EP 439: ChatGPT for free in 2025? Free ChatGPT vs. ChatGPT Plus.
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This is the Everyday AI Show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business, and everyday life. In the past, I think I said don't touch the free version of ChatGPT with a 10-foot pole because...

The free version of ChatGPT has been historically bad, right? Way more hallucinations, hardly no features, but that's change. It's 2025 now. And with a lot of the updates that OpenAI announced at its 12 days of shipness in December, there was a lot of pretty sizable improvements at that time to the free version of ChatGPT.

so today we're going to be doing kind of the 2025 update and comparing the free version of chat gpt versus the paid version and i'll answer that question again at the very end should you use the free version of chat gpt all right i'm excited to talk today i hope you are too

on Everyday AI. What's going on, y'all? My name is Jordan Wilson, and welcome. This thing is for you. This is your daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter helping us all not just understand what's going on in the world of AI, but how we can use it to take it to our advantage, grow your company, grow your career. So if you want to be the smartest person in AI at your company, in your department,

This is your new home. All right. So also your new home is youreverydayai.com. That is our website. It is a legit website.

wealth of free information. I've interviewed hundreds of the leading experts in the world on AI, as well as everyday enterprise business leaders who are pushing AI forward. All the secrets, whatever you're trying to know, it's probably already on our website, sorted by category, go find what you need. All right, and there you can sign up for the free daily newsletter. We're going to be recapping today's podcast, as well as keeping you up to date with every other thing you need to know. So yeah, we do this literally Monday through Friday, and then everything goes and it lives on our website there.

All right. And a quick reminder, January 20th.

Write that date down. That's Monday. Next week, we are kicking off a special series, five episodes, Monday through Friday. I've literally spent dozens of hours on this over the last couple of months. Putting this together are not just 2025 AI predictions, but a roadmap on how you can actually take advantage of all of these. So make sure you join us.

Monday through Friday, next week, special series coming at you. A lot of work has gone into this. Like I said, I'm lucky enough to get to talk to the smartest people in the world on AI. So sharing everything you need to know to get ahead for 2025 in that series. All right, before we get started going over, not just the basics of the free version of chat GPT versus the paid version and some new updates. Let's first start as we always do with going over the AI news. So

U.S. President Joe Biden has just signed an executive order to accelerate AI infrastructure development in the U.S. So Biden's new executive order aims to rapidly advance the infrastructure necessary for AI operations in the U.S.,

So the executive order directs federal agents to expedite the development of large scale AI infrastructure, including data centers and clean power facilities. So Biden emphasized the importance of responsible AI use, noting its potential benefits for national security and public health. So the Department of Defense and Energy will identify at least three federal sites for private sector AI data centers, fostering competition among companies, which

Developers will be required to cover the construction costs and ensure sufficient clean energy generation to meet the energy demands of their data centers. So the administration aims to prevent increased electricity prices for consumers by mandating that developers pay for all operational costs associated with AI infrastructure. So public labor agreements will govern the construction of these facilities, and some sites will be designated for small and medium-sized AI companies.

The Interior Department will identify suitable lands for clean energy developments to support AI data centers. The goal is by 2028, leading AI developers are expected to require data centers. Sorry, not the goal, but this is what's happening. By 2028, leading AI developers are expected to require data centers with up to five gigawatts of capacity for training advanced AI models. So

The order follows the Biden administration's proposed export restrictions on AI chips, which was not met favorably in the big tech and big AI community. All right. Our next piece of AI news, Microsoft is launching a new AI division, Core AI. So Microsoft is making significant strides by establishing a new division called Core AI.

Core AI aimed at creating robust AI applications and agents for its customers. All right. So yeah, Core AI essentially going to be building out AI agentic tools and workflows for enterprise customers. So the Core AI division will be led by Jay Parkai, the former engineering chief at Meta.

key figures from Microsoft, including Mustafa Suleiman, Scott Guthrie, Kevin Scott, Charlie Bell, et cetera. All the big names at Microsoft will collaborate with this new team. The goal of core AI is to create an end to end co-pilot in AI stack that allows both first party and get this third party customers. That's a big one there to build and operate AI applications and agents seamlessly. So this does look like it could turn into a,

almost like an app store of sorts, uh, for, uh, anything co-pilot, anything AI, anything autonomous agents. So the new platform will empower users to work with multiple agents simultaneously, enhancing productivity and user experience through an improved interface. That is a big one. Y'all, uh, essentially the third party. We'll see how that rolls out. So, uh, for more on those stories and a lot more, make sure you go to your everyday AI.com sign up for that free daily newsletter.

