ChatGPT Pro: What's the difference between free and paid?

ChatGPT is free to use — but a pro version priced at $42 a month is reportedly being trialed.

Nearly 30 percent of professional workers have used ChatGPT at work, according to a new poll out of Fishbowl, a social network for professionals. We're using the AI chatbot to message people on dating apps; to write essays for school; create malware, and more. And users are doing all of that for free, thanks to the company potentially paying millions of dollars a month so we don't have to pay anything.

There's been a rumor swirling around that OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, is working on a way to monetize its newest success. Just a few weeks ago, the company let users sign up for early access to "ChatGPT Professional," a version of the product that includes no blackout windows, meaning it is always available; faster responses from ChatGPT (which is helpful because it breaks down a lot); and as many messages as you want up to at least twice the regular daily limit.

OpenAI sent out a waitlist for ChatGPT Professional earlier this month, asking potential users not only what they use ChatGPT for most but also how much money would be reasonable for the product.

"If you are selected, we’ll reach out to you to set up a payment process and a pilot," the waitlist read. "Please keep in mind that this is an early experimental program that is subject to change, and we are not making paid pro access generally available at this time."

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But some users say they’ve been granted access to ChatGPT Professional at $42 a month. OpenAI hasn't confirmed that they've granted access to this tool yet, made any announcements about its launch, or confirmed the price point, and it did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mashable. 

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What ChatGPT said about ChatGPT Pro

When Mashable asked ChatGPT about the $42 per month version, it said it was "not aware of a $42 per month paid version of ChatGPT." But, when asked what was different between its free version and the paid version, it said: 

ChatGPT and ChatGPT-professional are both based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture. However, there are a few key differences between the two models.

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1. Training data: ChatGPT-professional is trained on a much larger and more diverse dataset, which allows it to generate more human-like text with a higher level of fluency and accuracy.

2. Fine-tuning: ChatGPT-professional can be fine-tuned with a small amount of task-specific data to improve its performance on specific use cases.

3. API:ChatGPT-professional is available as an API, which allows developers to easily integrate it into their applications and systems.

4. Scale:ChatGPT-professional can handle a much higher volume of requests than ChatGPT, making it more suitable for large-scale production applications.

5. Performance:ChatGPT-professional delivers better performance than ChatGPT in terms of generating more human-like text and providing better context understanding.

6. Cost:ChatGPT-professional is a paid service, while ChatGPT is a free to use model.

In summary, ChatGPT-professional is a more advanced and powerful version of ChatGPT, designed for use in production environments, and with more advanced features, more data and better performance, but also comes with a cost.

When asked about the details of that cost, ChatGPT said it depends and that OpenAI doesn't "publicly disclose the prices for the ChatGPT-professional."

Update: This story incorrectly identified Fishbowl as a publication. It is a social network.