If a company offers an LLM for free, it's because that company is training the LLM on the data that users put into it. Offering CrapGPT for free is financially unsustainable for OpenAI, and the time will come in the near future that the only way to access ChatGPT will be by paying. They'll offered a "tiered" subscription plan. The best version will cost probably $1,000+/yr. The crappy version will be like $20/month. If you don't believe me about those prices: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/06/altman_gpt_profits/ Whenever you copy/paste your work into CrapGPT, you're giving them free reign on your work and ultimately helping them to create a product that you'll eventually need to pay a lot of money for to keep using. Oh, sure. They'll still offer a free "preview version" of CrapGPT (with limited capabilities and a strict word limit/prompt limit), but this will exist primarily to entice you to pay for a subscription in the same way that a crack dealer gives you the first hit for free, knowing you'll be back for more. So if you rely on CrapGPT for your writing, you may be screwed in the near future unless you're willing to pony up a lot of money.
Also being able to cite N number of users is juicy for investors who think free users = future paying users. It also accustoms people to actually using it in the first place. This is such a bubble, has me scared of index funds at the moment.
I set up a system in Notion for tracking tasks and projects for work. It's nice although not perfect. One thing that really bugs me is that you can't turn off the AI features. I don't know what it's doing when I don't ask for an AI assist, and the commands to disable AI have disappeared. Reportedly, you can email Notion and they will turn off AI support for you. Not, in my opinion, the best marketing.
