Our Honest Review of ChatGPT

Last updated:
August 13, 2024
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Fast Facts

Name:
ChatGPT (OpenAI)
Key features:
  • Explain complex concepts in engaging and simple terms.
  • Debug/troubleshoot code and formulas.
  • Generate essays with prompt engineering.
  • Can have a conversation/answer questions.
  • Brainstorm ideas with personalized tips.
Our take:
The most complete chatbot experience.
Pros:
  • Tied for the best chatbot (with Claude 3.5 Sonnet). 
  • Exclusive features like GPTs, Voice Mode, web browsing, and DALLE 3. 
  • Versatile skill set, can complete a wide range of tasks. 
  • Speedy answers
Cons:
  • Writing style is sometimes excessive and unnatural.
  • Can give inaccurate answers (with a surprising amount of confidence).
Pricing:
  • Free for newest model ChatGPT-4o mini, limited access to ChatGPT-4o..
  • $20/month for ChatGPT-4o (40 prompts/3 hours) and early access to data analysis tools and custom GPTs. 
  • $25/month ChatGPT Team (2+ users): everything in Plus with higher message limits and workspace management.

Our Review

Note: This category is moving extremely fast. We'll do our best to keep this updated, but we may be a little slow. We recommend subscribing to our newsletter, where we cover big updates regularly.

It's hard to write about ChatGPT given how so many of our standards are set by ChatGPT itself.

Here's what we'll say to start: if you still haven't tried ChatGPT out yet, you should. But we get that it's hard to figure out how exactly to use it and where. We plan on writing a lot of content to help you out there.

Expanding horizons

The real exciting work about ChatGPT is all of the different directions it's moving in.

The core product is already helping people 10x their content production, learn any topic faster than they ever have before and problem-solve issues with a human-level thought partner.

But here's what's coming:

  • Plugins - Dozens of companies are building out connections so that you can use their products from within ChatGPT itself
  • Internet browsing - Until now, ChatGPT only had access to data through September 2021. Connecting to the Internet lets it find the latest info.
  • Multimodal - When announcing GPT-4, OpenAI demo'd a version of ChatGPT that could understand an image that you uploaded, then do things with that image (e.g., sketch a website then generate the code)

These are going to elevate the ChatGPT like crazy. There's a LOT of stuff you can do with those ideas, eventually leading to a world where you do most of your work with ChatGPT.

You need to learn how to prompt

The difference between tools like Jasper and just using ChatGPT is that Jasper has tooling in place to send the right instructions to the AI model so you don't have to figure it out yourself.

Our general stance is that you should learn how to do this regardless - it's the new "learn how to search Google" - but it's a process, and sometimes, you just don't have the time or patience to do it.

Once you eventually get there, you could theoretically replace other tools (which might cost you $30+/month) with ChatGPT, especially if you're using this for personal or small-team usage.

ChatGPT Plus: Is it worth paying for?

ChatGPT Plus costs $20/month and gets you:

  • Faster speeds
  • More availability, even when demand is high
  • Access to new features: GPT-4, plugins, all the stuff mentioned above

Our perspective: once you get used to using ChatGPT for all the different personas it can play (writer, editor, thought partner, etc.) - it's more than worth it. If anything, having reliably fast access is very helpful.

Back

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

Key Features

  • Explain complex concepts in engaging and simple terms.
  • Debug/troubleshoot code and formulas.
  • Generate essays with prompt engineering.
  • Can have a conversation/answer questions.
  • Brainstorm ideas with personalized tips.

The Interface

Target demographic

Anyone!

Our take

The most complete chatbot experience.

Pros

  • Tied for the best chatbot (with Claude 3.5 Sonnet). 
  • Exclusive features like GPTs, Voice Mode, web browsing, and DALLE 3. 
  • Versatile skill set, can complete a wide range of tasks. 
  • Speedy answers

Cons

  • Writing style is sometimes excessive and unnatural.
  • Can give inaccurate answers (with a surprising amount of confidence).

Pricing

  • Free for newest model ChatGPT-4o mini, limited access to ChatGPT-4o..
  • $20/month for ChatGPT-4o (40 prompts/3 hours) and early access to data analysis tools and custom GPTs. 
  • $25/month ChatGPT Team (2+ users): everything in Plus with higher message limits and workspace management.

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