You’ve all heard of the viral AI ChatGPT by now. I’m not in the AI business and hadn’t planned to write about it — but people from every industry kept asking me how to register ChatGPT, how to use it, and what it costs. So here’s a dedicated post.
What is ChatGPT?
Here’s ChatGPT’s own answer:
ChatGPT is a language model trained by OpenAI. It uses Transformer technology and the GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) architecture, designed to generate text with natural language, answer questions, or complete tasks. ChatGPT can be used in various applications, such as chatbots, Q&A systems, and more.
ChatGPT is a large language model with a very large number of parameters. Specifically, its parameter count depends on its architecture and training data. For example, OpenAI’s latest GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters. This lets it learn a vast amount of language knowledge and handle many different language generation tasks.
Preparation
ChatGPT is not available in Mainland China — direct access gets blocked — so some preparation is needed:
- Proxy: you need one to appear as an overseas address, you know the drill. Note that Hong Kong IPs don’t work — you need Europe/US or Japan/Korea. This topic is sensitive, so learn to walk the net yourself.
- Phone number: registration requires an overseas mobile number to receive an SMS code. SMS-receiving platforms can solve this, e.g. sms-activate.org. Virtual numbers like Google Voice and other North American virtual numbers won’t work — virtual numbers are detected.
Registering ChatGPT
First, create an account. Go to the official site https://chat.openai.com/auth/login, click Sign up, enter your email and password, and click the verification link in your inbox.
After email verification comes phone verification: enter a number from the SMS platform, receive the code, and if it’s correct, registration is done.
Two ways to use ChatGPT
I divide usage into two modes: the official chat UI, and the API. Let’s go through both.
The official UI
Visit https://chat.openai.com/chat — that’s the official chat interface. You can experience ChatGPT here, and it’s free.
The API
Visit https://platform.openai.com/playground to test things, or call the API directly — this is the API mode, and it’s paid!
The benefit of the API: you can call whichever AI model you want and tune all kinds of parameters:
Oh, and by the way: those open source projects on GitHub are also hitting the API underneath — also paid.
API pricing
Language model pricing
First, a concept: token. I don’t know how best to translate it — I’ll call it a “marker”. You can think of a token as a chunk of words used in natural language processing. For English text, 1 token is roughly 4 characters or 0.75 words. For reference, the complete works of Shakespeare are about 900,000 words, or 1.2 million tokens.
Second, there are many language models, each with different capabilities and pricing. The main ones:
- Ada: $0.0004 / 1K tokens (the fastest, lightweight model)
- Babbage: $0.0005 / 1K tokens
- Curie: $0.0020 / 1K tokens
- Davinci: $0.0200 / 1K tokens (the most capable model)
Note these are language models. If you process images with image models, image model pricing applies separately.
Billing works by summing the tokens of the input plus the generated output, then charging at the model’s rate.
ChatGPT Plus
ChatGPT Plus is the paid subscription plan. Even at peak load it offers availability, faster response speeds, and priority access to new features. It’s $20 per month.