@traders I updated the title and conditions of the market to disambiguate what "available to all premium users" means.

If you betted under the assumption that it means "available to all ChatGPT Plus users at no additional cost", please sell your stakes and let me know. I'll reimburse the difference in price between now and when you bought it.

@OlegEterevsky Can you specify what having access means? I assume it wouldn't count if they had to pay for a higher subscription tier or a fee like on the API. But what if it's like a testing program where only a fraction of the premium users can sign up in practice or where you have strict time limits or you typically need to wait in a queue when you start up the video chat?

@Sodann I think this in the title answers your questions quite unambiguously: "available to all premium users", but if anyone disagrees let me know.

- Fraction of premium users: resolves NO
- Higher paid tier: resolves NO
- if there is time limit but all premium users have access: YES
- queue, if you can realistically still get access, I'd think YES, i.e. not like hours of waiting.

(strange edge case:
- what if they rename the current $20/mo tier to ChatGPT Silver, and re-introduce (re-brand) ChatGPT Premium as a $50/month tier with this feature. I'd say this should be NO.
- Or another: the Premium name just goes away, and we'll have silver, gold, platinum, or similar.
)

A bit more realistic edge case that might be what actually happens:

Nominally premium users do get access, but it's so buggy and unstable that in reality people cannot actually use it. So then a very fuzzy line will have to be drawn in the sand between practically not at all usable vs mostly all good which might be a gradient with spurts and setbacks in service quality.

Might be worth saying that nominal availability is what counts in this case, if we want, even if for weeks afterward it's barely if at all useable.

Stranger edge case still: what if they do give nominal access but then have to take it back for whatever reason: legal, performance, stability, etc. Maybe the first nominal access is what counts and separate question can ask about reliable access timeline dates.

@Sjeyua @Sodann I agree with the interpretation above, except I've been thinking that having to pay extra would still count as "available". Intuitively "available" to me doesn't automatically imply "at no extra charge".

That makes sense too, but wasn't my first interpretation.
Because the price will matter to different premium users to different extents.
I.e. I can guarantee that there will be at least one premium user if this happens who wants access and does not have the extra money to get that access, so it won't be available to 'all premium users' strictly speaking.

(Joke illustration: i.e. there is a sense in which this is already available to all Premium subscribers: all they have to do is to apply at OAI, be good enough to get hired, and they'll have internal access! Available!)

But I'm ok with your interpretation.

@Sjeyua I'm just thinking that the statements like "public transport is available to everybody" are generally considered true even though you need to pay for it.

I wouldn't say that being hired by OpenAI is an option available to everybody because they have only limited number of positions.

Regarding the edge cases in the previous comment: I'll resolve as soon as its nominally available plus vast majority of users can have at least a very basic conversation, even if it's otherwise buggy. So my expectation is that if it passes QA to be be released to the general public, it will almost certainly qualify.

@OlegEterevsky I object to that. If you followed that interpretation, you wouldn't write "to all premium users" since all it takes to become a premium user is to pay extra. So, it would just be "available to all users".

@Sodann That's a very valid semantic point too. Even more so: "When will video chat with GPT-4o be available to every man, woman and child on earth?", since you don't even need to be prerequisitely a user to get access, you only need to become a user of the system afterward.

(but I still don't have a strong horse in this race and I can see multiple sides of this coin. It would be nice to be able to split apart a market in similar cases so that people could trade accordingly, because both forecasts can be interesting to different folks)

@Sodann Good point.

When I wrote "to all premium users", what I meant was "to all users willing to pay for it".

There is a bit of an ambiguity around the definition of "premium". It doesn't necessarily mean "all users that pay OpenAI anything", since you could pay just for the DALL-E API, and not have access to GPT-4.

For ChatGPT in particular there is only one kind of subscription at the moment, but potentially they could create different subscriptions for different sets of features, and I would necessarily automatically call all these users "premium".

To me it seems less ambiguous to ignore any changes to billing/subscription when talking about availability.

If you advertised "All our Premium users get access to feature XYZ", but then it turns out that they need to upgrade to the Ultra tier for that feature, then you would likely be convicted of fraud. The formulation clearly implies that the Premium subscription should be sufficient.

[retracted comment]

(as it turns out I had a cached memory that they call their tier premium, but in fact they name it plus. I think your above point is valid Oleg)

@Sodann @Sjeyua The payment tier is called "Plus"

Yup, see my edit, I double checked just after I sent it. That one is my bad.

