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Ask HN: Anyone else see GPT-4 access as unfair?
15 points by neotrope on April 26, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 45 comments
GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are worlds apart and having access to GPT-4 (API) is a competitive advantage.

Like countless others, I've been on the waitlist forever, and seeing other companies get access to GPT-4 means my project is on hold while they're moving ahead.

Am I the only one who sees this as an unfair practice by OpenAI?



Yes - it should be everyone gets access, and they rate limit based on how much demand they could support. If that means everyone only gets 3 requests per day for GPT4, then so be it. That would be fair.

It's disappointing since Sama was a part of YC which does seem to care about merit and "fairness." So you'd hope he'd support the same principals to "support the little guy" and give everyone a shot at having the best tools.

At least GPT4 isn't good enough to use something like AutoGPT to actually be useful at self-developing large portions of software. Once AI is that good, API access will be critical. Entire infrastructure and first-mover advantage could be dependent on API access at that time... there would be AI pipelines that wouldn't have been possible months ago that a highly intelligent AI model could see to use instantly and build out in a day. Imagine if your competitor has access and you don't in that AI future.


Sooner or later you will have your own AIs, locally and selfhosted. You can have it now, but not exactly chatGPT, which is the argument of using openais-api here.

I believe in the near future they will put AIs locally in your toaster and all toys, because they will become so cheap to embed offline.


True, but only in the long term. Cutting edge AI will continually provide a competitive advantage and access will result in better products.

Once the diminishing returns of improvements drop off or when it gets "good enough", then it won't matter.


The current batch of YC was all given access. I'd guess OpenAI has a profit sharing agreement to incentivize it.

> At least GPT4 isn't good enough to use something like AutoGPT

I worry that GPT-4 will continue to get better while access will still be limited.


They have no obligation to be fair.


This is a fair argument. However, their mission contradicts the advantage they’re providing to friends.

> Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.


> their mission contradicts the advantage they’re providing to friends.

“Missions” are pure marketing. The only mission of a corporation is to make money.


It started as a non-profit.


[flagged]


Submit an Ask HN?


How would they know if your project benefits humanity? Perhaps the best way to go about that is by ensuring you give tool access to people where you already know their output, and ignore others.

Why is total fairness a prerequisite for benefiting humanity?


They can’t know. Eventually it will be open to everyone like cloud providers are today.


I don't see any contradiction to their mission in being closed. If you think that the people you've given access to are the ones who you know will benefit humanity, and you're not sure about the others, it makes sense to ignore the others.

FWIW, I don't think that they're giving access based on that mission, but I don't think your claim has much merit. There is a possibility that unfairness and their mission are perfectly in sync.


How long will it be before it becomes unfair in your view? What if they never open it up and the only way to get access is through YC or knowing the right person.

What if you had to give away 10% of your company to get access to AWS (or any cloud provider)?


It already is unfair in my view! But I don't care about the unfairness. There's a strong case to be made that benefiting humanity means that they should have stopped most people from being on the waitlist at all. There are plenty of people we exclude from having tech in an unfair way to benefit humanity, we do that through any number of sanctions already.


They abandoned that mission ages ago.


But perhaps a nominal obligation to be open.


You mean, the API access that is explicitly prioritized by how much free labor you provide to OpenAI?

I don’t think “fair” is even part of the idea.


To be fair, I got GPT-4 API access a few days after it launched, without providing any free labor (though I don't know what that's referring to, so maybe I did?).


They state (or did last I looked) that their priority is based on submission of quality AI test cases to their repository of such.


Ah, I wasn't aware, thanks.


Exactly.

Just goes against their mission, if that’s still a thing.


Weird, I got API access pretty much next day and I’m just a solo dev playing around with it for personal projects.


Congrats!


Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is just farming the wait list for the best ideas so they can build them while you're waiting and then beat you to market.

Sounds like something they would do.


The original announcement of GPT4 included a list of companies that had already integrated GPT4 to their product, it’s a totally unfair competitive advantage


I don't have GPT-4, but I thought it was available by default to paid subscribers. Is this not the case? Or is there a waitlist to even become a paid subscriber?

Also, does anyone know if Copilot is using GPT-4? I assume it is.


OP is referring to GPT4 API


For historical purposes, this submission was shadow banned ~30m after submission.


Is it so much better? I honestly don't see that much of a difference with "good prompts" between GPT4 and GPT3.5 in chatgpt.


It's substantially better.

I've compared the same prompts between both, and GPT-4 is always better, except when you need speed or it's a very simple task.

For complex tasks, especially requiring some sort or social understanding (I'm building a group AI sharing tool) it has a capacity for nuance which is sometimes surprisingly good. ChatGPT is usually more straightforward.

If anyone hasn't played with gpt4 yet I'm looking for testers on my platform and I have access.


Share it!


It’s far better at producing workable code, logical reasoning, keeping a train of thought, etc. Their benchmark breaks it down.

https://openai.com/research/gpt-4


It is much better, yes. The new 3.5 is still pretty good and very cheap, so it's my go-to for simple things, but GPT-4 is unmatched for complicated reasoning.


What waitlist? I got immediate access as soon as I paid.


I assume they mean API access to GPT4, not the ChatGPT interface.


They must mean for free


Pay $20


This post refers to API access to GPT-4, which is only available via gated waitlist. I pay for ChatGPT and hit the cap regularly.


I just upgraded today from free user to paid (i did lose all those welcome credits long ago by playing around with, what i already forgot).

There is no different signup or waitlist for the api. It's just much more expensive to use gpt4 in favor of gpt-3.5-turbo.

The first example you find there for creating a chat-app let's you freely choose between the models.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/chat


This is untrue. Anyone can verify this by hitting the API using their key:

    curl https://api.openai.com/v1/models \
      -H "Authorization: Bearer TOKEN" | \
      jq '.data[].id'
Curious how you got it though. Perhaps you had an account for awhile?


Are you saying that when you became a paid API user, you got access to gpt-4?


Yes. Exactly. But it is usage-based (tokens). And gpt3.5 is a lot cheaper.

Just put the creditcard details in and do not forget to set usage-limits to your liking in the settings.

This way you do not have to fear higher costs than you are willing to accept. There is a standard cap of 120$ per month. That is the absolute maximum, if you do not contact them and raise it. I turned mine to 20$.

https://openai.com/pricing#language-models


Good to know. I’ve been waiting for access but am happy to pay.


I totally have to rollback anything i said before. Just now i understand what happens in the background. Nobody is directly granted and the waitlist is indeed there to block me from using it.

I just hammered against it and found out you are totally right. Which is a real pain, because i have lots of things to test and checkout with more tokens.

I am working with a friend on something, and i know he has access, we share the code and tomorrow i wanted to start using GPT-4 with it.

So i am now as disappointed as you are.

Sorry for my confusion, but like i said, i had no prior need for a paid account (api) and the docs do nowhere mention that.


Thanks for the correction!




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