Two months with ChatGPT: it can do work but you can't entrust it

I spent two days properly running through several main features of ChatGPT. Actually I've been using it for two months, casually asking things, but this time I wanted to seriously test how much work it can take on.

The preparation isn't complicated. You can use it by registering a free account, but the free version gives you a low-spec model, no memory—close the page and come back, and everything you chatted about is gone. Voice, images, file uploads are basically unusable. I went straight for Plus; only the paid version has web browsing and file analysis. By the way, some domestic e-commerce platforms sell accounts for one yuan to fifty yuan, shared or customized. I wouldn't touch those—the account could be reclaimed at any time, and your chat history is in someone else's hands.

I started with file analysis. I threw in an Excel of a client ledger and asked it to look at correlations between columns. It read smoothly and gave an explanation directly. Then I uploaded a PDF contract and asked it to extract key clauses—that was passable too. It can also connect to Google Drive, directly read files in the cloud, and convert PPTs to PDF or images, saving a format conversion step. There's a hard limit for free accounts: three file uploads per day, then you have to wait. Also, it currently can't handle pure audio—no speech-to-text module. If you want to throw in a meeting recording and get minutes, that path doesn't work now.

There were pitfalls too. The first time I uploaded a table, it treated a date column as text, and the calculations didn't match up. I manually changed to a uniform format and reran it. Web search occasionally cites older pages, so you have to scan the sources yourself. Another time I asked it to draw an interior sketch based on a description—the output was viewable, but the details were all made up by it. Fine for a designer's reference, but not for direct implementation.

How high is this technical barrier? Model capability itself is no longer the barrier—anyone can tune it. The real difficulty is whether output can be traced, reproduced, and handed off to the next person. ChatGPT is now a useful assistant, but still far from an auditable process system. Last week I wrote in the Spark article that you shouldn't value it as a chat model—the same logic applies here.

Conclusion: it depends. For writing code, processing documents, preliminary research, getting unstuck when writing—these scenarios it really saves effort, worth the money. But for handling audio, enterprise-level compliance, or plugging results directly into business processes, don't expect it to cover you now. Action advice: first use the free version for two weeks, throw your most annoying specific task into it, don't buy an account right away, and don't jump to Plus right away.