Yes, There’s a 100% Free Way to Use GPT-4!
GPT-4 was officially announced on March 14, but it turns out it's been with us all along...inside the new Bing! It's free to use and only requires signing up for a waitlist.
Wow, what a week!
Just one day apart, we saw two big AI launches I talked about in January.
First came GPT-4 on March 14, followed the next day by Midjourney V5.
I already covered Midjourney V5 in great detail.
But let’s now have a quick chat about GPT-4 as well.
What’s GPT-4?
In case you’ve somehow slept through the entire ChatGPT buzz of the past several months, GPT-4 is the long-awaited upgrade to GPT-3 and ChatGPT ( which was considered GPT-3.5).
These are large language models from OpenAI, capable of interacting with people using natural language and writing human-like text, answering questions, and even writing code.
To see a bit of what they can do, check out my Lex post from November 2022.
What makes GPT-4 better?
Both GPT-3 and ChatGPT were already impressive enough.
So what’s changed?
Very briefly, GPT-4…
Beats the current ChatGPT on almost every imaginable benchmark for language processing.
Is multimodal. In addition to text input, it can “see” images and answer any questions related to them.
Has a much, much larger context window. It can reportedly process up to 25,000 words of text, so you could realistically feed GPT-4 an entire novella to discuss.
To go deeper down this rabbit hole, you can visit OpenAI’s GPT-4 product page, read the GPT-4 research paper, or watch this launch livestream:
The GPT-4 hype train took off instantly and hasn’t stopped since.
For just a tiny glimpse of how people are using GPT-4, you can check out Twitter threads like this:
Or this:
Primary ways to access GPT-4
OpenAI lists just two official ways to do this:
Sign up for API access as a developer (waitlist)
Shell out money for ChatGPT Plus ($20 per month)
Also, if you’re using a 3rd-party tool built on OpenAI’s API, I’m sure many of them will soon make GPT-4 available.
(Speaking of which, Lex founder Nathan Baschez just updated Lex to enable GPT-4. I still have a few Lex invites left, so give me a shout if you’d like one.)
But since “Why Try AI?” is for the non-tech crowd and those wanting to sample the wonders of AI for as little money as possible…there’s another way.
How to use GPT-4 for free
Microsoft has now confirmed what many have assumed: The new Bing AI chat runs on GPT-4. (In fact, it has done so for the past several weeks.)
The best part? It’s free and available to everyone!
So if you’re willing to let Bing back into your life, simply go to “The New Bing” landing page.
Then smash the giant “Join the waitlist” button.
Yes, you’ll need a Microsoft account.
Yes, there’s a waiting list.
And yes, you’ll have to live with the knowledge that you came crawling back to Bing after abandoning it for that flashy Google boy.
But then you’re in!
Once you gain access, you’ll be able to chat with Bing’s ChatGPT-style bot. Not only is it powered by GPT-4 but it’s also hooked up to the Internet.
Which means you can ask it to actually research stuff before helping you with your tasks. For instance, I asked Bing Chat to look up my Substack and come up with an “About” page:
Not too bad! (Even though I prefer to write my own “About” pages.)
Limitations of GPT-4 in Bing AI
As cool as it is to have access to a web-surfing GPT-4, the Bing version isn’t exactly the same as the standard GPT-4. Here are some differences:
The GPT-4 in Bing doesn’t currently accept any visual input, only text.
The Bing version has been tweaked to make it optimized for search and it may have additional built-in guardrails that the “pure” GPT-4 doesn’t.
There’s currently a per-chat limit of 15 messages. (Although it’s already up from the previous limit of 5, and you can always start a new chat.)
Using Bing Chat in your preferred browser
By default, Bing AI is only available within a Microsoft Edge browser. But here are several extensions that let you use it with your browser of choice:
Chrome:
Firefox:
Over to you…
Have you already tried GPT-4? If so, how do you think it compares to GPT-3 and ChatGPT? What awesome stuff does GPT-4 allow you to do?
If you have any cool GPT-4 tricks or other ways to use GPT-4 that I didn’t cover, I’m all ears. Drop me an email or leave a comment!
“Why Try AI” is 100% free to read for everyone. There are no content paywalls or other pay-to-access features.
But you can help support my work through an optional paid subscription. It’s like buying me a fancy cup of coffee once a month. If you do, thank you!
Lex also has the option for GPT4 now and doesn't have a reputation for going totally off the rails like ol' Sydney. 😉
Have you encountered any 3rd party tools that allow access to GPT4's image processing feature? I'm quite curious about that and would like to learn more about how capable it really is.