OpenAI Goes After Project Which Gives Free Access to Its API
ChatGPT is free for everyone, but if you want to use the latest language model, GPT4, you can either pay for ChatGPT Plus, pay for access to OpenAI’s API, or use GPT4 for your own free chat You’ll need to find another site that you built into your bot. You have sites like Forefront and You.com that use OpenAI, but what if you want to write your own bot and don’t want to pay for the API?
GitHub project called GPT4 free (opens in new tab) You can get free access to GPT4 and GPT3.5 models by centralizing these queries to sites like: u.com (opens in new tab), Quora (opens in new tab) and CoCalc (opens in new tab) and return the answer. This project is the most popular new repo on GitHub, 14,000 stars this week.
According to Xtekky, a European computer science student who currently runs the repo, OpenAI has sent a letter demanding that everything be removed within five days or a lawsuit be filed.
In an interview with Xtekky on Telegram, he said OpenAI should not target him. That’s because he isn’t connecting directly to the company’s API, but getting data from other sites that pay for their own API licenses. He argued that if the owners of these sites had problems with his scripted queries, they should contact him directly.
I installed GPT4Free in WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) on my PC. I cloned the Github repository, installed the required libraries with pip, ran the Python script, and it was done in a fraction of the time. After launching the script, I used a web browser to visit http://localhost:8501. This address is the one I got from the script and it showed me a working chatbot running from my PC.
On the backend, GPT4Free accesses various API URLs used for their own queries by sites such as You.com, an AI-powered search engine that employs OpenAI’s GPT3.5 model for answers. For example, the main GPT4Free hits the URL https://you.com/api/streamingSearch, feeds it various parameters, then takes the returned JSON and formats it. The GPT4Free repository also has scripts that pull data from other sites like Quora, Forefront, TheB, etc. Enterprising developers can create their own bots using these simple scripts.
“We can achieve the same [thing by] Just open the site tab. You can open tabs such as Phind and You in your browser and spam him requests,” said Xtekky.
All sites powered by GPT4Free pay OpenAI fees to use its large scale language models. Therefore, with scripts, these sites will incur charges for your queries without your having to visit them. If those sites rely on advertising revenue from your site to offset these API costs, you’re losing money for these queries.
Xtekky said he is happy to remove scripts that use the APIs of individual sites at the request of site owners. He said he already removed the scripts that used phind.com, ora.sh and writesonic.com.
Perhaps more importantly, Xtrekky pointed out that any of these sites can use common security measures to block external use of their internal APIs. One of the many ways sites like you.com can use it is to block API traffic from IPs that don’t belong to them.
Xtrekky said he advised all the sites that wrote to him to protect their APIs, but none of them did. So even if he removes the script from the repo, other developers may do the same.
Developers do not consider themselves responsible for what other people do with their scripts, and OpenAI should not target them because they use APIs from other sites. I said no.
“OpenAI could contact the site to warn/notify and cooperate and come to me to do the deletion, but this is [legal threat] “I’m not sure, but it seems that if a site uses OpenAI’s API, it has OpenAI’s legal protections and OpenAI is liable for damages. The site gets it.”
Xtrekky said he is still deciding whether to remove his GPT4Free GitHub repository and is seeking legal advice before making a decision. However, as he points out, the code is public and he could find a way for anyone to use it if the APIs of these sites are still unprotected.
“Users are sharing and hosting this project everywhere,” he said. “Deleting my repo is not important.”
We have reached out to OpenAI’s press email for comment and will update this article if we receive a response.
Click here if you want to try it while it’s still available GPT4Free on GitHub (opens in new tab). Even if it is withdrawn, cacophony channel (opens in new tab) It seems to remain. If you want to set up your own ChatGPT-like chatbot without hitting OpenAI lawyers, check out our tutorial on how to run ChatGPT on a Raspberry Pi or PC. (opens in new tab)