OpenAI categorically stated in an official document that GPT-4 Turbo (with 1.8 trillion parameters, 128k context Windows support) is only accessible through licensed apis or official programs, while the “chatgpt mod apk” is not capable of supporting the full version due to technical reasons. Check Point, the security company, in December 2023 reverse engineered 15 leading “chatgpt mod apk” models and found that 3% of them claimed to support GPT-4 Turbo but did so by employing model parameter clipping (from 1.8 trillion to 7 billion) and trimming context windows to 4k. This made the response accuracy rate for difficult tasks plunge by as much as from the official 92% to 34%. For instance, an APK with over 900,000 downloads, while generating processing code requests, experienced its syntax error rate rising to up to 28% (the official figure was 3%) when the hierarchical attention mechanism was removed, and response latency rose to 9 seconds from 2 seconds.
Technically, when “chatgpt mod apk” is being forced to be injected into GPT-4 Turbo, it has to get past the model weight distribution protocol protected by AES-256, and it does so at the explicit violation of Article 5.3 of OpenAI’s “Developer Policy”. In February 2024, an American federal court ruled that a developer who had released the cracked version of “GPT-4 Turbo” would have to pay $2.3 million in damages as it had decreased the F1 score of medical text classification from 0.91 to 0.53 by modifying the inference engine (reducing the floating-point precision from FP16 to FP8). It also heats up the device’s GPU (up to 98°C) and accelerates the rate of hardware aging by a factor of three from the default setting. It also, with the removal of Safety Fine-tuning, increases the threat of producing malicious content for this type of APK by a factor of 22 compared to official ones. For example, the rate of false negatives in hate speech detection tests has risen from 2% to 45%.
The data on test performance also indicated the problem of false advertising. A comparison test conducted by third-party benchmark platform MLCommons in January 2024 found that the “chatgpt mod apk” claiming to feature GPT-4 Turbo only achieved a 51% accuracy (official was 87%) on the GSM8K math problem test set, and since dynamic batch processing optimization is removed, The single-inference energy cost has increased to 14W (23W for the official API), reducing the phone’s battery life by 62%. For instance, one build made the CPU instead of the NPU perform matrix computations, reducing the inference speed of 128k context input from the normal 60 tokens per second to 7 tokens, increasing memory consumption by 400%, and making the app crash 2.3 times an hour. The 7-day user retention rate dropped to as low as 8%.
Market monitoring indicates the deceptive function name of “chatgpt mod apk” has formed an industrial chain. In 2023, FraudScope’s anti-fraud division monitored that black industry gangs advertised downloads by claiming to have excellent performance reports (e.g., reporting BLEU scores of 53-89 falsely), and each APK made over 120,000 US dollars monthly by showing AD pop-ups (avg. 5 times per session) and selling user data back (0.005 US dollars per post). For instance, a specific isolated APK has 53 embedded tracking SDKS, uploading 2.1MB of user input data every hour and using the device’s computing power to mine Monero (consuming 85% of the computing power), resulting in a sharp reduction of battery cycle life from 500 times to 120 times and motherboard failure rate to 17%.
Under the dual threats of law and technology, the entire cost that users have to bear for choosing “chatgpt mod apk” is far beyond imagination. The cost of invoking GPT-4 Turbo via the official OpenAI API is $0.01 per thousand tokens, and the response delay is controlled within 700ms. But illegal APKs increase the error rate by 41% in handling multilingual tasks due to theft of previous models (such as imitators that have been fine-tuned on the basis of GPT-3.5). And it has an average 23% likelihood of leading to DMCA infringement liability. Users of hacked APK to avoid a $20-per-month subscription fee would have, according to market research company ABI Research, a median potential loss of $1,800 resulting from repair of a device, data leakage and legal controversy, and a Risk-Reward Ratio as low as -9.7, significantly lower than +2.3 for compliant services.