Solving CAPTCHAs at the moment is more inexpensive using humans than using GPT-4 API.
I suppose a human could spend 10 seconds per Captcha, so they could do 360 per hour. Add some overhead for not being operating at peak performance every minute of every hour & call it 250. Let's say you can hire someone for $2, that works out to a bit over a penny per Captcha.
I don't think OpenAI has published pricing for GPT-4 Vision yet, but if we assume it's on par with GPT-4, and uses only 1000 of the 8000 possible tokens to process an image that's 3 cents per Captcha.
Doesn't seem completely unreasonable that at-scale humans may actually be cheaper than LLMs at this point. My mind is a little blown.
If you just search for "captcha solving service" the first few results that come up offer 1000 solves of text-based captchas for <= $1 USD, (puzzle / JS browser challenge captchas are charged much higher).
Whether these are actually human based, or just impressive OCR services, it seems like they are still much more cost effective than GPT-4 is for now.