OpenAI has launched a recent subscription plan for ChatGPT, its AI-powered chatbot platform – and it’s very, very exorbitant.
Confirming the leaks this morning, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Pro, a recent $200/month subscription tier that provides unlimited access to all OpenAI models, including the full version of the o1 “reasoning” model.
“We believe the audience for ChatGPT Pro will be ChatGPT power users — those who already push models to their limits in tasks such as math, programming and writing,” Jason Wei, a member of OpenAI’s technical staff, said during a livestreamed press conference on Thursday .
OpenAI released a preview version of o1 in September, but this recent version is, overall, more productive. Compared to the preview, users can expect a “faster, more efficient and accurate reasoning model that is even better at coding and math,” an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Additionally, o1 can now reason about uploading images (this was not possible during the preview) and has been trained to be “more concise in its thinking” to improve response times. According to OpenAI’s internal testing, o1 reduces “major errors” on “difficult real-life questions” by 34% compared to the preview version.
Strangely, however, the full version of o1 performs better than the preview version in many popular benchmarks. One such benchmark is MLE-Bench, which measures the effectiveness of AI “agents” in machine learning engineering.
O1 does not require a ChatGPT Pro subscription. As of this afternoon, all paid ChatGPT users can access o1 via the ChatGPT model selector.
But ChatGPT Pro subscribers get a seemingly better version of o1 than users who don’t spend as much. It’s called o1 pro mode, and it “uses more processing power to get the best answers to the hardest questions,” OpenAI says.
ChatGPT Pro users can access this functionality by selecting “o1 pro mode” in the model selector and asking a question directly. Since it will take longer to generate a response, ChatGPT will display a progress bar and send an in-app notification if the other party switches to another conversation.
O1 pro mode may simply boost the “reasoning” time the model needs before responding. In its o1 announcement announcement, OpenAI said it intends to experiment with o1 models that reason for hours, days, or even weeks to further enhance their reasoning capabilities, and this could be a step in that direction.
“In evaluations by third-party expert testers, o1 pro mode provides more reliable, accurate and comprehensive answers, particularly in areas such as data science, programming and case law analysis,” an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Compared to o1 and o1 preview, o1 pro performs better on challenging machine learning benchmarks in math, science, and coding. In particular, we saw a 75% error reduction on easier coding competition questions that were more reflective of everyday programming queries.”
O1 will soon also be available in the OpenAI API with recent capabilities such as function calling (i.e. the ability to operate external tools) and image analysis. OpenAI says it plans to add support for web browsing, file transfers, and more in the coming months.
ChatGPT Pro is undoubtedly the most exorbitant OpenAI plan ever – and 10 times more exorbitant than ChatGPT Plus. That being said, this will likely be a challenging sell to all but the most dedicated users many people I already think ChatGPT Plus is too exorbitant.
To sweeten the pot, ChatGPT Pro also provides unlimited access to GPT-4o and Advanced Voice Mode, ChatGPT’s human-like conversational feature.
OpenAI will also be giving away some subscriptions for free. The company announced a program to award 10 ChatGPT Pro grants to medical researchers at “leading institutions,” with plans to award additional grants in “a variety of disciplines” in the future.
There have long been rumors about ChatGPT premium price increases. According to OpenAI, ChatGPT Plus is expected to be charged $44 per month by 2029 reporting by The Up-to-date York Times. The company too he was having fun with the concept of ultra-costly business subscriptions with additional functionality and access to models in development, according to The Information. Today’s news certainly confirms these reports.
The aggressive moves reflect investor pressure on OpenAI to cut losses. Although the company’s monthly revenues reached $300 million in August, According to for The Up-to-date York Times OpenAI expects to lose about $5 billion this year. Expenses such as staff, office rent and AI training infrastructure are to blame. ChatGPT itself was around at one point apparently costs OpenAI $700,000 per day.
ChatGPT remains one of OpenAI’s largest revenue sources. The platform has over 300 million weekly lively users, of which approximately 10 million are paying subscribers.