it.
- alightsoul 1y agoThe internet used to be a luxury too. No, the internet doesn't cost 100 dollars a month everywhere in the world for 300 mbps. In developing countries it's as cheap as 20 dollars a month for the same speed.
- howmayiannoyyou 1y agoStop, if for just a moment: Have a look at industrial accident data globally, considering underreporting in developing nations. - Same, environmental accidents. - Same, WMD proliferation, including chem, bio and nuclear. - Same, malicious cyber. Now, ask yourself if we have enough problems aligning & regulating AI at the moment? Are we sure that in the name of laudable egalitarian ideals that we are prepared for the second and third order effects of broad global accessibility to AI, including frontier models?
- rs186 1y agoSo what? My salary pays for 2-3 developers in the UK, even more in India, and I am not necessarily any better than those developers. Should I feel bad for that as well?
- alightsoul 1y agoSo, sell the same thing at the same price everywhere? Things are cheaper in the developing world so US AI can either follow their pricing or get ignored.
- gregatragenet3 1y agoWhat utility does the guy running a bonbon tè stall get from a frontier AI model anyway?
- glimshe 1y agoHome computers were ridiculously expensive in their initial years. Some could cost more than a car. ChatGPT Pro gives you access to cutting edge technology so it isn't surprising that it's expensive. Just remember that a Wal Mart $50 phone is faster than a supercomputer from the 70s/80s. Prices will go down.
- pointlessone 1y agoFor all the shorcomings of AI and everyone involved this must be one of the silliest takes. - The latest concept sports car costs a few lifetimes of income in low-income countries - Aircraft carrier costs 200 GDP of Tuvalu
- alightsoul 1y agoExcept AI boosts worker productivity and with it, GDP increases. They will use a Chinese model that is an order of magnitude cheaper.
- Simulacra 1y agoOk..?
- general1726 1y agoIf 200 USD / month would replace a developer, then it would be a bargain. If 2000 USD / month would replace a developer, then it would be a fair price. Problem is that none of existing models are capable to replace a developer. They all need babysitting. And I am saying that as a probable customer who would actually pay something between 200-2000USD for AI junior developer which can actually work and understand what it is doing. Either those models will start doing what has been promised by tech CEOs, or AI winter is upon us.
- e3bc54b2 1y agoThe morons who want to replace developers with these so called tools already feel like developers need babysitting. Partly because they suck at giving requirements or sticking to them or both. It will be fun to see them finding out the devs do more that bashing code.
- siva7 1y agoThis has the to be the dumbest blog and argumentation i've read the whole year... Corporations aren't charities. A ChatGPT Pro subscription isn't necessary for human survival in those countries. A ChatGPT Pro subscription isn't necessary for basic human needs.
- lxgr 1y agoThis argument would make more sense if machine learning inference had zero (or close to it) marginal cost, which is the case for intellectual property among other things. However, inference infrastructure is anything but free, and I'd estimate that cost to currently dominate the fraction of dollar per token.
- asce 1y ago[dead]
- cwmma 1y agoThis is a real problem but I think the author has it backwards. As LLM subscriptions become more expensive simply hiring folks from low income countries becomes a more cost effective solution.
- quickthrowman 1y agoThis is a really stupid blog post, I’m not sure why someone decided to post it here other than to ridicule it. A person in a low-income country would also need to work for 38.6 months ($2400?) to afford to hire one of my electricians for two days of labor. Things in high-income countries are expensive, who would’ve guessed?? If I lived somewhere that the average income is $200/month, there’s a lot of things on Maslow’s Hierarchy that come before ‘ChatGPT Pro’… like um a stable electrical grid, clean water, sewer system, etc.
- gizmo686 1y agoChatGPT (and all high end players in the current AI iteration) do not follow the normal laws of software economics. Normally software has a near 0 marginal cost. This allows sellers to offer steap discounts because they cost the seller almost nothing. In many cases, sellers are better off having you use their software without paying instead of not using it; because they are out almost no money, but have increased their odds of a future sale High end LLMs are different. Sellers are not setting their price to maximize revenue. They are setting their price to cover the marginal cost of providing the service plus margin. Lowering their price is not a matter of price discrimination. It is a matter of engineering a cheeper product.
- NoPicklez 1y ago> Epitome of AI Access Gap There is an access gap to almost everything including water when we extend to low income countries. Also, don't forget that Google for decades have provided free Google search that has allowed the world to search for information for free.