That's disappointing, I thought ChatGPT WAS using the API. I mean what's the point of paying if you don't get similar levels of quality?

I thought that too. It's certainly how they present it. But, apparently not.

ChatGPT doesn't use the API. It uses the same underlying model with a bunch of added prompts (and possibly additional fine-tuning?) to add to make it conversational.

One would pay because what they get out of chatGPT provides value, of course. Keep in mind that the users of these 2 products can be (and in fact are) different — chatGPT is a lot friendlier (from a UX perspective) than using the API playground (or using the API itself).

They are comparing text-davinci-003 with ChatGPT which presumably uses gpt-3.5-turbo, so quite different models.

They are killing text-davinci-003 btw.

I've spent like $600 on text-davinci-003. This sucks!

We also compare ChatGPT4 vs GPT4 API in that thread and observe the same difference.