All right, let's get into it. Hey, live stream audience, if you didn't know, podcast peeps,

Thank you all for listening. You can always check your show notes. There's a link in there to connect with me on LinkedIn, email me, the show, et cetera. But live stream audience, I want to know, what are you using for ChatGPT? Are you using the free version? Are you using the paid version, ChatGPT Plus? Maybe are you using that ChatGPT Pro, the $200 a month version? What are you using? I'm always curious. All right, but let's go over the basics here, y'all.

And just as a little, I guess, precursor, right, before I get started, I've used all versions of ChatGPT, right? I currently have a free account.

I use that so I can test things for shows like this. But for the most part, aside from that, I don't use a free account. So I have a ChatGPT Plus account, and that is $20 a month. And you can have these all too, right? Then there is a Teams account as well. So I have the main accounts on my screen, but the Teams account isn't even up there. So we're not going to focus too much on that. And then there is a Pro account. So these are all plans for individuals.

All right. The pro account, super expensive. The biggest thing that you get access to is you get way better limits

in the pro account with the new 01 and 01 Pro models. I am loving 01 Pro, by the way. But for the most part, we're just going to be focusing today on the difference between a free account and a ChatGPT Plus account. I should also mention there's one more, which is kind of the enterprise accounts as well, which I have accounts on there as well. So when I'm coming to this, it's not like, ah, I'm someone that uses the free version of ChatGPT. No.

I've been using ChatGPT since the day it came out. We train large organizations on how to use ChatGPT, right? Whether they're going from a free version to Teams or from a Teams plan to an enterprise. So this is kind of like what I do, FYI. All right, so I just wanted to start there.

But I will also say the free version has changed significantly. All right. One of the biggest things is the model it uses. So the free version used to use the 3.5, the GPT 3.5. And for the longest time,

I told people never use the free version of ChatGPT because at the time there was way better versions or better ways that you could use at least GPT-4 for free, like Microsoft Copilot, right? Which had a pretty good free plan as well. So I've always said, if you've listened to the show, especially for a long time, you probably heard me harp

on the free version of ChatGPT because for a long time, it was actually kind of dangerous to use. I think all of these, you know, and that's not because of anything OpenAI did or didn't do. It's because humans are lazy, right? And they don't understand the difference, right? If you were using back in 2023 or the early part of 2024, if you were using ChatGPT and you didn't know what you were doing and just copying and pasting things, that's when it can get dangerous because the free version, the 3.5, it's old,

like hallucinations much more likely. And if you didn't even know the difference, you were much more likely to just make mistakes. All right. So the biggest thing is now the free version does have limited access to GPT-4-0. All right. So let's just start there. In the free plan, you at least get extremely limited access to one of the most powerful large language models in the world in GPT-4-0.

All right. So let me just start because sometimes I feel bad. Right. And I'm like, oh, I'm so hard on these certain tools. But is the free version of ChatGPT still that bad? I don't think so. It's it's it's not bad.

It's not terrible. I do think there's better options, better free AI models, which I'm going to talk about. There's even better ways to get more limits or more generous limits on GPT-40 for free. Or if you want like one subscription, I think there's better options out there, but we're going to get to all that. But right now,

If you are just using chat GPT free, it's not bad anymore. As long as you know the capabilities, what it's capable of and what it's not right. If you understand, I tell people this, I like sports, right? Uh, even when I was a teenager, I coached basketball. I love, I love sports. I like to think of large language models. If you think of it like sports, it's actually easy.

I coach basketball. All right. So when you think of large language models and putting them to work for your business, I tell people you have to understand a couple of things. Number one, the rules of the game. You have to understand the field or the court, and you have to understand the players. So the same thing in this instance, the free version of chat GPT, all of those things are changing. The game is changing. The field is changing. You know, the field or the rules, and then the players are changing as well.

