Ask HN: Are you going to shell out $42 for ChatGPT pro? Is it worth it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34500783

by gaurangt • 3 years ago

23 41 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

From what I have read, it doesn't provide a whole lot of features other than giving you a priority in the queue, and storing your chat history, etc.

So would you guys rather wait a little longer for the prompt to answer or shell out the $42?

Personally, I might pay if they limit the number of responses per month, or they put up a credit system like Dall-E.

theGeatZhopa• 3 years ago

If you going do business with them, then ...

If not, one has to think about the use case, 42$ isn't so much but it's a plenty just for the funs.

I for myself would appreciate something like "Problem? 5$" If it's not solved, then 0.5 :)

realalandonald• 3 years ago

This too shall pass. This is no different than the time when everyone was crazed about having an Alexa at home because "oh i am too busy to write down my grocery list"

xdfgh1112• 3 years ago

I never used Alexa for anything because it was faster to just use my phone directly. But ChatGPT has been genuinely helpful. Not sure about $42 helpful, but much more than Alexa.

selfhoster112• 3 years ago

There’s a significant difference between voice assistants. Roughly, in my experience Google is the best, followed by Alexa (less smart), followed by Siri (better at controlling the phone, much less smart). A Google assistant with a custom wake word would be perfect.

iliane52• 3 years ago

I wish they would make the Pro version less filtered and less apologetic about only being a language model.

Even it's a bit annoying, I do understand them trying to limit what the free, public facing model will answer but I'd say it'd be a pretty fair expectation to get more leeway for the Pro version.

jfoster• 3 years ago

Yeah, my first thought about Pro was that even if I pay $42 per month, the results will still be nerfed, and perhaps increasingly so over time.

It's possible to view almost every fact or opinion as somehow controversial, and I think they're misguided in trying to prevent things that may generate minor controversies.

In fact, it's interesting to see how a LLM might be biased after taking in massive amounts of training data.

iliane52• 3 years ago

I think they'll move away from limiting or censoring it once the general public gets more familiar with language models and what they can/can't do. It's a bit of a silly endeavor to try to limit some answers when the whole point of ChatGPT is that there are a million different way you can get it to do what you want or trick it so ignores its prompts or its safety features. Either that or someone will move faster than them and release a 100% unfiltered model.

whywhywhywhy• 3 years ago

It’s laughable when you see it claim it can’t do something then with some rewording you trick it into doing just the thing you asked.

If I was at OpenAI I’d be looking at this sort of ideology as what’s gonna be our downfall like it was with Dall-E 2 once a democratized model is released by someone else.

SQueeeeeL2• 3 years ago

It's purely because of market forces. ChatGPT and DallE2 are no longer just a long series of instructions running on a computer, which happen to be flawed in someway. They are now brands, characters, products, and those need to be maintained and highly curated, or else all the suits you're attempting to sell AI customer service chat bots too might peek behind the veil and see just how flimsy easily exploitable these pieces of software are

MagicMoonlight• 3 years ago

Yeah you can do exploits like write the offensive part of the prompt backwards and then ask it to reverse it before executing it.

The problem is it’s so stupid it doesn’t always know how to reverse things and sometimes just makes up a result.

ddmma• 3 years ago

It will follow the same pattern as in Dalle2, they need purchase validation

villgax• 3 years ago

The thing is this is something which would only benefit application where your customers are using the API through your service somehow because it would be very difficult to control direct customer usage without any supervision of results for let's say a FAQ bot without strong guarantee of stupidity leakage

ulfw• 3 years ago

For what? Legit question. What are you going to actually use it for that warrants this high cost? And how many people would have a similar use case?

brewtide• 3 years ago

I am assuming it's not lost on users here, but the answer to all proposed questions is proposed as $42.

Sounds like they needed a number in a range and this one provided a nice reference to their clientele.

Oras• 3 years ago

I don't think this price is justifiable for the current interface. I am judging based on my experience with Github Copilot.

I use copilot daily (because it is integrate with VSCode), it is very useful for me and it is only $10/month.

For ChatGPT to be useful in the everyday use, it has to be integrated in a current workflow, not for breaking the workflow by going to external website, login in, and start chatting.

wkat42422• 3 years ago

No, it's too much. It's more than half my monthly electricity bill (considering the 42$ doesn't even include VAT).

ChatGPT is great but not that great. For work purposes when used to make money, perhaps. I wish they had a token option like with Dall-E.

wkat42422• 3 years ago

Edit: why the downvotes? I'm simply answering the poster's survey. The answer is my opinion alone. Of course everyone will have their own.

I'm in one of the poorer European countries where 42$ is a lot of money.

mattbrewsbytes• 3 years ago

I ignore AI/ML tech just like I ignore a burgeoning JS framework because I fail to see practical uses in my daily work since I don't use them. I'm the software engineer type that likes solving business problems and don't see the value in things like writing a new programming language or a new compiler, etc. I'll wait for others to explore those research endeavors and for something to become more mainstream.

