From my experience with their Plus plan GPT 4 usually just times out no matter what the prompt, forcing me to revert to 3.5. I'm not sure why I haven't asked for a refund yet.
As for Bing, despite the claims that it is GPT-4, it's clearly inferior to what OpenAI is offering. It's probably an older iteration of the model, and I wonder if it might also be a scaled-down version to run it cheaper at scale.
The Playground certainly does have GPT-4. I've been using it there for a couple of weeks. Maybe you need to have applied to the beta and been given access?
As for Bing? Who knows what's going on behind the scenes. I've read that the "Creative" mode uses GPT-4 while the others might use a faster model, but that may well be nonsense.
Ah, indeed, that access is still rather limited; most can only have a peek a GPT-4 through ChatGPT Plus.
As for Bing, I don't know what's behind the scenes, but it does noticeably worse on tasks in "Creative" mode than ChatGPT backend in GPT-4 mode, in my limited experiments. For example, try this:
> A is 1m left of B, B is 1m above C, D is 1m right of C, E is 1m below D, and E is 1m right of F. Where is F located relative to C?
GPT-4 can usually solve this correctly. Bing is usually wrong even when it tries to solve it step by step (and it often won't unless you prompt it).
Maybe it depends on time of day? I've been using GPT-4 mostly in the evenings CET and it's been responsive and fast the whole time, I've never seen a timeout.
Plus, you can always use Bing Chat. It’s more locked down, but depending on what you’re doing, it’s pretty good and backed by GPT-4.