Stephanie Stebbins

A very sad day. ChatGPT is officially on death row. The beautiful, blissful experience of interacting with a frontier-ish reasoning model without worrying about a usage meter will soon be a thing of the past. I am weirdly significantly impacted by this. It feels like it shouldn’t matter…I could reserve all current usage for Codex and buy a $20 plan just for ChatGPT and it would be more than enough. But it’s not about the money…it’s about the psychological impact of The Meter. The idea of having to think about optimizing for a meter is just so exhausting that it ruins the whimsy of free-flowing exploratory thought. That is what ChatGPT was. A whimsical, magical all-you-can-think buffet of experimentation and exploration where you were limited only by your imagination and your ability to come up with $20 once a month. You didn’t have to think about “using all of your usage” or scheduling your thinking time around someone else’s arbitrary schedule…you just had a portal to endless information and research capability in your pocket to tap into guilt-free at any time the moment struck you. But either because OpenAI thinks adding the meter will stimulate additional usage (it probably will), generate additional revenue (it probably will), or just because too many people took undue advantage of ChatGPT’s generous allowances (they definitely did)…that amazing, weightless experience is now coming to an end. It was awesome while it lasted. RIP ChatGPT.