[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.

[the_mitsuhiko]

> at least for Africa it's fixed

How is it fixed for Africa? Africa has a ton of phones, but it does not have a lot of smart phones. There is a reason that SMS and USSD are corner stones of the african digital economy.

[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.

[the_mitsuhiko]

> There's 5 billion people with a smartphone worldwide

There are more than 8 billion people on this world. By your own account, 3 billion of them do not have smart phones.

> The device hurdle is gone.

Evidently not. There are a lot of countries that still have a smartphone penetration rate of <50%.

We're talking about people with low income here. We're talking about people that cannot even afford bicycles for transportation.