Why you should give ChatGPT Plus your $20/month

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bot

For just $20/month, would you embrace a tool that promises superpowers? That's the tantalizing offer from OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus. And the race is on, with giants like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google not far behind. We're on the cusp of a digital revolution. Bid adieu to primitive assistants like Alexa or Siri; enter the era of assistants as sophisticated as Scarlett Johansson’s “Samantha” from “Her”. And isn't it intriguing that ChatGPT’s voice eerily resembles Johansson’s?

Let me explain and give you some examples of how ChatGPT Plus has completely changed the way I work and play.

What is it?

Launched in February 2023, ChatGPT Plus is a subscription plan introduced by OpenAI to provide an enhanced user experience. Priced at $20 per month, this plan offers a slew of perks over the free 3.5 version or the ChatGPT Model integrated for free into Microsoft Bing, although Bing and others have their place as I’ll outline in more detail below.

Key Features of ChatGPT Plus:

1. General Access: Subscribers will experience unrestricted access even during peak times.

2. Faster Response Times: The paid plan facilitates quicker interactions, making the conversation flow smoother and more natural.

3. Beta Features:

   • Custom Prompts: Give context and help guide the context for an interaction.

   • Voice Input / Output: Conversate with ChatGPT on any topic

   • Image Input: Take a picture of anything in the world and use it as input.

   • Image Generation: Describe anything you can think of an instantly generate an image using the latest DALL·E 3 engine.

   • Advanced Data Analysis: Upload and analyze any document.

   • Plugins: 3rd Party specialized plugins for discrete tasks such as diagrams, maps, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.

   • API Access: For those who want to push the boundaries of current capabilities or create a solution around ChatGPT.

Much of the true differentiation compared to the “free models is in these Beta Multi Modal Features which is a term you’re going to be hearing a lot more of. Essentially meaning that the system can now ‘hear’, ‘see’, and ‘talk’ about the world through these different modalities just as we humans use our senses to understand the environment around us.

Why is it relevant?

Since Google's PageRank Algorithm in 1998, search engines haven't truly evolved. They sift through content, match keywords, and rank results. However, ChatGPT promises a rich, contextual, conversational experience. It understands the intricacies, personalizes interactions and redefines how we seek information. Instead of keyword hunts, you converse, extracting insights seamlessly.

Rather than hunting and pecking for matches of keywords on web pages. I’m able to show or speak to the AI in the same way I would a human and get to the real nuggets of what I’m trying to achieve way more quickly.

Here’s OpenAI’s marketing video and some examples I’ve collected from around the web.

Vision

• Take a photo of your clothes and ask GPT to advise what combination would look great

• Plant identification

• Take a picture of your refrigerator contents and ask it to suggest recipes

• Take a picture of a room and ask for interior design ideas

• Take a photo of your dumbbell rack, foam roller, etc., and ask it to generate a set of exercises for the equipment that you have.

• Send it an image of your bookshelf and request recommendations for new books based on them.

• Draw an image of a website and send a picture of it, then ask for the Python code to create it.

• Feed it a workflow diagram and instruct it to generate a project scope statement, epics and features, requirements, acceptance criteria, and use cases.

• Ask it to critique your website and provide suggestions for improvements.

• Have it read handwritten letters from your long-gone grandparents and transcribe or summarize their content.

Voice

1. Ask it to create a recipe, then skip its long response by tapping the screen. Afterwards, tell it, I've gathered the ingredients. What is the next step?"

2. Have voice assistance turned on beside you while studying or working. Tell it what you have to study or do, and ask for encouragement. When you've completed something, request congratulations and guidance on what to do next.

3. Utilize it for self-reflection and personal growth, as well as learning about different philosophies. Ask it to create a "council of elders" with historical and modern thinkers to answer your questions from their own perspectives.

4. Use it as a platform to develop "blue-sky" ideas without immediate criticism. Ask it to explore the feasibility of your random thoughts and help you flesh them out.

5. Create homeschooling content for your kids.

6. Send it any document and have it quiz you on it.

7. Create a voice note and instruct it to create to-do lists.

8. Request a guided meditation session.

9. Ask for an interactive bedtime story with 10 chapters, each ending with 3 options for the next part.

10. Request lessons on how to speak Italian.

Data Analysis

• Upoload a Zipfile of a github project - Request it to add a new feature that does x, y, z.

• Map addresses onto a custom map and give the optimum route to visit each.

• Upload an excel spreadsheet or any comma delimited file. Ask it to output different transformations on the data.

Image Generation (DALL-E3)

• Show 3 male adults in their 50s on a Washington lake with a blonde woman and black haired woman in their 30s and 50s with a 4 yr old girl and 2 year old, on a floating deck powered by solar with an electric outboard

  

• A middle-aged consultant sitting in a nice basement office sitting in front of a 65 inch screen writing a post on substack (bit of a hallucination compared to reality here….)

• Create a beautifully intricate coloring book image of a jungle with a 4 year old and 2 year old girl playing with lots of different animals.

So hopefully that’s enough to inspire and interest you. Many of the examples above are things I use on a regular basis now, and I’m finding that the more that I interact with my new friend, the more use cases and benefits I discover.

Yes there are limitations (the current model is trained up until January 2022), It can only remember context for 100 tokens and then it forgets), there’s a small delay when processing voice, it can’t generate images based on a submitted image, etc. These problems are all being worked on and with the blistering pace we’re already seeing with AI, we’ll see major advances and much more in the months to come.

I also highly recommend pairing chatgpt with an AI enabled search Engine. I’ve been using Bing a lot more which has vastly improved since the OpenAI integration. Google Bard which I’ve found a little lacking compared to the competition but it’s early days and I think we’ll likely see some great things from the incumbent. Meta’s making big strides in media and a more open and rapid approach to making their models available. Amazon will make Alexa smarter overnight, I’m sure.

However, I’ve mostly been moving away from the traditional search players and have been getting a ton of utility from using a new app called “perplexity” especially on my phone. Somewhere between a traditional search engine and chatgpt, their application will both serve up a page of related links AND create an AI generated answer to your question. Worth experimenting with, I’m liking it a lot.

Got any idea for something you’d like me to try?

What have you been using ChatGPT for?

I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

In a future post I’ll talk a little bit more about where I think this is all going but I wanted to share my enthusiasm and excitement as we’re in for some magical times ahead and I choose to believe that we’ll all have superpowers that can enhance and allow us to improve the world around us.

Stay ahead and let Sheppard Consulting help navigate your business through the new technology era. Let’s Talk.