And it's changed a lot in the last couple of months, especially since some of these new updates were released to paid users. So now free users are getting a little taste of these as well. I think one of the reasons why now the free version of ChatGPT is actually pretty good is because OpenAI, I think, has changed their strategy. Okay, let me explain. I think before, you know, two years ago, I think OpenAI was trying to compete with, you

Claude from Anthropic. I think they were maybe trying to compete with early versions of Meta. I think they were trying to compete with Gemini, the model. All right. I think OpenAI two years ago was playing the large language model game. They're not anymore. Right. They are playing the controlling your device game, which is the smart game. All right. They have a very capable device.

app, which is available for free as well, right? A lot of the same limitations apply, FYI.

Same thing. There's a desktop version, right? You can download ChatGPT, the desktop version for PC or Mac. And that is free as well. That used to be paid only. Now it's free. The same limitations carry over and we're going to be going over those. But the rules of the game, the game itself and the players have changed when it comes to the free version of ChatGPT. It is actually extremely capable if you only need it just here and there. But I still will make the case.

I still think $20 a month for chat GPT plus is a no brainer, right? That is two coffees, two or three coffees a month and what you can get out of it, right? In the, in the chat GPT plus version for $20 a month. So many times I'll hit the enter key once so many times a day. And I'm like, yeah, that was worth $20.

multiple times a day, every single day. Because if you actually know what you're doing, large language models are a cheat code. And I do think, I still think, ChatGPT is by far the best large language model, right? So if you want to use a front-facing AI chat, I still think ChatGPT is the best. Google Gemini technically has the most powerful model.

I think their go-to-market strategy is a little fragmented. It's not as easy to use it, but I still think ChatGPT, the paid version is the best bargain in business. But the free version is not bad anymore. It's actually good. All right. So let's talk about some of the new updates. So in December, it was actually Google and OpenAI going back and forth. It was chaotic to watch, right? But essentially OpenAI released a ton of new features. And generally,

Those new features are for paid members only and free members don't get a taste of it. But like I said, or like I started to say anyways, OpenAI used to just be competing with large language models. Now they're competing for devices. They're competing with Google. They're competing with Google search. They're competing with perplexity, even though I think perplexity is very far behind, right? So I think OpenAI has really shifted its strategy. They want people.

Google search to be a thing of the past, right? They want to be not just an alternative to traditional search. They want to be an answers engine. They want to be a one-stop shop for working with your data. And then they also want to be that AI chatbot as well. So during the 12 days of open AI in December, a lot of these premium features also got rolled out to free users as well. So

Uh, let's quickly look at the differences. All right. So if you're tuning in FYI or listening on the podcast and you're like, oh, I hope, I hope Jordan's going to go into chat GBT and, and run a bunch of run a bunch of prompts. No, it's not what this is. So many people, business leaders out there are making terrible decisions.

decisions for multimillion dollar organizations because they don't understand the basics. We are going over the basics today. All right. This is school. This is AI. Someone in our live stream audience called it AI university. I like that. You got to learn. All right. This is the textbook stuff. And then you go home or go to your business and put it to use. So let's talk about free versions here. Here's what chat GPT free does have. And a lot of this is new.

It does have access to the new chat GPT search. All right. And there was a lot of new updates that were announced at the December event. And those are free to users to a certain extent. Keep that in mind. We're going to talk about those limits. All right. Things like local maps. Right. Very cool. That's one of the things I use Google most for. Right. Is I want to know things that are by me.

You have that now in the free version of ChatGPT. So keep in mind, I'm not just talking the web interface. I'm talking the iOS app if you have an iPhone, Android app if you don't, and desktop apps as well. So ChatGPT search is included in the free version.

You do now have custom instructions in memory, whereas about this time last year, you did not have that. All right. So custom instructions in memory, things I don't use a ton. But if you have a very limited use case of ChatGPT or if you only use ChatGPT for certain things, custom instructions are great. Custom instructions are essentially, let's just say you are a, I don't know, you're in marketing for a big company and you're always writing press releases, right?

You can put that in your custom instructions. And then every single new chat that you start, it's almost like having a preemptive prompt out there. So in custom instructions, it's essentially like,

Another layer of prompt that you never have to enter, reminding ChatGPT of certain things that you put in. Memory, kind of the same, but also different. So memory, ChatGPT will pick up little things throughout your conversation and quote unquote, remember them and then apply them when it sees fit. Where custom instructions is a little different. It is a set of instructions that you essentially apply to ChatGPT unilaterally.