@OlegEterevsky I am not talking about the names. I should have called "Gold" and "Silver". To give a related example, if I tell you that GPT-4o for text is available to free users now, that implies that they can use it without signing up for a paid subscription. In the same spirit, if I say that video chat is available to all paying users, that implies that they do not have to upgrade to the Ultra Deluxe Video subscription first. I assumed this would be uncontroversial.

@OlegEterevsky I think I would agree with the public transport comparison if OpenAI was already using a system where even premium users had to pay extra for the individual features that they use.

But this situation is much closer to saying "First class is open to every passenger."

@Sodann There are two orthogonal questions here: one about general availability and another about pricing. I've tried to formulate the question about the first. The mention of premium users is used to clarify that: a) the question doesn't require this feature being available to free users, b) it doesn't require for the feature to be launched in the markets where premium features are not enabled.

I could update the title to only mention general availability and expand the definition in the description. Would this work?

@OlegEterevsky I would not be happy if you updated the title like that since I still think that it would change the meaning of the question. In my opinion, it should not matter what you had in mind when you created the marked. You wrote something down and that is what we have been betting on. I suggest that you try to look at it with a fresh mind and resolve according to what the text actually says.

Your point a) looks like we are still talking past each other. As I understand your interpretation, availability to premium users should also mean availability to free users and non-users since they can sign up for the video chat plan just as easily. But that contradicts point a).

LLMs are really useful for this kind of question, so I gave the following prompt to ChatGPT with GPT-4o:

If OpenAI introduces a new membership plan that gives you access to video chat for 50 dollars per month, will it be fair to say that all paying users have access to video chat then since they can easily upgrade to that new plan?

ChatGPT consistently answers this with a clear no. Is that convincing?

To put in at least one opposing perspective, I'd been betting on the assumption that this was "when will you be able to pay for this feature", rather than "when will this be available at the lowest paid tier OpenAI offers".

@Sodann I’m willing to reimburse you the difference in the shares price if you are willing to sell now.

My problem with this interpretation is that I can’t find a way to make it consistent in case of any changes in OpenAI billing. Like what if they create both higher and lower tiers and at the same time change the cost of Plus.

@ChrisPrichard It is interesting to hear the opinion of other participants. I can see your point that "when will this be available at the lowest paid tier" might not reflect the spirit of the question since the question might build on the assumption that there will be only one tier. If there is a new tier for $2 with injected advertisements then it seems reasonable to ignore that one and only look at the closest successor of the current Plus tier (although @OlegEterevsky emphasized in a comment above that he was talking about all premium users, not just Plus subscribers).

But this does not change my position that "available to the Ultra Deluxe tier" does not mean "available to all tiers".

@OlegEterevsky Thank you for the offer! I will keep it in mind.

I am trying to understand your worries. Is it about the price of Plus going up or down?

@Sodann My problem is that a) the current title can be interpreted as GA, as we see from the comments, b) I don’t see any consistent and intuitive the ways to formalize what “premium” means to the exclusion of some tiers.

@OlegEterevsky

a) From the outside, it looks like @ChrisPrichard might have fallen for the fallacy of substituting with an easier question. He didn't even claim that his interpretation was valid. I tried to demonstrate with ChatGPT that it's not even ambiguous if you give it some thought.

b) You could leave it at "all premium users" and clarify that it comes at no extra cost or, as I suggested above, you could change it to the Plus plan or it's obvious successor which will very likely exist since OpenAI is not going to kick out that many paying users so soon. There is no inconsistency with this at all.

But I accept that I have likely lost this debate.

@Sodann

It's not just @ChrisPrichard, since this was also my understanding of the question when I wrote it.

I try hard to give clear resolution criteria for the questions that I write, and I hope they are above average for Manifold in that regard. But human language is hard, and so is imagining all the possible future developments, so unclear and ambiguous questions creep in nevertheless.

If it turned out that the question as stated had unambiguously different meaning than originally intended, I would've just accepted that. But in this case the question was ambiguous and I decided to disambiguate it in the direction that seems more natural to me. You obviously disagree with this choice. Since I'm to blame for the initially ambiguous statement, I'm prepared to reimburse the difference.

By the way, if @Manifold implemented the ability to run polls in the comments, it would've been much easier to resolve such disagreements by just polling the traders regarding their understanding of the question.

@OlegEterevsky @Sodann if this is important enough and you think it'd help a separate manifold poll can be created and linked here in the comments.

(I'd however like if not just 2 options were given in the poll, since my exact position for example I suspect is something other than what either one of you have. Polling is hard and tricky onto itself, and there is an art and science to it.)