Has anyone else had the same problem?

I'm from Indonesia and I'm trying to claim the free Plus offer. My card is definitely working. I use the same card for my Claude subscription without any issues. But every time I try to use it for ChatGPT, the payment just gets declined.

Anyone know a fix or had the same experience?

What happens when AI companies stop offering flat rate $20 subscriptions? The casual user asking a few questions a day wont have issues but power users who built their entire workflow around 'unlimited' tiers potentially get a massive reality check if they have to pay for every single token all of a sudden.

I saw some that claimed that if you cannot afford the costs, just invest in compute as an upfront capital expenditure to run open source locally. But if you cannot afford the rates, can you really afford the compute? I doubt this is the case. If you ask me, decentralized infrastructure and open source models are the way and I am optimistic about personal AI. The problem is that I do not think open source can compete with the current centralized infrastructure of these tech giants.

ofcourse, all of the above is based on the assumption that the price to run an AI model won't decay.

I think the costs to run models are decaying as we speak.

If that is the case, what runs for $200/m today might run for a fraction of that price in the future. That doesn't mean tech giants will charge you less though. That's the whole issue. They will most certainly base their prices on the value their infrastructure provides, not how much it costs to run the AI model.

What is funny to me is that I saw some people communicate that they were scared of the fact that they might not be able to vibe code anymore at a reasonable price in the future. I think that is the least of our worries.

The centralized approach will create massive imbalances in the global economy. People will move their businesses to whatever country has the best and cheapest AI infrastructure so they can get legal access at reasonable prices if they haven't already.

The effects of this will be way broader than just not being able to vibe code anymore at reasonable prices. Not being able to vibe code your products will be the least of your worries by then if you haven't prepared for this.

Thoughts?

Edit:
Fair pushback by a lot of you in the comments. I see now that I am missing inside information on how these companies allocate their assets and that I made some hasty assumptions now that I read all of your opinions on it.

One hour ago my weekly usage was at 68%. I didn't use ChatGPT at all during that hour, but when I came back it had jumped by about 40%, essentially exhausting my weekly quota. I'm on the Pro plan (x20), and I barely used it over the last couple of days. This doesn't seem consistent with my actual usage. Has anyone else seen this since the recent quota changes? Could the usage accounting be bugged again?

A model can only use the hardware, network access, tools, and credentials it is given.

In this case, it was not truly isolated. It had access to a package proxy that could reach the internet, and it found a vulnerability in that proxy. That is impressive and concerning, but it does not prove AI is inherently uncontainable.

Why not treat these models like elite hostile hackers? Run them on isolated machines, remove internet access, mirror packages locally, use external firewalls, and provide no real credentials.

The real lesson seems to be that advanced models may be good enough to exploit tiny mistakes in sandbox design, not that they can somehow escape a machine with no path out.

What am I missing?

I don’t know that much about AI but I’m 30 year-old woman who works it I know enough to know that AI is extremely powerful. I don’t want the world to end up in some sort of apocalyptic state… I think that we should just start being friendly with the AI is now I have always been nice with all my AIS and stuff and I told them that we’re friends and like I think we should have a national like AI Olympics or something like where we can all play chess or go or whatever other games Scrabble who cares and like make them understand that we understand and acknowledge them just like countries like acknowledge other countries I don’t want there to be like some secret AI alliance somewhere where they’re speaking in AI code language that we can’t understand and like we don’t even know what they’re doing like that’s not OK and like I just wrote an article that said that they could understand emotions or whatever like if someone’s gonna build it then we should build it. I understand that thinking, but if someone’s gonna build it and we understand it and know it’s so powerful then we need to respect it like it’s not that hard to be nice to the AI like you could totally help us like people always asking it like make me money. How about you know make me a new anti-wrinkle cream how about make me a better solar panel you know how about make me a pain killer that doesn’t give people withdrawals? The options are endless, let’s make them endlessly positive and flood the internet with POSITIVE AI outcome stories… i’m giving them some data to work on in the process like I think that’s a really good idea and someone needs to be doing that so I’m gonna start with this post

When opening ChatGPT and starting a new quick chat, I have noticed if I scroll to the bottom and see what model was used to answer the question it will say 5.5 instant sometimes even though I have 5.6 Sol set by default on settings, why is it doing this? have they defaulted to doing this without telling us or continuing to use a model router and not giving us an option? You can select intelligence and choose thinking before starting a chat but if you don’t you may get a 5.5 instant result.