The reason why I'm not a fan of these two things is I use ChatGPT for so many different things. So I don't necessarily want that one size fits all set of instructions or memory applied to everything. All right. Also some new updates. You can turn off model training on the free version, which when it first came out, you couldn't. All right. That's important. And I think that's a smart play by OpenAI because, you know, one of the biggest keys to adoption with large language models is data, right? And knowing it's secure and knowing it's safe. So you can turn off model training.

You can use any GPTs. You can use any GPTs on a free plan, again, with your messaging limits. That's the big thing here. I should probably just mention what these limits are, but essentially you get very limited access to GPT-4.0. Okay. That is, like I said, OpenAI's right now, their most powerful GPT model. All right. They have the O1 and O2.

01 Pro models that are more of the reasoning models. But you only get about a handful, maybe 10 messages. It's not a hard number within a five hour window. Okay. And then after that, it's going to default to GPT-4-0 Mini, which is still a very capable model. GPT-4-0 Mini is still light years ahead of GPT-3.5, which again, I'd say don't touch that thing with a 10 foot pole.

ChatGPT also has temporary chats. Think of that as like an incognito window, but you can still be logged in. It has access to standard voice mode, not advanced voice mode, but standard voice mode is still better than talking to something like Siri or Alexa, and it's not even close. So you still have access to standard voice mode.

You do have very limited file uploads, whereas before you could not upload files. And you also have Canvas mode, which is huge. Free users have access to Canvas mode. Canvas mode, I think inside of ChatGPT, we've already seen it get copied, right? I've

predicted and projected that this would be a very much copied mode and we're already seeing that. But Canvas mode is essentially, it's different than Claude's artifacts mode, but it's like inline AI editing. It's more working with an AI or ChatGPT throughout the course of a document. You can go up there and let's say you have ChatGPT create a press release.

Generally, in a quote-unquote AI chat conversation, you would just have to go through a lot of back and forth to change small things. With Canvas mode, you can go up halfway through. You can start typing yourself. You can run natural prompts to chat GPT. There's a nice sleek interface on the right-hand side that can make it longer, shorter, change the tone, all with just little nice interface buttons. It is more of an interactive experience in working with

chat GPT in canvas mode, but that is available to free users. All right. But

The limits are very limited. So like I said, you're probably only going to get between, I'll say four to 10 messages in GPT-4.0 before you default to 4.0 mini. And then the uploads are not good, not that great either, right? But if you only need to upload one or two docs, you're fine, right? But doing some testing last night after two documents on my free plan, it says upgrade to ChatGPT Plus or try again tomorrow after 7.08 p.m.

So what I noticed is it looks like the first time you upload a document for me was about 7 0 8 PM. I was doing some testing. I was able to upload two documents. And then after that, it looks like you have to wait a full 24 hours from when you started. So keep that in mind. Uh, if you want to do a bunch of, uh, you know, documents and a free, not, not, not, not that good y'all.

All right, now let's talk about some slight differences. We're going to get to what the free version does not have, but there's kind of this gray area because right now the free version of ChatGPT actually has DALI. That is OpenAI's AI image generator. DALI is not good, right? It's not good. Let's be honest.

I I've never used all the, like for an actual real reason, aside from maybe, you know, showing it to you all, or if someone is curious, you know, maybe I put out a couple of short tutorial videos, but you can use Dolly on the free version. I think you only get two generations every 24 hours, but you cannot edit Dolly.

So if you do have the chat GPT plus plan, there's essentially like a brush, right? And you can highlight things and talk to Dolly and have it change it. It's not that great. Uh, I'd say Dolly is probably the worst, uh, chat, chat GPT function or feature. Uh, it's really, uh, an update is really needed, right? I think Sora has the capabilities to produce photos. So I'm sure Dolly will get, uh, replaced soon. Okay.

Also, we already talked about the very limited number of messages you get with GPT-4.0. Another big difference here is the context window, right? So if you think, oh, okay, well, I can't upload a bunch of documents, but I still want to use the free version of ChatGPT. Well, you only have about 8K token input, right? That's about, think about 10 pages of text, right? Which might seem like a lot, but it's actually not if you are a power user and you're not

Chat GPT is going to start to forget things much quicker. I've done a lot of tests on that, uh, on the show, uh, of that exact same thing, but it's memory is going to forget things, right? So if you're starting out in the free version of chat GPT and you do a couple messages and you're like, oh, this is great. And you share some information with chat GPT in the context window or in the chat, right? And then, I don't know, two or three messages later, you're like, wait,

This thing already forgot. That's because it's very limited in what it can remember at any one given time, right? So it's only 8K token, which is not a lot of words.

