My point is that in normal world, when you buy something, it is verifiable. You buy vegetables by weight and you can weight them yourself. You buy gas at the pump by the liter, and you could measure it yourself. You buy electricity by kWh and you can measure it.
With AI subscriptions, you get "some amount" of "something", neither of which is defined, and neither of which you can measure.
How many gigabytes can you download from your broadband connection? Often they call it unlimited, yet it's fair use and the provider decides what's okay and what's abuse.
What's your guaranteed down and upload speed? The ISP's usually guarantee far lower speeds than they advertise.
Token subscriptions are not really a completely novel concept.
Often its "Unlimited" with a Fair Use policy in place, commonly putting a cap of maybe 10TB/m or something. The alternative fixed bandwidth limits (1TB a month) which was commonplace for about 2 decades.
Yes, but how many tokens are in your subscription?
Also, you can't always measure those tokens independently, and the definition of a token changes over time (see the rage with one of the Opus updates).
Here's the actual announcement email I got yesterday:
Hello,
In the coming weeks, we’ll start testing a combined experience for Chat and Work tabs in ChatGPT with a small group of users. We’ll use their feedback to improve the experience before bringing it to more people.
This will enable you to move from exploring an idea to having ChatGPT carry it through, all in one place. You can bring in your files and plugins and ask ChatGPT to build a website, create a presentation, or do things for you on the web, while reviewing and guiding its work. Codex will remain a separate experience in the ChatGPT desktop app.
*A shared allowance for ChatGPT and Codex*
As part of this unified experience, your use of ChatGPT and Codex will draw from the same allowance in the coming weeks. We’re preparing carefully for this transition to help prevent disruption to your workflows. We expect most users won’t need to wait for their usage to reset more often than they do today. Usage will depend on model and task, with more advanced models and complex tasks using more of your allowance. Unlimited Instant is included in your plan and will not draw from your usage.
You will be able to see your combined remaining usage and reset times in Settings → Usage. If you use your full allowance, you can wait for it to reset, upgrade your plan, or buy credits to continue using eligible features.
> We expect most users won’t need to wait for their usage to reset more often than they do today
With the implied, "...but some will"
Note that they also started tracking tokens for normal chats in one's ChatGPT profile in the last couple weeks. Scroll to "Token activity" on: https://chatgpt.com/profile
I look at that page in the last few weeks probably every day. Not sure they themselves know what exactly they are summing up or how much tokens they believe they should be charging - my usage recently went from ~48B -> ~51B -> ~47B -> ~44B -> ~46B. Meaning, they messing around with the tokens consumed math / rewriting the consumption history, surely should not ever go back down, and just making it go up/down however they like. Even the individual per-day counters seem to have changed for me without rhyme or reason, some past ones increased, some decreased.
Not convinced those two pages help you in any substantial way to estimate your token burn rate across input/output/caching, etc.
Edit: It's some info, but not much around caching, or what context does vs just what you type in the chat, how reasoning or tool use affects cost/token burn, what control you might have on output tokens, etc.
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