A ChatGPT Pro subscription costs 38.6 months of income in low-income countries

[sebzim4500]

>I find this very troubling for two reasons. First, while Claude and OpenAI are new, Google has been around for a long time. It should have thought better about pricing so that the tool is within the reach of the developing world.

Why? I don't see a practical argument for why Google would want to offer this service at a massive loss.

[niek_pas]

The author is making a moral argument, not a practical (from Google’s perspective) one.

[alightsoul]

Well, this will only increase immigration. Isn't this what the US doesn't want?

[gizmo686]

ChatGPT (and all high end players in the current AI iteration) do not follow the normal laws of software economics.

Normally software has a near 0 marginal cost. This allows sellers to offer steap discounts because they cost the seller almost nothing. In many cases, sellers are better off having you use their software without paying instead of not using it; because they are out almost no money, but have increased their odds of a future sale

High end LLMs are different. Sellers are not setting their price to maximize revenue. They are setting their price to cover the marginal cost of providing the service plus margin.

Lowering their price is not a matter of price discrimination. It is a matter of engineering a cheeper product.

[EbNar]

Luckily, a ChatGPT Pro subscription is not mandatory. It's not like one can't live without it.

[alightsoul]

for now. Wait until you have to compete with those who do have it. It's like competing in a race with a ferrari without a race car. The same thing used to be said of the internet.

[lgsilver]

A CS degree costs something like 124 yrs salary for someone in a low income nation—and it’s a much longer harder road. I’m not AI’s biggest fan, but arguably, this type of tech actually narrows the gap. Even if it’s expensive.

[latexr]

That’s a false equivalence¹. You don’t need a CS degree² to become a good programmer, you can do it with time, perseverance, and access to an old machine. Additionally, even if you needed a CS degree, you don’t keep paying for that indefinitely³ and get skills which last for life. An LLM subscription is something you have to keep paying for, and are screwed if you can no longer afford it, it goes down, or you’re in a place without internet connectivity.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

² Nor do they cost the same everywhere.

³ In the sense that it’s not a subscription. I get that in the US you may be paying for student loans for an unreasonably long time, but that’s not normal for the rest of the world.

[graemep]

It sounds like you are talking about the cost of doing a CS degree in a developed country. The $736 (number used in article, source World bank) number multiplied by 124 gives you $93k. That is enough to manage a degree at one of the cheaper (but perfectly OK - regulated to ensure minimum standards) universities in the UK such as Chester. It cover one year of fees at Oxford but not leave you much to live on. I am pretty sure there are cheaper options in Europe.

Of course, someone from a low income nation is most likely to go to university in their own country which is a whole lot cheaper (and a lot of low and middle income countries have free or subsidised university education - which is why British hospitals were historically had lots of South Asian doctors, and now Africans). If their own country does not offer the right degree or demand for limited places is very high they can study in another low or middle income country (I know Sri Lankans who have studied in India).

[raverbashing]

It doesn't

You can't compare the cost of a degree in the US with how much that person would pay in their country (even for a top uni there)

And even if you literally compare US costs, that person would probably be eligible to scholarships etc (if they manage to be selected, of course)

[esperent]

This is utter bullshit. An American CS degree might cost that much, but why would someone from a developing country (who isn't rich or getting a scholarship) want one of those?

The actual cost of a CS degree varies a lot depending on the country, but here in Vietnam I think it's about $1000 per term at public universities. That's not cheap, it's about a year at minimum wage here. But it's a long, long way from your claim of 124 years.

And to forestall the obvious next claim: Vietnamese education is quite good actually. Maybe you won't be going to Harvard but there's plenty of universities in the top 1000 worldwide with a few in the top 200 (no idea for the ranking for CS specifically though).

[epolanski]

Do you have a source for this claim?

[can16358p]

I don't think it's got anything to do with ChatGPT, especially given that it has a generous free tier too, let alone a about much cheaper (than the pro) plus tier.

It's an international economy problem, not an AI problem.

[siva7]

This has the to be the dumbest blog and argumentation i've read the whole year... Corporations aren't charities. A ChatGPT Pro subscription isn't necessary for human survival in those countries. A ChatGPT Pro subscription isn't necessary for basic human needs.

[jama211]

I thought it was about comparing the equivalent labor you could hire instead of buying a subscription perhaps

[coldtea]

>Corporations aren't charities

So? Perhaps they should be.

