OpenAI says it will charge $200 per month for ChatGPT Pro, a new premium tier that costs ten times the price of the Plus subscription.
The company’s idea is that researchers and engineers capable of using “research-grade intelligence” will want to pay for luck.
The cost is a sizable jump over the company’s $20 per month ChatGPT Plus plan, but adds unlimited access to the company’s GPT-4o and o1 models, unlimited access to Advanced Voice, and access to o1 pro mode, “which uses more calculation for the best answers to the most difficult questions.
OpenAI claims, with some grandeur, that the most expensive version provides access to a model “that thinks longer to get the most reliable answers.”
“In evaluations by external expert testers, o1 pro mode produces more accurate and complete responses.”
The intention is to add additional compute-intensive productivity features to the plan, but OpenAI hasn’t specified exactly what will happen. OpenAI is currently working on “12 days of OpenAI”so it might be a good idea to see what else is out there before signing up for ChatGPT Pro.
The o1 model was introduced in September. The set of models then included o1-preview and o1-mini, and OpenAI claimed that the LLM was capable of emulating complex reasoning. According to OpenAI, the professional version of o1 that comes with the ChatGPT Pro subscription is capable of generating better answers and requires more computing.
The fact that it takes longer is demonstrated by a progress bar while the service recovers its response. Users can move on to other conversations until a notification appears that a reply has been generated.
According to OpenAI, “in assessments by external expert testers, o1 pro mode produces accurate and complete answers more reliably, especially in areas such as data science, programming and case law analysis . »
While the increase may seem steep, it also represents a clear statement of intent. OpenAI needs to make money, and if the o1 model can actually increase productivity and/or reduce personnel costs, then CEO Sam Altman & co would like a piece of the action.
OpenAI also announced that it is awarding ten ChatGPT Pro grants to US medical researchers and plans to expand these grants to other regions and research areas in the future. ®