84 | Battle of the Chatbots: ChatGPT
First in a series of chatbot profiles
Introduction: Exploring the World of AI Chatbots
Welcome to our new series, “Battle of the Chatbots.” Prompted by both widespread confusion about what’s available in the array of general-purpose chatbots and the dizzying pace of new features and new chatbots, we're kicking off an exploration of this wild world of AI chatbots.
This series is accompanied by a master spreadsheet comparing the various tools. It’s a work in progress, so you’ll see some blank spots and question marks. If you see anything wrong or know the answer to a missing piece of info, please reach out to me! And if you open it and wonder what’s changed recently, look on the Revision History tab.
In this inaugural piece, we're focusing on the barely 14-month-old granddaddy of them all: ChatGPT1. We're breaking down ChatGPT's three main plans: ChatGPT 3.5, and ChatGPT 4 Plus and Team, to give you a clearer picture of what each offers and how they cater to diverse needs. There’s also a ChatGPT Enterprise plan, which we’re not going to profile.2
Overview of ChatGPT Plans
ChatGPT's offerings are designed to accommodate a wide range of users, from casual enthusiasts to professional teams looking for ways to collaborate in their use of the tool. At a glance, the plans are:
ChatGPT 3.5: The free basic chatbot. It provides all of the text conversation features you’d expect in a chatbot, but little more.
ChatGPT 4 (Plus): The primary paid plan and the market leader by far. It is the current gold standard of chatbots, offering the greatest breadth of capabilities and the top-of-the-line large language model (LLM), GPT-4. Currently priced at $20/month per user.
ChatGPT 4 (Team): A recent offering that adds some capabilities to ChatGPT 4 Plus to allow teams to collaborate. Currently priced at $30/month per user, or an annual plan of $300 per user ($25/month).
A Closer Look—What You Get for Your Money
The major hop in plans is from the free 3.5 version to ChatGPT 4 (either Plus or Team). The paid ChatGPT Plus/Team plans offer:
Access to GPT-4. This is not to be undervalued; the quality of responses and conversations with GPT-4 is notably better than in GPT-3.5, and is still superior in most benchmarks to all other available LLMs. ChatGPT 4 also can carry on much longer conversations without losing track, due to its much larger ‘context window’.
Up-to-date information. ChatGPT 3.5 can only respond with information through spring 2023. ChatGPT 4 uses Microsoft’s search to incorporate up-to-date information in its conversations.
Image generation with DALL-E 3. As has been described in many StrefaTECH articles, creating images in ChatGPT is very impressive. ChatGPT expands your prompt to send a richer request to its DALL-E 3 image generator, which is one of the top tools available. That said, the same DALL-E generator is available in Microsoft Copilot, which I tend to use more than ChatGPT.
File analysis. You can upload a wide array of files to ChatGPT 4 and ask questions about the contents. File types include .pdf, .docx, .csv, .xlsx, image files, and more.3 The image analysis is particularly of note—you can, for example, take a picture of a label and ask questions about the ingredients, or ask about assembling an item, or translate a document into English, or…..4
Please remember: don’t upload any sensitive information!
Create and use custom GPTs. This feature of ChatGPT is in its early use, but it has the potential to completely change how we “get things done” with AI. This deserves its own article5. For now, I’m going to leave it as a nod to this being something to consider trying or at least keeping an eye on.
Moving up to the Team plan adds a few general items—higher usage caps, data excluded from model training by default—as well as the ability to create custom GPTs that are shared only within the team. If you and colleagues are doing a lot of work with ChatGPT, this may be worth considering; but if you’re newer to regular usage or are alone in blazing the AI trail, there’s no reason to pay the extra fees. And, if you’re on a Plus plan, you can upgrade to Team any time.
The one notable drawback to moving to ChatGPT Plus from 3.5 is the usage cap. ChatGPT Plus limits you to 40 prompts per 3 hours (Team expands to 100). While it may be uncommon to use ChatGPT that intensely, it’s an unforgiving cap—if you hit the limit, you have to wait three hours to use ChatGPT Plus, though you could switch to 3.5 (abandoning your stalled prior conversation).
Final Thoughts
Choosing the right ChatGPT plan depends on your individual or organizational needs, from basic inquiries and fun explorations to integrating AI into your professional workflows or team projects. With this guide, we hope to have illuminated the path toward selecting the ChatGPT plan that best aligns with your aspirations in the AI landscape.
Coming up in the series: Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and Perplexity. Stay tuned (or check out the spreadsheet to ingest the detailed rundown).
And remember, in the fast-evolving world of technology, staying informed helps you…
Make Good Choices
The StrefaTECH ChatGPT series from fall 2023, starting with #17 - Why ChatGPT is More Than Just Another Chatbot, covers a number of the features of ChatGPT in more detail. It’s mostly still accurate, though things do keep advancing!
If you’re interested in ChatGPT Enterprise, check it out with OpenAI and tell me what you learn!
The file uploading can be a bit fragile; ChatGPT will often display errors analyzing a file, then try to fix them. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes not. But if you ask it to try again or try harder, it may work! I’ve found it to be immensely helpful to find information in large PDF files, for example.
I’ve done all of these and more. I just open ChatGPT on my phone and snap a photo of something, then start asking questions. Like all things generative AI, it’s hit or miss as to how helpful the response is, but I’ve learned to bail quickly if it doesn’t look like ChatGPT will help, and I’m delighted at the time and frustration saved when it does!
It’s high on the StrefaTECH “future topics” list!