No Account Required for ChatGPT Users
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OpenAI has just announced that they're going to be making ChatGPT available generally to everyone without even needing to essentially create an account. So why is this a story and why is this interesting? A lot of people are talking about this. They made a whole blog post about this. And this is interesting for a number of reasons. But first, exactly what this means is essentially like you'd imagine, you go to the ChatGPT homepage and instead of being prompted to sign up or create an account, you can just go and start creating.

using ChatGPT, asking questions, et cetera. Now, of course, this isn't GPT-4, so it's still gonna just be 3.5, their free version. But what's interesting here is it obviously costs money to generate. So why are they giving this away for free? Now, the short answer is they're already doing this, right? 3.5, GPT-3.5 is already free to use.

And so this isn't that much different. So what's the difference between having an account and not having an account? They outline a couple different things here. And I think one of the big areas is they're just trying to reduce friction, essentially make this easier. There's going to be some sort of percentage of people that are going to land on their homepage and are just going to, you know, bounce because they don't want to make an account. I tend to think like,

You'd be surprised by what that number is, by the way, because having apps myself, you know, Self Pause, the number one AI life coach that I've created, it is impressive the bounce rate you get on people that download the app and if you immediately make them sign in for an account versus if you just let them start using the app right away. And there's definitely trade-offs between the two of them, but it's interesting. I think it's significant. I think they're going to get a big uptick. Now,

What I think is actually interesting here is something that not a lot of people are talking about. Reddit recently did something very similar to this. And if you look at Reddit's web traffic right before there, so Reddit was doing this pre IPO, right? They're about to do a big IPO. And I think essentially if you want to juice your numbers, this is one of the easiest ways to do this. Now, I don't know if that has anything to do with

OpenAI's strategy. But essentially there's a large percentage of people that, Reddit's I guess a little different because there's content and it's all over the web and it ranks very well on Google. But essentially what was happening is on Reddit a lot of times you're clicking on stuff and you're kind of immediately before you're able to read the thread getting hit with like a, make an account.

Now, they saw pretty flatlined web traffic. And after they made the change where on Reddit, you didn't need an account anymore. You could immediately get your content. They saw a huge spike. And it's, in fact, like noticeable enough that on their IPO filings, this was a big thing. A lot of people were talking about this. Like I think it was up like 40% or something crazy over a number of months.

Reddit's traffic increasing because of this. And so I think while OpenAI may not have necessarily content, I think this could definitely affect shared posts or shared threads. So like a lot of times you can actually share a thread that you've created, a conversation you've created, and that shareable link, being able to view that without actually having to log an account, I think that would be a benefit. I'm not sure if that's gonna be part of the rollout or not.

But regardless, just being able to hit there and start searching, what people are saying is essentially this is going to turn into Google. And some people are saying with even better results and responses. So a reporter recently over at TechCrunch was asking some questions about this because apparently with this version in particular, they're going to have quote unquote slightly more restrictive content policies. So the reporter asked them what that meant. And this is the response they gave. They said, the signed out experience will benefit from the...

the existing safety migrations that are already built into the model such as refusing to generate harmful content in addition to these existing

mitigations. We are also implementing additional safeguards specifically designed to address other forms of content that may be inappropriate for signed out experience. We consider the potential ways in which a logged out service could be used in inappropriate ways informed by our understanding of the capabilities of GPT 3.5 and risk assessments that we've completed. Okay, honestly, to me, that's like a big nothing. It doesn't really explain. They've essentially said there's going to be some differences, but they haven't really said what they are. The big thing I'm noticing here is by default, you're going to be

automatically opted in to having all of your essentially all of your data being shared into the model

you can go and disable it if you go to settings and then you go over to, there's a toggle that says improve the model for everyone and essentially it allows your content to be used to train the model. You can toggle that off. I think a part of this is they're like, well, we'll get more users, but we're making everyone automatically opted into, we can use all of their conversations and training data. And so I think this is interesting. I'm not sure like when you look at Google, if they're like, in my opinion, Google's probably taking all that exact same information for everyone that uses Google for free.

but people kind of complain about this when they have to pay for it. And so if it's free, it kind of makes sense. So then the one other thing I wanted to bring up is that same reporter, when they kind of asked about what the slightly more restrictive content policies were gonna be, they kind of gave that answer. They weren't really sure what that meant exactly. So they asked again, you know,

