OpenAI introduces the most powerful ChatGPT yet – at a shocking price

ChatGPT creator OpenAI on Thursday unveiled the latest version of its flagship AI model o1 Pro – along with a new ChatGPT Pro subscription tier that boasts a jaw-dropping price tag.

This subscription tier includes several new features, such as access to OpenAI o1, o1-mini, and GPT-4o, as well as advanced voice AI capabilities. However, the new offer comes with a hefty price tag: $200 per month. In comparison, the previous subscription tier, ChatGPT Plus, costs $20 for a monthly subscription.

“A lot of people are power users of ChatGPT at this point — they use it really heavily and want more computing power than is available for $20 a month,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a video presentation. “Pro has full access to our models and also things like advanced voice mode.”

While Altman claimed that o1 is the smartest AI model in the world, he added that the Pro tier improves its capabilities even further.

“These improvements may seem small, but in complex workflows where you are really pushing the limits of these models, they are quite significant,” Altman said.

In an on-stage interview on Wednesday with The New York TimesAndrew Ross Sorkin highlighted ChatGPT’s significant growth since its launch in November 2022 at the annual DealBook Summit.

“We have more than 300 million weekly active users,” Altman told the audience. “We have users sending more than a billion messages to ChatGPT every day, and we have a very large developer company with 1.3 million developers in the US and many more around the world.”

From strawberry to o1

OpenAI first introduced o1 in September, after weeks of speculation and rumors about codenames like “Strawberry” and “Orion”. The model was considered so advanced that OpenAI decided to adopt a new naming convention, moving from GPT-3 and 4o to simply “o1”.

Is it worth the price?

As OpenAI unveils its most advanced tools over the next 11 days as part of a holiday-themed “12 Days of OpenAI” rollout, the debate over the value and accessibility of generative AI may just be beginning.

Edited by Andrew Hayward and Sebastian Sinclair