Unraveling the Mystery: Why ChatGPT Comes Free

0:00Nash Falls is the relentless new thriller from number one New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci When mild-mannered business analyst Walter Nash is recruited by the FBI to help bring down a global crime network, his life is turned completely upside down. Publishers Weekly says, in Baldacci's long list of heroes, Walter Nash is among the most memorable. Experience the full cast audio production of Nash Falls, led by McLeod Andrews. Available from Hachette Audio wherever audiobooks are sold. Also available in hardcover and ebook. Why is ChatGPT free? A lot of people ask this question. We know that it costs millions of dollars to run this really complex AI model.

0:39So how are they making this free? What is this doing? On the podcast today, we're going to talk about this. We're going to talk about how they're using this as a research tool, how the model's user inputs are helping it to become better and better. So let's jump into it. Obviously, we know ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, which originally was a research organization that kind of focused on developing different AI. the idea was that it was going to make it safe and beneficial for humanity so open ai was founded by a bunch of different uh you know famous people in tech including elon musk sam altman greg brockman and the mission of the company originally or the organization because it was a non-profit was to ensure that artificial intelligence was developed in a way that was you know beneficial to humanity and that didn't cause harm this is a reaction to google buying a very big AI firm and people worrying that they were going to really just consolidate power and be kind of the titans of AI and just use that for their corporation.

1:36So that's kind of where this was spawned out of. One of the ways that AI really achieves its mission in doing this is by creating tools and technologies that are accessible to everyone. Originally, they created earlier versions of what is now ChatGPT, right, different language learning models. and they gave these out for free kind of they were open source so people could download them and run them on their own computers today that is not the case they are now a for-profit company i think microsoft offered them around a billion dollars and you know a lot of controversy around that but that kind of changed their mind so um they're still trying to stay true to their i guess mission by making chat gpt free right when they first launched this it was completely free but that is still, you know, a lot of people are asking, why is this free?

2:24You know, like, what are they getting out of this? We know this is costing the millions of dollars. I think part of the answer is that, you know, they have a billion dollars from Microsoft originally when they, and when they launched ChatGPT, it became so popular, they gained another, they raised another 10 billion from Microsoft. So they have the money to be able to give this away for free, but I think it's still a business decision because essentially they're able to use the inputs that people give it to train the models to become better. So essentially every time somebody messages something to ChatGPT, asks it a question, it's taking that data and then adding it to its giant corpus of data and helping it to fine tune the result.

3:03In addition, as people will notice, there's a thumbs up, thumbs down button when you get a result. And so people are essentially rating the responses they're getting. And OpenAI is able to feed that back into their model to help fine tune the training and make this even more effective. In addition, by launching this for free as their scientific research tool, they're essentially releasing a beta and getting millions of free users to test this thing out and really put it through a very rigorous test. I think they announced that in the first two months, they reached over 100 million monthly active users on ChatGPT.

3:35Absolutely enormous. That's way faster than Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or even TikTok grew. So this is an incredibly popular tool. And while a lot of people are going on Twitter and posting screenshots of like, hey, look, I figured out how to jailbreak ChatGPT's safety features. I was able to get it to say this or that. ChatGPT is actually happy about that because they're able to use all of this kind of all of these, all this press, all these people using it, all these people testing out for different things to help continue to fine tune it, train it, make it more safe and reliable. So by making this thing free, essentially, they've just been able to get 100 million people to be beta testers, find all the bugs.

4:13No one can complain that, you know, ChatGPT does X, Y, and Z because it's literally free. There's not, it's not like this is a product people paid for and then, you know, gave them a bad response. Now, that being said, they've done a number of fast updates since it launched, sometimes weekly, sometimes every couple weeks, and sometimes every month. They've been putting out updates, fixing different things that people are complaining about, and they're able to use all of the searches and all of the content that people are feeding it to help fine tune those results and put out those updates faster.

4:41So the reason why ChatGPT is free is because it is using all of the content generated. And sometimes that is fine tuning the model by machine. And sometimes that is by hand where they literally have people looking at your messages that you give ChatGPT. That's why they say don't give it anything, any of your personal details or addresses, anything that would be a violation of privacy, because they can look at it all. And they do look at a lot of it to help them fine tune their data. So that is why ChatGPT is free and that is what they're doing to kind of help make this a better product overall.