And they got this response as well. They said,

have been involved through the design and implementation of this experience and will continue to inform its design moving forward. I think the big thing here is people are like, what are you going to do when if you don't even need an account, people are just going to create bots that go and like use this and spin out answers and do a bunch of crazy stuff. The nice thing about accounts is like if there's an account that's

you know, doing something crazy and spending, getting millions of things generated, you know, okay, well, this is this account that's doing it, shut down the account. But if it's just open to everyone, you can have different IP addresses, different computers, different, you know, essentially different virtual private networks or servers all over the world. And one person can be controlling it to get tons of stuff. So it looks like Chai Chappati and OpeningEye is looking at this, but I'm curious to see how this will go. Specifically on their LinkedIn post, there was a couple of interesting comments

Someone said, please release the memory feature. Yes, this is something, this is notorious. OpenAI announces something and they don't have it roll out right away. They announced a memory feature a while back and have not done it where it can remember everything you are working on.

Someone said, "I'm curious on how you're protecting from an IP farm kind of scenario." This is what I was just mentioning. "I understand the cost of inference for 3.5 has come down enough. This is now a reality, but I'm still not convinced this can fully be protected against attacks. Kudos to the team protecting this from malicious actors."

So yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see how that rolls out. Someone else said, removing friction is probably the most important thing that sets companies with amazing products from mediocre ones apart. So I agree, like we mentioned with Reddit and now this move, I think removing this friction, they're gonna see a big bump in site usage and traffic. Not big, but like I think double digit percentage. And because of that, I think...

whether that means that they're like going to look at raising money or they need that statistic for some other benchmark, I think that it's an interesting play to make.

Someone else said, "No signup means easier access, but without an account, you're gonna miss out on having number one, the ability to share conversations, number two, conversation history for records retention, and number three, opting out of using data to train the model." Okay, so I guess you may not actually be able to opt out of using your data to train the model with this free version, which if that's the case, that makes perfect sense why they'd be doing that.

she then said all the more reason for organizations who don't have generative AI policy to get one in place. Yeah, that's a good point, right? Like people are saying, um, you know, they're banning chat GPT at work early on. And then eventually there, you know, you could opt out. So it wasn't training off of any of your stuff if you paid for it. And so then they're like, okay, you can, you know, organizations can use this. And, uh,

Yeah, now you definitely want to have an AI policy because you don't want your employees to be using this free, not logged in version that definitely is taking all of the data. So a lot of very interesting stuff here. Personally, I think I'm interested to see if they're going to be making any big announcements, if they're going to be raising any funding, if they're going to be doing anything in kind of that scope.

what the need really to bump the juice, the numbers, or maybe it's just if they're opting everyone in automatically to having their data trained, they just want to get more data out of it, increase their users. Very, very interesting. Last thing I will say is in their blog post, they kind of started this off with a very interesting take that I think might directly be in relation to Elon Musk suing them for going from an open...

open nonprofit to a closed for-profit. They said it's core mission. It's core to our mission to make tools like chat GPT broadly available so people can experience the benefits of AI. Okay. That is literally from like the lawsuit where Elon's like, you said it was going to be open source. And they're like, no, we didn't say it was open source. It's just going to be openly available to everyone to get broad benefits. They kind of changed that in their charter, I think, which, so anyways, it's kind of funny that it's like, they're like leading with this.

They said more than 100 million people across 185 countries use ChatGPT weekly. This is one thing I do want to say. They made this claim 100 million weekly. I want to say like six months ago, if I'm not mistaken. It feels like six months ago. Maybe time flies. It was a demo day, I think, right? So maybe that was what, November? So we got, yeah, a handful of months ago, and it doesn't seem like this has necessarily increased.

a lot since then. So I'm wondering if they're seeing growth plateau and whenever they make their next, you know, big announcement, they want to say 200 million or 140 or 150 million. And so this is like trying to juice the numbers again. So, I mean, that's just one point for the juicing the numbers theory. They then say to learn something new, find creative inspiration

inspiration and get answers to their questions starting today, you can use it. Okay, whatever. I think we got the juice out of that sentence there. In any case, I'll keep you up to date on everything that's happening with this. If we do see a significant numbers boost in the future, just remember this podcast episode and remember this may be what they're going for all along. Hope that you all have an amazing rest of your day. Make sure to subscribe if you're on YouTube. Follow us if you're on Instagram

If you're on Spotify or Apple and make sure to leave us a review or a comment. I really, really appreciate it. Hope that you all have an amazing rest of your day.