[qsort]

Regrettable, but did it take o3 mega pro to find out about real and nominal value? Even something a trivial as an iPhone is a far bigger purchase if you're not on a Bay Area salary.

[glimshe]

Home computers were ridiculously expensive in their initial years. Some could cost more than a car. ChatGPT Pro gives you access to cutting edge technology so it isn't surprising that it's expensive.

Just remember that a Wal Mart $50 phone is faster than a supercomputer from the 70s/80s. Prices will go down.

[yapyap]

… who cares?

1. the companies don’t get any cheaper compute because a user is from a low-income country.

2. this is an AI subscription, it’s purely a luxury product. We do not need this to survive. If you can’t afford it, don’t buy it.

[alightsoul]

The internet used to be a luxury too. No, the internet doesn't cost 100 dollars a month everywhere in the world for 300 mbps. In developing countries it's as cheap as 20 dollars a month for the same speed.

[pointlessone]

For all the shorcomings of AI and everyone involved this must be one of the silliest takes.

- The latest concept sports car costs a few lifetimes of income in low-income countries

- Aircraft carrier costs 200 GDP of Tuvalu

[alightsoul]

Except AI boosts worker productivity and with it, GDP increases. They will use a Chinese model that is an order of magnitude cheaper.

[the_mitsuhiko]

So a handful of things here. One is that you can actually at the moment at least use a lot of it for free. Secondarily, I think when it comes to access to ChatGPT and other services, in a lot of low-income countries there's a much bigger hurdle than the money, which is a combination of language and device that is capable of connecting to ChatGPT. There are a lot of countries still where you're limited to feature phones or not even having a phone at all.

[rfoo]

> There are a lot of countries still where you're limited to feature phones

I thought China fixed this for most of the world, at least for Africa it's fixed. It's the Internet access being the bottleneck now.

[alightsoul]

There's 5 billion people with a smartphone worldwide. The device hurdle is gone. ChatGPT is worse in languages other than English, but it's still so much better than searching on Google. The alternative before ChatGPT was watching time consuming videos on Youtube.

[torginus]

One issue I have with the widely used metric of 'Productivity per hours worked' - if I have a second apt I rent out to Bob for $1000, I have a 'productivity' of $6.25 per hour 'worked', despite nobody producing anything and nobody working for any length of time.

[maratc]

But that's the same with GDP: if you and me are living on an uninhabited island and grow/catch all of our food for consumption, our GDP is $0. If however I rent out my bungalow to you and rent yours instead, and I sell you all my food and buy your food instead, somehow our GDP skyrockets.

[Aldipower]

A pack of cigarettes in Norway is virtually unaffordable.

[general1726]

If 200 USD / month would replace a developer, then it would be a bargain.

If 2000 USD / month would replace a developer, then it would be a fair price.

Problem is that none of existing models are capable to replace a developer. They all need babysitting. And I am saying that as a probable customer who would actually pay something between 200-2000USD for AI junior developer which can actually work and understand what it is doing. Either those models will start doing what has been promised by tech CEOs, or AI winter is upon us.

[e3bc54b2]

The morons who want to replace developers with these so called tools already feel like developers need babysitting. Partly because they suck at giving requirements or sticking to them or both. It will be fun to see them finding out the devs do more that bashing code.

[renewiltord]

Yes, obviously. It's advanced technology. Are we just dividing two numbers now?

Median people from the Democratic Republic of Congo will have to work for 6 years to pay a PG&E bill.

[alightsoul]

Their power bills are at least an order of magnitude cheaper. Pricing is relative. They also consume fewer kilowatts of energy.

[howmayiannoyyou]

Stop, if for just a moment:

Have a look at industrial accident data globally, considering underreporting in developing nations.

- Same, environmental accidents.

- Same, WMD proliferation, including chem, bio and nuclear.

- Same, malicious cyber.

Now, ask yourself if we have enough problems aligning & regulating AI at the moment?

Are we sure that in the name of laudable egalitarian ideals that we are prepared for the second and third order effects of broad global accessibility to AI, including frontier models?

[lxgr]

This argument would make more sense if machine learning inference had zero (or close to it) marginal cost, which is the case for intellectual property among other things.

However, inference infrastructure is anything but free, and I'd estimate that cost to currently dominate the fraction of dollar per token.

