Confused about file upload limits

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I’m not actually a developer, but I can’t seem to get an answer to this question on other sites, so I’m hoping someone here will know the answer.

I have a Plus subscription, and I just use the regular ChatGPT page (no custom GPTs). I wanted to upload some articles and have ChatGPT summarize them and note places where some of the articles agree on particular topics. But I’m not sure how many documents I can upload.

In the OpenAI File Uploads FAQ, it seems to say 2 contradictory things:

  • How many files can I upload at once per GPT?
    • Up to 20 files per GPT for the lifetime of that GPT. Keep in mind there are file size restrictions and usage caps per user/org.
  • What are the file upload size restrictions?
    • All files uploaded to a GPT or a ChatGPT conversation have a hard limit of 512MB per file.
    • All text and document files uploaded to a GPT or to a ChatGPT conversation are capped at 2M tokens per file.
    • Each end-user is capped at 10GB.
    • Please note that users are be able to upload up to 80 files every 3 hours on GPT-4o, and Free users can upload up to 3 files per day.

So of course, that’s quite a difference, depending on which answer is correct. I was wondering if maybe the first question/answer (20 uploads) was referring to the “knowledge” that you upload to a custom GPT, except that’s not how it seems to be worded. And I wondered if the second question/answer (80 uploads) was actually referring to the number of questions you can ask, but again, it’s not phrased that way.

So if I can only upload 20, then what happens when I reach that limit (or if I reach the 10GB per-user limit)? Am I correct that I would have to go into the old chats, find files that I previously uploaded, and delete them from the chat?

Also, there have been times where I sent ChatGPT a link to a document on a website and asked it questions about what was written in it. Would that work as a “workaround” for the file upload limit - like if I just uploaded the documents to a website, could I give ChatGPT the URLs and have it work off from that, without counting as file uploads?