But for the paid plan, it's 32,000 tokens. So 32,000 tokens is about 27, 28,000 words just for context. So the 8K token for free, it's about 6,000 words, 64,000 or sorry, 6,400, either 6,000, 6,400, something like that.

And then Canvas. So yes, although you do have Canvas mode for free in ChatGPT, you can't use GPTs in Canvas mode. You can use GPTs, but not in Canvas mode. And also you cannot execute Python code.

in canvas mode, something you can do, uh, or you can't execute any code. I know Chad GPT is, has already started to roll out in beta, uh, uh, new types of code that you can execute within the canvas window. So similarly, uh, to Claude artifacts where you can execute anything, right? Uh, you can't really do too much in canvas mode. Samuel here says, uh, Dolly is truly bad.

Hey, this is Jordan, the host of Everyday AI. I've spent more than a thousand hours inside ChatGPT and I'm sharing all of my secrets in our free Prime Prompt Polish ChatGPT course that's only available to loyal listeners like you. Check out what Mike, a freelance marketer, said about the PPP course. I just got out of Jordan's webinar.

It was incredible, huge value. It's live, so you get your questions answered. I'm pretty stoked on it. It's an incredible resource. Pretty much everything's free. I would gladly pay for a lot of the stuff that Jordan's putting out. So if you're wondering whether you should join the webinar, just make the time to do it. It's totally worth it. Everyone's prompting wrong, and the PPP course fixes that.

If you want access, go to podpp.com. Again, that's podpp.com. Sign up for the free course and start putting chat GPT to work for you. Yeah, let me know. And hey, live stream audience, if you do have questions, please, please let me know as we go along. I'll try to answer them if I see any. All right. I'm going to get to the questions at the end because I'm actually going to tackle a

right away some of the most common questions people have between the free and the chat GPT plus. And I will tackle any questions that you all have at the end as well. So if you do have any, make sure to get them in now. It doesn't even have to be very specifically about the differences between, you know, chat GPT free and plus or, you know, plus and pro the 200, right? Whatever your chat GPT question is, get them in. I'm going to try to get them at the end of the show.

All right. So we talked about the similarities. Yes, ChatGPT Free does have these more quote unquote premium features. Now we just talked about some of these slight differences. So there's kind of this gray area where it's like, oh, ChatGPT Free has this, but...

So now let's just talk about what it does not have. So you do not have advanced voice mode in the free plan. You have standard voice mode, which like I said, again, it's at least better than Siri or Alexa, but advanced voice mode is amazing. It is for those of you that saw our, you know, top AI tools of 2024, it was one of our top. It was, I think one of our top three, you know, tools or features or of the entire year.

Advanced voice mode, amazing. So you don't have 01 or 01 mini, not even the taste. You don't even get one, right?

So that is the reasoners. So again, I like to tell people when you think of large language models, this is important because all of the big large language model makers are coming out with these reasoning models. It's different. So I like to say, think of your transformer type models. So that's your traditional, you know, your, your Claude three, five sonnet, your Gemini to your,

GPT-4-0. And then you have your reasoner models. These are models that think a little differently, much more kind of compute is needed. It kind of does a little bit of, you know, chain of thought thinking before it responds to you.

So, uh, in the $20 a month plan chat GPT plus you do get pretty good limits on Oh one in Oh one mini. You don't get Oh one pro on that. You got to have that expensive $200 a month pro plan. All right. On the free version, you cannot build GPTs. You can use any GPTs. You cannot build any. However, once you have shared access. So I know a lot of people, you know, they'll just do, uh,

who just want GPT access and they really need some specific ones. I know people that will just, you know, buy a subscription for a month or two, then share that, uh, or, you know, make sure that they can use that once their subscription is done, you can do that. So, you know, even custom GPTs, whatever it is, uh, you can continue to use those on a free account. Uh,

