Expanding Access to ChatGPT-4 Through Nano Payments

While platforms like ChatGPT-4 offer a treasure trove of knowledge and assistance in various domains, the cost and payment options can be a barrier for many. Nano democratizes this access, allowing people to pay only for what they use.

This article dives into how we leveraged Nano to make ChatGPT-4 accessible to a broader audience. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, an educator, or someone looking to stretch your dollar while making efficient use of AI and crypto, read on!

Opening up access to ChatGPT-4 to anyone, anywhere

ChatGPT-4 has been an incredibly versatile tool for me, assisting in everything from learning programming languages to generating creative content. It’s an invaluable asset that has helped me learn NodeJS and Python, figure out the extent to which I could replace my easy runs with bike rides, summarized texts for me, recommended books, and explained dozens of concepts to me in a simple and interactive way. It’s helped me come up with recipes, written poems, generated images and even helped me write this article.

I’m in the position of luxury that I am able to pay a $24-a-month subscription to OpenAI, live in a country where credit cards are widespread, and usually feel secure enough to ask my questions to OpenAI on an account linked to my real identity.

This is not the case for everyone. Some might want to ask just a few questions and think $20 a month is too much. They might not have access to the payment methods OpenAI accepts or might want to use it anonymously.

Nano-GPT strives to help fix this. Rather than paying $20 upfront, you pay only for what you use. The bot can be used anonymously, and no information on the user is stored. Anyone can use it from anywhere because it uses nano.

There are users that deposit Ӿ0.1 nano, about $0.10 currently, presumably asking just one or a few questions. Adding any sort of fees to such transactions would be prohibitive, so Nano’s feelessness is crucial here. Nano also eliminates any waiting time, allowing users to send funds and immediately start using the bot. 

To me, this is a fantastic combination. I believe Nano is a force for good in the world, making value transfer infinitely better through instant and feeless transactions, while being fundamentally the strongest possible store of value. ChatGPT-4 has been an immense help to me, and I feel like it’s an extremely good teacher and assistant for very little money. Both should be accessible to a broad audience, and I’m happy to help accomplish this.

Integrating into the Nano ecosystem

Unfortunately, at this stage, not everyone has nano or access to nano. Some might hold some other crypto, and they would not be able to use the bot.

To solve this we built the ability to swap other currencies for Nano into the website itself. By going to their wallet on Nano-GPT, people can swap most other crypto into nano, which is then added to their Nano-GPT account. For this, we use the NanSwap API.

This API is easy to work with, and NanSwap as a service is very speedy. Minimums to swap into Nano are fairly low, usually around $2.5. By implementing NanSwap we were able to open the service up to the broader crypto ecosystem. That said, Nano by far, is the easiest, fastest, and cheapest way to add funds.

There are also people that don’t have any crypto. For those, we link to PlayNano’s offerwall and NanSwap’s “Nano Mining,” where you mine XMR and have it converted to XNO immediately.

Developing with Nano

As a developer, Nano is a joy to work with. When developing this website, we would make changes, run it, send in a test transaction with Ӿ0.000001 nano, and instantly know whether it worked. Seconds later, we would be doing the next test transaction, using just Ӿ0.000001 again, paying practically nothing for the test transactions and getting immediate feedback.

To be clear, I am not an experienced developer. Yet I was sending transactions programmatically within an hour of starting to work on this.

Some tips for those working with Python: the Nanohakase library makes it incredibly easy to integrate Nano. There are many public nodes you can work with to do RPC calls (essentially a call to a node to provide information from the Nano network). There’s an overview of public nodes here. For those working with NodeJS, which I’ve recently started doing, the tutorial by SomeNano is a great way to quickly get started.

As a side note, ChatGPT-4 is surprisingly well aware of how the Nano node and node commands work and can be a great help here as well. I’m reasonably sure that anyone can build a basic program that works with Nano within an hour using the Nanohakase library and some help from ChatGPT-4.

Next steps

The website has become a bigger success than expected. As of writing this, we have over 3500 unique accounts. The number of users is still growing rapidly, and I’m very grateful to those who are using it. That said, we’d like to grow it further.

We’ve just added more chat models, giving everyone access to cheaper models like Meta’s CodeLlama and LLama-2, hyper-efficient models like Mixtral 8b7b, and a model like Perplexity Online, which, as the name suggests, natively browses the web and is always up to date.

We would like to add gift accounts, where people can gift others “the gift of knowledge” for those that don’t have Nano or even crypto yet. We also plan to add more models with the idea of making Nano-GPT a place to access any model cheaply and want to build voice chats with these AIs. Lots still to do!

I’d encourage those interested to try out Nano-GPT. You can deposit very minimal amounts like Ӿ0.1 nano, and even withdraw whatever you have left after trying it out. If you’d like to stay up to date on Nano-GPT, we also have a Twitter account that posts updates at @NanoGPTCom.