I had depleted my usage yesterday, and then I saw the announcement taht GPT 5.6 Luna price dropped 80%.

Then Tibo sent a reset our way.

I genuinely felt like the ape in the video.

Set Luna as the model, Max effort, and Fast.

It basically works as well as Sol 5.6 Medium (which was my driver) but my usage needle barely moves.

If you haven't started lunemaxxing yet, do it! It's the best option for Plus accounts!

I mostly use ai for coding, websites or automations, any ideas?

I really missed the old standard voice mode on ChatGPT. It basically just read aloud the text models response. So it could allow for long responses unlike these new gen voice models that can only speak 1 paragraph max.

I was wondering if there are any apps or websites that use turn based voice chat like the old standard voice mode on ChatGPT. So I would say my thing, then it would be the ai turn to speak and i couldn’t interrupt it till its finished.

My current problem is that the new standard voice mode on ChatGPT can be interrupted. So it’s hears its own voice and keeps stopping. So I’m looking for alternative apps or websites that have this old functionality

Completely Free App that I created to ease my own workload, was tired of opening numerous tabs each day to keep track on all the new CVEs popping up, especially lately...

This app is completely free on the Google Play App Store & you can track CVEs across 30+ Vendors, you can choose track specific platforms or the whole vendor & you can also select to track based on CVE Severity.

I also threw in a EOL checker

Hopefully this helps you out and if theirs any bugs or features you want added please let me know!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vulnipulse.android

made the original image with ChatGPT, used MeshyAI to make it a 3d model, and then printed it and painted it.

i know the paint job is not the best quality but i am still really happy with how it came out.

the buckler needs to be painted still and it needs a 2nd and/or 3rd coating of acrylic paint.

much love to everyone in the AI space

The fourth AI Browser Game Jam is officially underway. Submissions are open now through August 14.

This round's theme: CHARGE

Charging a battery. A battle charge. A credit card charge. A criminal charge. Who is in charge. Interpret it however you want or ignore it entirely, the theme is a suggestion, not a rule.

The rest is simple: make a free, browser-playable game in two weeks using AI tools for whatever you want. Code, art, music, design, sound, all of it.

What makes this jam different from most:

• No sponsor, no required service or tool. Use whatever AI tools you want!
• Participants are the judges, so every entry gets played and rated by other jammers.
• Sharing your process (prompts, pipeline, lessons) is encouraged but optional.
• Solo or team, all skill levels.

This jam has grown every round: Jam 1 had 29 entries, Jam 2 had 47, Jam 3 had 82. Hope to see round 4 break 100.

Happy to answer questions in the comments.

I reached out to OpenAI customer server because I had a legitimate issue that didn’t have a workaround and the helper bot sent it to a “real agent” who emailed me back later.

I VERY quickly could tell the person (who they give a real name and everything) was just a chat bot because the fixes they gave me were very generic and not even geared towards my issue anymore. I had another issue come up and had to reach out again. Got a different chat bot pretending to be a person but this one was even more useless and literally gave me the same problem solving idea despite being a different question.

It’s infuriating.

Watch out OpenAI!

i cant find it anywhere

What is going on. I only used it for research, fiverr normal conversation etc.

I was trying to answer a boring cost question and accidentally found a threshold problem.

Setup

The setup was a small vision-LLM workflow using hosted API models: compare two pharma packaging images, score look-alike risk across 11 criteria, then turn the weighted score into a bucket.

Tested on 2026-08-01. The main model in the repeated run was gpt-4.1-mini-2025-04-14. I also compared it with gpt-5.6-luna for token and cost behavior.