Other things you don't have, Sora, right? Open AIs, which is technically the best AI video tool that's available to the public, right? Because Google VO2 is by far better, but it's like, I don't know, like 0.01% of the people that want to use it can actually use it right now. But Sora, you do get access to that on the normal $20 a month plan. You get zero access to

on the chat GPT free plan. So you can't access either of those inside chat GPT. Although I do think in the future, OpenAI will have that capability. Right now you have to go to Sora.com. But if you think, oh, okay, well, I get some Sora. No, you get nothing. You get nothing for the AI video and then also Teams, right? So a lot of people think, oh, I'm going to create a team. I think there's a lot of great team features and functionalities out there for chat GPT, but

Every single person on your team has to be on a team's plan. That's something not a lot of people get right. All right. So now let's tackle some of the most common questions. All right. So now listen in.

Because if your organization hasn't fully implemented generative AI, which I'm sure many of you either have or your companies are on the fence, these are the questions that are always going to come up about the free version of ChatGPT. So here's the answers, right? I'm just going to give it to you quick. No nonsense. Here we go. So is there a free version of ChatGPT?

Yes, obviously there is right in the free version. Like I said, it's actually pretty good now, but like we just covered, there's a ton of differences between the free version of chat GPT and the paid version chat GPT plus, and there is no legal free way to get a free version.

copy or a free version, right, of ChatGPT+. So there is no free ChatGPT+, although the free ChatGPT plan has really improved in quality and features. Another thing to keep in mind, you do not even need an account to use ChatGPT for free.

So like I said, ChatGPT and OpenAI, they really are trying to be more of like a search engine, right? So even if you are not logged in, you don't even need an account. You can go use ChatGPT for free. In that instance, you are only getting 4.0 mini.

And, you know, a lot of these other features that we talked about, you know, attaching files and chat GPT search, not technically available, right? But you don't even have to be logged in to use at least the basics of chat GPT. But with the free account, you do obviously get a lot of those features. But there is no free version of chat GPT plus. But yes, there is a free version of chat GPT. So,

How many times can you use chat GPT for free? There's actually not a set number, right? Kind of weird. Uh, usually, like I said, it's between about, uh, four to 10 messages over about a five hour period. So not a ton. And then after that, you don't get locked out. All that happens is you can still work, but you just get kind of, uh, downgraded from the GPT four Oh model to four Oh mini. So there's no set number of times that you can use, uh,

you know, GPT-4-0 on a free plan, but it's pretty limited, right? And especially if you're doing some proper prompting, it's going to go pretty quick. All right. So next common question, can you talk to ChatGPT for free? Yeah, you can, right? You can on...

desktop, you can on mobile, you can on the web interface, but it is the standard voice mode. It is not the advanced voice mode, but still very cool, right? And to tell you the truth, I don't hate, I don't hate the standard voice mode, right? Especially if you're someone like myself that still tries to use Siri and Alexa every single day, and it's mind numbingly painful.

So the standard voice mode, it's free. It's not even that bad. So if you haven't used it, I actually recommend. So the advanced voice mode and all of those cool features, you can chat with video, you can show it. I do that all the time when a little thing around the house is broken or missing or I'm like, what's this? Because I don't know, a screwdriver from a hammer. So you can show video and say, hey, ChatGPT, what's this? Or this is broken. This is leaking. What do I do?

how do I even Google this, right? Like, what do I look up, right? You don't have those video or screen sharing capabilities of advanced voice mode in standard voice mode, but standard voice mode is still a, I think an often overlooked tool that you can use inside of ChatGPT.

So how do you access chat GPT online for free? Well, you just go to chatgpt.com, right? There's no secret. Again, there's no pirated free sneaky workaround where you can get like the full GPT 4.0 chat GPT plus for free.

