How to Access GPT
(And other AI Language Models)
Here are some ways to access GPT. This information is from January 2024, and is likely to change quickly.
ChatGPT Free
OpenAI’s ChatGPT most popular AI chat application. The free version allows you to chat with GPT 3.5 on a website and with mobile phone apps. You must sign up for an account.
ChatGPT Plus Paid
ChatGPT Plus, OpenAI’s paid version of ChatGPT, gives you access to GPT 4 for $20 per month. You also get some additional features: like the ability to converse about documents and images, and the ability to search for information on the web.
OpenAI recently launched the GPT Store, where you can try out purpose-specific custom AI agents. These custom “GPT’s” extend the capabilities of GPT by connecting them to databases of information (like a chatbot to search through research papers), or give them capabilities to interact with other computer programs (like a chatbot for booking flights). There are already many custom chatbots for policy and law applications. The GPT store is currently accessible to people with a GPT Plus subscription.
What’s the difference between GPT 3 and GPT 4?
GPT 3 marked a major improvement in the capabilities of AI language models and sparked much of the current hype around AI and ChatGPT. It surprised technologists by exhibiting converational AI capabilities that most of us thought were still decades away. GPT4 brought about significant improvements in accuracy (while still having hallucination problems), and a better ability to “reason” about complex questions. It is also able to process much larger documents, as well as pictures. GPT 4 is a much bigger model, and thus is significantly more expensive and energy-intesive to run. Therefore, GPT 3.5 is still used for many applications where the extra accuracy and capabilities are not required. (GPT 3.5 is an incremental improvement on GPT 3.)
Google NotebookLM Free
Google’s NotebookLM is an experimental tool for analyzing documents, mainly designed for people like journalists and researchers, and also potentially useful for policymakers. It allows you to upload documents as PDFs or Google Docs, and it can provide summaries and answer questions from the documents. (NotebookLM does not use GPT, instead using Google’s comparable Gemini model.)
Microsoft Copilot Free
Microsoft’s Copilot allows you to interact with GPT 4 for free. When you chat with this bot, it searches the web to find relevant information and analyzes the top websites with GPT 4 to answer your questions. If you use Microsoft’s Edge browser, you can also use Copilot alongside webpages in a sidebar, which can summarize the web page and answer questions about its content. (Its answers tend to be shorter and less detailed than other versions of GPT4.)
Microsoft has announced plans to integrate Copilot into more of its products in the future, like Word and Outlook. As of January 25, Copilot 365 is on the market, which integrates with Microsoft Office products, but is exorbitantly expensive and only for enterprise customers.