OpenAI’s new $200 monthly ChatGPT subscription will buy you more compute time
On Thursday during a live demo as part of its “12 days of OpenAI” event, OpenAI announced a new tier of ChatGPT with higher usage limits for $200 a month and the full version of “o1,” the full version of a so-called reasoning model the company debuted in September.
Unlike o1-preview, o1 can now process images as well as text (similar to GPT-4o), and it is reportedly much faster than o1-preview. In a demo question about a Roman emperor, o1 took 14 seconds for an answer, and 1 preview took 33 seconds. According to OpenAI, o1 makes major mistakes 34% less often than o1-preview, while “thinking” 50% faster. The model will also reportedly become even faster once deployment is finished transitioning the GPUs to the new model.
Whether the new ChatGPT Pro subscription will be worth the $200 a month fee isn’t yet fully clear, but the company did specify that users will have access to an even more capable version of o1 called “o1 Pro Mode” that will do even deeper reasoning searches and provide “more thinking power for more difficult problems” before answering.