Nope, not a thing. All right. Is there a next common question? Is there a free AI better than chat GBT? Technically? Yes. Right. That goes to Google. It is much different though. So I do think if you want the best quote unquote, fully free AI model, it is inside Google AI studio, but that is the caveat, right? Everyday AI for the most part, this is for everyday people. Um,

Google AI Studio is a little technical. It's technically kind of for developers, although it's not that scary once you get in and once you get started. So it's not your, you know, Google Gemini, you know, Gemini.google.com where you go in there and super easy UI UX and you're just chatting. It's a little different, right? But that is by far the best free AI that you can use. However,

Keep in mind, Google AI Studio, you cannot turn off training, right? So all the information that you upload, all the content of the conversation you're having, Google's using that data. Okay. So that's the trade-off if you are using Google AI Studio and it is better, more powerful. You have all of the newest models inside Google AI Studio. So there is 100%

As of, you know, January 2025, there is a much better free AI to use than chat GPT, even though chat GPT, the free version, like we talked about, you do get a nice taste of all of these different AI features, more premium functionality. What's the best free chat GPT? Well, it's just GPT 4.0, right? I'm answering all those common questions that people are always asking, right? What's the best free chat GPT? Well, it's that.

There are other places. So I'm going to talk about that next. There's other places where you can use the GPT-4-0 model for free, but most of those places, you don't get these full features and functionality. And this is one of the main reasons why I used to tell people never use the free version of ChatGPT because all you had was GPT-3-5 and you didn't have any of these other functions, features, et cetera. Now you do. That's now why I'm like, all right, it's not that bad anymore.

All right. So is there an alternative to chat GPT? Yes. There's literally hundreds. So it has to depend on what you're looking for. So as an example, are you looking for a completely different large language model? In which case, you know,

That's easy. You can go to Anthropix Cloud. You can go to Google Gemini. You can use an open source-ish Matalama. There's Mistral, right? There's obviously Microsoft Copilot, right? There's so many kind of quote unquote large language model alternatives, but there's also other ways that you can use ChatGPT. So there's a lot of pretty popular destinations across the internet where you can still get even better

free limits on GPT-4.0. And if you do have one subscription, so some people love these platforms. I'm not a big fan of them because they don't have all of the features and functionalities that you would get within the native chat GPT interface. But as an example,

There's Poe. You can use all these different models. U.com, TypingMind, like we talked about. There's Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity with Perplexity, even a free Perplexity plan. You get a certain number of free usage of these other models, or sorry, of the Perplexity Pro.

Hugging chat, right? So there are a lot of free places across the web that you can still use ChatGPT for free and some of the features of ChatGPT Plus for free, but not all of them.

And yeah, some of these you can pay one subscription and then you do get a decent amount of access to all these other models, right? Where you can pay, you know, some of them are 10, 15, 20, $30 a month. And then you don't have to have, you know, three, four, five subscriptions. I don't personally use those a ton because even those great platforms do not have the full features and functionality of something like a chat GPT.

One other thing that I think I missed on my list is work with apps.

Uh, so that is not available in the free version of chat GPT. And I love that. So on the desktop version, uh, you know, as an example, I'm currently on a Mac, although I have my, you know, Microsoft copilot plus PC, I still have to set up. It's been busy around the holidays and a lot of things going on. Uh, but the work with apps is only available on the paid version. So that's on the desktop. You can connect different apps. So, you know, it could be X code. It could be, uh,

your Apple notes, it could be text edit, right? And then ChatGPT can see all of the contents of these files without you having to go in and even scroll to them or copy and paste. So the work with apps kind of feature is only available on the paid plan. All right, before I answer this final question, all right, looks like we got a lot of Poe fans in the house. Fred says he uses Poe to try different models.

Dennis says people really like you.com, but doesn't seem like Dennis is a fan. Jackie says Poe, Poe all day. All right, let's go through. Let me quickly answer some of these questions that we have. All right, we'll go through quickly here because I know Fred is on the elliptical there. Some of you are walking your dog and you just wait for me. All right, so let's go through the questions very quickly.

So Joe is asking, what benefits do you see of using Gemini Advanced over GPT-4.0 for the API? So yeah, when we're talking API, great question, Joe. Thank you for this call out. This is completely different. I'm only talking here about the front end chat, right? So businesses that are using the API, so you can essentially tap in and kind of use their technology and connect it with your data. So at that point, that's a whole nother conversation because

In that instance, the newer Gemini models in many use cases are going to be better than GBT 4.0. But, I mean, GBT 4.0, their API, you also have access to Whisper. You have access to their kind of their live video, live voice API, which I think is better than Google's. So I'll have to have a dedicated show on that one, Joe. But, yeah, it's definitely different.