[NoPicklez]

> Epitome of AI Access Gap

There is an access gap to almost everything including water when we extend to low income countries.

Also, don't forget that Google for decades have provided free Google search that has allowed the world to search for information for free.

[varbhat]

> low-income

someone has to pay for the servers at the end. are you asking for openai to subsidize ChatGPT Pro for low-income countries? Since OpenAI is for-profit entity focussed on profits, I don't think it might be a wise idea financially for OpenAI to do so.

[closetkantian]

Well it was founded as a non-profit

[alightsoul]

It might be better for OpenAI, but this disparity only increases immigration. If the US is serious about keeping immigrants out, they should subsidize access to AI.

[cwmma]

This is a real problem but I think the author has it backwards.

As LLM subscriptions become more expensive simply hiring folks from low income countries becomes a more cost effective solution.

[v5v3]

I think one step at a time.

There are still many countries where digital literacy is very low.

So first step is to ensure everyone has internet/mobile phone/laptop and knows how to use them.

[hdgvhicv]

I take one look at our smartphone/social media addicted society and the damage that does and think of the parallels of forcing opium on a population in the 19th century

Not that the rural third world don’t already have phones. Whether they are engineering to be as addictive as crack like in the west I’m not sure.

[energy123]

A warning about ChatGPT Pro. The 128k tokens context claim is deceptive advertising.

Messages above ~65k tokens are rejected. Messages between about 50k-65k are accepted, but the right-side of the text is pruned before the LLM call is made. Messages just below ~50k are accepted, but are then partly "forgot" on any follow up questions (either the entire first prompt is excluded, or the left-side of the text is chopped off).

Realistically, it's a 55-65k token limit (40k token question, 15k token response).

They want you to attach your context so they can use RAG.

I can't even be bothered filing a bug report, because I know this shit is intentional. The mistakes always run in a favorable direction.

(GPT-5-Pro is a genuinely good model however, and usage limits are generous)

[gregatragenet3]

What utility does the guy running a bonbon tè stall get from a frontier AI model anyway?

[epolanski]

Nonsense.

Albeit I'm no economist, I'm quite sure you should compare salaries to costs, not gdp/capita. Whether unemployed/retirees and children can afford a ChatGPT pro subscription seems irrelevant.

Let's take Madagascar, GDP per capita is $ 538. But the average salary is above $ 150/ month.

What interests us really though is not really the average salary in the country, rather the white collar (the end user's) worker's one.

In Madagascar software engineering salaries seems to range from an average $ 850/month for junior roles to well beyond $ 2000 per senior/specialized roles.

And this further ignores that such expenses are generally paid by employees, often with bulk discounts compared to B2C customers.

Which leads us to conclude that if ChatGPT Pro is such a performance multiplier, it is worth the price even in the poorest of the poorest countries in the world.

[quickthrowman]

This is a really stupid blog post, I’m not sure why someone decided to post it here other than to ridicule it.

A person in a low-income country would also need to work for 38.6 months ($2400?) to afford to hire one of my electricians for two days of labor. Things in high-income countries are expensive, who would’ve guessed??

If I lived somewhere that the average income is $200/month, there’s a lot of things on Maslow’s Hierarchy that come before ‘ChatGPT Pro’… like um a stable electrical grid, clean water, sewer system, etc.

[bradley13]

People in low-income countries have low incomes. News at 11:00.

Seriously, what is the point of this observation? Few if any workers earning low wages have any use for a ChatGPT Pro subscription?

[District5524]

I believe it's more about witnessing a deepening AI-divide between rich and poor countries. Or the maturing of the AI market. But in the end, this will only matter if we see these more expensive tools/subscriptions actually having a market advantage that cannot be mitigated by low income countries. (Certainly no new startup will be able to train new models in low income countries, hire world class AI professionals etc.)

[rs186]

So what? My salary pays for 2-3 developers in the UK, even more in India, and I am not necessarily any better than those developers. Should I feel bad for that as well?

[alightsoul]

So, sell the same thing at the same price everywhere? Things are cheaper in the developing world so US AI can either follow their pricing or get ignored.

[Simulacra]

Ok..?

[largehotcoffee]

Ok

[the_real_cher]

The running tech bro narrative is that Americans are lazy and not snart.

But tbe chart on that page shows very high productivity

[FergusArgyll]

Wait till you find out how much an apartment costs!