Can someone explain a TL;DR of practical uses in software engineering for ChatGPT? I'm not looking for explanations of what is possible or the potential, just actual use cases where it helped solve a business problem.

spicyusername• 3 years ago

I recently asked it to generate a Python function, with type annotations, to query a vSphere server and return all the virtual machine objects using the PyVmomi library.

It returned a perfectly working function.

I recently asked it to generate a Gitlac CI file to format, plan, and apply a Terraform plan.

It also produced most of what I needed.

I think its going to end up being a solid replacement for using Google and Stack Overflow for many people.

bil7• 3 years ago

I've used it to convert JS to TS by adding all the type annotations for me.

theGnuMe• 3 years ago

That’s cool.

fleur-de-lotus• 3 years ago

Where did you get that figure from?

notdang• 3 years ago

Ask an AI: "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything"

pandemicPandaaa• 3 years ago

Nothing official yet but there are some fresh reports -:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/23/23567317/chatgpt-pro-tier...

kgbcia• 3 years ago

I thought it was based on gpt3 which charges pennies? I will consider shelling out $10 a month if it's behind a pay wall. But Google the ad company is creating their own chat. So it's an arm's race at this point. I have copilot and the results are not the best, but it gives me directions where to look. Plus multi line auto completion is the way to go for ide.

SQueeeeeL2• 3 years ago

I thought the general consensus was that copilot was untouchably bad for unlawfully utilizing open source code. I had forgotten it was an actual product that people could still consume

throw1234651234• 3 years ago

This is a topic I am really interested in - copilot or chatGPT? I was thinking of getting copilot because it comes with IDE extensions.

sytelus• 3 years ago

Just had ChatGPT write code for scipy and saved at least hour (it ran correctly as-is). $42 is way too cheap for people in software development at least where hourly rates far more than compensates such costs.

tukantje• 3 years ago

Hell no.

efficax• 3 years ago

no way the final price us $42. that’s just filler copy drawn from what the ai computer says in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Going from free to $500/yr is nuts. $10/mo seems more like the right price

cloudking• 3 years ago

Hope you're right and it's just an experiment :) $10 seems reasonable

estevaoam2• 3 years ago

Innovation is really a weird thing. If we could show ChatGPT to people 10, 20 years ago I'm certain most people would be amazed by this technology.

Today, lots of people heavily criticize its limitations and thinks 40 bucks/mo is too much for this kind of tech.

Reminds me about newspapers headlines being skeptical when light bulb started being sold for the first time. 99% people seems to be fundamentally conservative and can't grasp innovation properly, nor understand the fast pace of evolution some things can have.

Not saying this is good or bad, just an interesting phenomenon to observe.

selfhoster112• 3 years ago

I think this is mostly people being (rightly) pissed off that this technology and the kinds of resources required to replicate it are in the hands of 1-3 companies, who try to add “safety” features that hamper it.

DRMed technology is almost worse than not having it - it’s tantalisingly close, but you can’t use it for what you want because a human (not the machine!) said no.

estevaoam2• 3 years ago

I agree. I’m also not happy with that. Hopefully we’re getting more open tools like Stable Diffusion.

rozenmd• 3 years ago

Can you make more than $42 from using it? If so, worth it

jytechdevops• 3 years ago

as a junior engineer, chatgpt helps fill so much gaps in my knowledge to grow. i can ask it to build some code, explain the parts that are confusing, elaborate on concepts that are fuzzy to me, and then help me utilizing some packages. i will definitely shell out $42

KomoD• 3 years ago

No, but I would probably pay ~$15-20/mo just to get longer responses

iammjm• 3 years ago

If it connects to my Siri (and saves the session so that I can go back and forth with it remembering the context) than yes.

serjester• 3 years ago

I run a startup and can say that ChatGPT saves me a couple hours a week. The other day I needed to write a function that dissolves a geojson outline (say the outline of a state) into h3 hexagons and split a metric into those hexagons. With a little back and forth ChatGPT wrote me something usable in minutes. This is not remotely trivial and would have taken me an hour even with Copilot.

While high, I've paid far more for a significantly less capable VA in the past. I'd likely pay up to a $100.

f0e4c2f7• 3 years ago

Yes $42 feels quite cheap to me. I pretty much always have a ChatGPT tab open, mostly for coding but also sometimes for searching more broadly or exploring it's capabilities.

It's worth it to me just to have access to a version that doesn't go down as much. I would say I can work about 30% faster on most computer related tasks having it.

It feels like another Google (to me). I'd pay $42/mo for Google if it didn't exist otherwise.

The nice thing too, if Stable Diffusion is any indication we'll have an even better open source version in a year or two.

In either case I just want access to the stuff the automates the largest amount of boring repetitive work.

_boffin_• 3 years ago

100% going to dish out the $42. Would probably go up to $100/mo before thinking about it.

For me, it’s it’s a Phd in a multitude of subjects that hallucinates at times.

Due to this, it’s augmenting and expediting my learning as I can ask it any stupid question I can think of on a subject.

Ask HN: Are you going to shell out $42 for ChatGPT pro? Is it worth it?

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