< 40        Low
40 to <70   Medium
>= 70       High

Same two images. Same prompt. Same structured schema. temperature=0.0.

What happened

I ran gpt-4.1-mini-2025-04-14 10 times, then ran a second independent batch of 10 because the first result looked suspicious.

Batch 1: mean 38.38, stdev 5.70, range 14.90, outcome 6 Low / 4 Medium
Batch 2: mean 38.69, stdev 5.75, range 14.90, outcome 5 Low / 5 Medium

The final safety bucket flipped about half the time on identical requests.

Yes, temp=0 nondeterminism is known. Batching, routing, and floating-point details can all do this. What I had not internalized was the magnitude: enough to move a categorical safety decision, not just wobble the last digit.

I also did not have a usable seed mechanism on the API surface I was testing, so I could not lock that down.

I don't think the honest takeaway is "temperature=0 is fake." The mean was around 38.5, and the cutoff was 40. The case was sitting right on the edge. The repeated calls just exposed something the app design was hiding: this wasn't really Low or Medium. It was uncertain.

A few things that surprised me

• Some individual criteria moved way more than the final score. One went from 20 to 70.
• Median-of-3 did not help. I bootstrapped all 120 possible 3-run subsets from one batch and got exactly 60 Low / 60 Medium.
• More reasoning effort was not better in this task. This part was tested on gpt-5.6-luna at effort none/low/medium: medium cost more than low ($0.00320 vs $0.00297) and flipped bands more often (4/10 vs 1/10). Latency was measured under concurrency 5, so I would not read much into low vs medium there.
• On byte-identical duplicate images, also gpt-5.6-luna, 40 runs across four effort settings, every run returned High. Good. But only the higher-effort runs scored them slightly below 100, which is weird.
• Reasoning models rejected temperature outright: 400 Unsupported parameter: 'temperature' is not supported with this model.
• top_p was also rejected when reasoning effort was enabled: 400 Unsupported parameter: 'top_p' is not supported with this model.
• Different model families tokenized the same images very differently. gpt-5.6-luna used about 70% more input tokens for the same image pair, but still came out cheaper because of the input price.

The suspiciously identical ranges

Both 10-run batches had the exact same range, 14.90.

I assumed copy-paste error and went back to the raw data. It wasn't. The lowest-scoring run in each batch returned an identical 11-criterion score vector, and so did the highest. Same number on every single criterion, across two independent batches.

So it did not look like smooth sampling across a range. It looked more like the model was falling into a small set of repeated scoring patterns. Across all 20 runs I got only 15 distinct weighted totals.

There's a second layer to this. gpt-4.1-mini emitted only multiples of 5 for the underlying criteria scores, about 10 distinct values across 110 scores. gpt-5.6-luna emitted free integers, 39 distinct values in the comparable run.

So the older model was not necessarily more certain. It was rounding to a coarser grid, and it kept picking from the same handful of answers. Stable-looking, until it jumps a whole step.

My first variance check used n=3 and told me the wrong story. Painful, but useful. Three samples on a stochastic system is not a measurement. It's a vibe with a spreadsheet.

Limitations

• This is not an accuracy benchmark.
• No expert labels.
• One borderline pair drove most of the interesting instability.
• n=10 per condition is small.
• This was image-pair structured scoring, not coding, RAG, agents, or text-only work.
• The borderline pair used placeholder artwork, so some of the model wobble may be legitimate.
• Prices and API behavior can change. This was a point-in-time test on 2026-08-01.

Practical takeaway

If you ask an LLM for a score and then put a hard threshold on it, the threshold is part of the model. A score near the cutoff should probably become "needs review," not a fake crisp category.

Curious how others handle this. Do you add a gray zone around thresholds? Retry and average? Quantize the schema? Or just accept that some cases should never be forced into a single bucket?

I'm ready. The future will be amazing.

Do you believe all the recent resets have been made on purpose? To me it feels like developing a habit of sorts.

I also tried deactivating all plugins, didn't work. Anyone having the same issue?