Whether you like it or not, AI is coming to more services, with specific services made for the use of AI. It won’t help you save energy or even save on the energy usage that AI applications and services use, at least not until “local AI” becomes a proper thing, but there are definite services that use models you can pay for.
AI models and services to help you make images. AI models and services that specialise in the creation of music. Even some AI services you can pay for that handle the creation of code and websites.
And then there’s the all-rounder AI service that does it all, the jack of all trades.
That may well be what services such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are known for, asking you for money if you want to go beyond a limit number of actions every day.
For the past few years, those free actions have been just that, capped only by the amount you churned through on a daily basis, or even ever 12 hours or so. It seems that services will end up getting their cost through regardless, though, with OpenAI announcing that ads are coming to ChatGPT.
Much like how Amazon includes ads on its Prime video service (and expects you to pay extra to get rid of them), as does pretty much every major service, ChatGPT will soon get advertising, as well. Australia isn’t quite on the cards just yet, with the US being the testing ground for the free ChatGPT service ads initially, and then likely the rest of the world to come.
For folks keen to avoid the ads, you’ll need to upgrade to the $30 per month ChatGPT Plus plan, which includes more memory and messages, plus the video generation system, Sora 1. But if you don’t mind the ads and want the expanded AI capability, OpenAI will soon have a tier for a little less than half the price of Plus, offering more messages and interaction for the $13 per month ChatGPT Go Plan.
If you’re a ChatGPT fan, this might be just what you’re after, but it won’t fix or quell the environmental cost of the generative AI platform, which still runs from the cloud.
The solution is likely to not use AI services, or to run something similar from your own machine, something AI PCs and Macs with Apple Silicon can technically support. The software isn’t quite there yet, but the hardware can support it.
There is no word on whether ChatGPT will bring a small version of its model to run on your own hardware, but fortunately, if you’re keen to try this sort of thing, you might want to check out the likes of Ollama or LM Studio, and let your own computer do some of what ChatGPT is known for.