All right. Larry asking, are some free AIs better for some particularly tasks, which is best for literature reviews? Perplexity? So for certain things, it's about the context window, right? And right now, Google AI Studio, it's like, depending on the model, it's like a million tokens. So if you're not worried about

If about the, the, the sensitivity of the data, right? So yeah, if you're writing a book or, you know, reviewing other pieces of literature, like Larry is asking here, I would go Google AI studio just because the free version of Chad GPT, the context window is extremely small. So it's going to forget things pretty quickly and you can't, you know, copy and paste a bunch of information in there anyways.

Fred asking, how about the free version of Claude? The paid version of Claude is not even good enough for businesses to use because of the rate limits. So that still stands true. Yes, I know people love 3.5 new, Sonnet 3.5 new, 3.6, whatever you want to call it. Anthropic, I think, had a terrible go-to-market strategy, right? You can't use it. I've been a paid subscriber of Claude since it came out.

I try to use it because I like to always keep up to date and give you the most up-to-date unbiased information from a very unbiased standpoint. Even the paid plan of Claude, you can't use it. The message limits are too low. Literally, there's a lot of times when I go to try to use Claude because there are certain things it's pretty good at, but the limits are so bad on the paid plan, let alone the free plan, I wouldn't use it. So...

Sarab Kumar, sorry, I know I did not get your name right, Sarab. So asking is the screen share feature available in the desktop application on Windows?

The screen share is not yet available on the desktop version. So right now you have work with apps, but the screen share is not yet available. There are some kind of shortcuts where you can essentially take a photo of your screen very quickly and easily or any tab that you have open or any application. So not necessarily as they've demoed it, not yet.

Uh, all right. So I think that's all of the questions. So let's wrap this one up y'all. Shall we? Uh, so should you use the free version of chat GPT? Let me just answer the question. Probably not. Probably not because what you get with a $20 a month subscription, to be honest, this show has already been 45 minutes. It's not even worth your 45 minutes. If you just invested 45 minutes to listen to me, talk about the differences between free and chat GPT plus $20 a month, uh,

I already just ate up 45 minutes of your time. Your time is worth more than that, right? The $20 a month, it's still the best. Like I just said, I think it's the best deal in business right now, at least. It's not worth it to use it. However, if you are just experimenting, if you are literally brand new, I think it's still good to use now, right?

If you're serious about using AI to grow your company, grow your career, should you use this? No. Invest the $20. But I'm not going to tell you anymore to stay away from the free version with a 10-foot pole like I told you to in the past. Because in the past, you couldn't upload files. You couldn't access the internet. You couldn't...

have access to the latest model. Now you have all of those things. So in very limited use cases, the free version of ChatGPT is very capable. You can have trust and confidence that you're going to have strong, reliable outputs. Is it better for anything than a couple minutes a day? Probably not. I still think it's worth investing in that $20 a month plan. But like we said,

The free version has changed a ton over the last month or two. And I do think it is at least safe, quote unquote, safe to use, good to use. You can still drive a decent amount of business value out of a free plan, but I do think it is still, there's still enough separation between the free plan and the paid plan that I'd say for 95% of business use cases, the free thing, the free plan is still not going to cut it. I still think it is worth it to update the

to the $20 a month paid plan. All right, that's it, y'all. I hope this was helpful. But like I talked about, the free version of ChatGPT has changed so much. And I know that so many people are still in this mindset of, hey, I don't need to pay for AI. It's so free. It's so available. But

You also have to think what the companies are trying to do, right? And at any point, they want you using even their free tools as much as possible because the prices could go up at any time, right? They might lock certain capabilities of free users down. So keep that in mind. I would say don't really make a free tool a needed piece of your day-to-day workflow, right? Because it could change at any time. And like I said, I would just recommend...

paying for ChatGPT Plus or whatever large language model tool that you're using. Because even those that I am not huge fans of, it's still one of the best and easiest ROIs having a premium version of something like ChatGPT Plus. All right. As a reminder, January 20th, make sure to join us. That is all of next week.

Five shows. I've spent countless hours, hundreds of interviews with experts, all rolled up into five banger episodes. Not just predictions. Yes, these are predictions, but it's much more than that. It's laying out the roadmap for you and your company to succeed. There's so much happening in the world of generative AI right now. This is all I do.

All right. So get your, get your board together. Listen to these talk about them. I have them kind of sorted by category. I promise you, you do not want to miss these episodes. They are going to pay off dividends for months in probably the end.

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