For me, it would be cost and alignment. If I own the software, I can choose whatever alignment suits me, or none at all. And ChatGPT is $20/month (assuming you want GPT4, and I do).

But there's still a good argument for a hybrid solution. Buy GPT4 access through the API and get a native UI to query it. Much cheaper to pay as you go, and someone else is still handling the heavy lifting. But if you want an uncensored model, you're out of luck.

Its roughly comparable to how you can use a spreadsheet to do a lot of different things, but it improves the UX (with some trade-offs) to have more custom designed UIs instead of directly using a spreadsheet.

As someone working in a large non-software org, that statement does not hold. Spreadsheets are the underlying infrastructure to a mildly terrifying amount of modern civilization.

Privacy is a big one. ChatGPT (the website) gives Openai the right to use your conversations for model training (unless you turn conversation history off but that feature is rather important to the UX).

Anything going through the API on the other hand has a commitment to not do this and to purge the history after a month.

ChatGPT is amazing but ultimately unwieldy for directed, long running relationships more nuanced than general themed chit chat.

We’re in the nascent stages but I think there will probably always be a community of folks who want to add more nuance to the communication, whether it’s reveries that enact a mood or goal, tie-ins to other services, etc.

Eg imagine wanting to have your ChatGPT DnD master also keep some kind of score. It may be ultimately easiest to put a wrapper around a themed GPT window that imposes a predictable way to do that rather than require everyone to figure out how to prompt it correctly.

But they created a wrapper web page for a web page here

It's mostly horny teenagers, tweens and 4chan degenerates. They don't need a good product they just need a uncensored one.