OpenAI continues to expand the options available to free ChatGPT users. The company started by making its newest model, GPT-4o, generally free to all users—though there are limitations unless you pay—and now it has expanded the accessibility of major 4o features by removing the paywalls on file uploads, vision (which can use your camera for input), and GPTs (or custom chatbots). Browse, data analysis, and memory, also formerly paywalled features, were already available to free users in a similarly limited capacity.
OpenAI has been clear about its plans to expand the offerings that its free users can take advantage of since it first revealed GPT-4o a few weeks back, and it has made good on those promises so far. With these changes, it makes paying for ChatGPT Plus even less important for many, which is surprisingly a good thing for OpenAI. More users means more usage testing—something that will only help improve the models running ChatGPT.
There will, of course, still be usage limits on the free version of ChatGPT. Once you reach those limits, you’ll be kicked back to GPT 3.5, as OpenAI hasn’t made GPT 4 or GPT 4 Turbo accessible in the free tier. Despite that, some paid users are not exactly happy with the change, with many wondering what the point of ChatGPT Plus is supposed to be now.
Paying users still get up to five times more messages with GPT-4o than free users do, but that hasn't stopped some from taking to social media to ask questions like “what about the paid users?” and “what do paid users get? False hopes of GPT5.”
ChatGPT Plus subscribers still get access to the ability to make their own GPTs, and based on everything we know so far, Plus users are the only ones who will get 4o's upcoming voice-activated mode, though that could certainly change in the future.
Giving more people access to ChatGPT’s best features brings the chatbot in line with one of its biggest competitors, Claude, which allows free users access to the latest version of its AI model (albeit it through a less powerful version of that model).
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