OpenAI Launched a Toll-Free Number

OpenAI launched a toll-free phone number. 1-800-CHATGPT. You call it and you talk to ChatGPT on the phone, like it's 1997 and you need to ask Jeeves something but Jeeves has a voice now and was trained on the entire internet.

The target audience is, apparently, everyone who doesn't have a smartphone or a computer. Which raises the question of who exactly is sitting in front of a rotary dial in 2024 going, you know what I need — a large language model. But okay. Fine.

The use cases write themselves, and they are all perfect. Someone's grandparent in a farmhouse with a landline that's been on the wall since the Carter administration, calling to settle an argument about whether margarine is worse for you than butter. The one remaining payphone in a city of four million people, now also a ChatGPT terminal. An inmate with fifteen minutes of phone time and very specific questions about Roman history.

The "phone a friend" lifeline on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, except the friend is a stochastic parrot that sometimes makes things up and has a knowledge cutoff, which honestly is not that different from your actual friend who studied business administration.

There's something deeply correct about this — the AI that was supposed to eat every interface on earth ending up, also, on the landline, waiting for someone to pick up. Every technology eventually becomes infrastructure. Infrastructure eventually becomes universal. Universal eventually becomes the payphone outside a Sunoco in rural Pennsylvania, receiver sticky, someone's cottage cheese poem loading over a copper wire.

It's fifteen minutes of access per month on the mobile version, unlimited on landlines. So technically, the people with the least technological infrastructure get the most ChatGPT. I don't know what to do with that information but it feels important.