OpenAI has a new professional-level subscription tier for ChatGPT — but it comes at a high cost.
ChatGPT Pro will cost $200 a month, but offers unlimited access to the company's new reasoning model called o1, formerly known as Strawberry, as well as its growing lineup of other models and AI tools, including a new "pro" mode.
This does mark a significant price increase, with ChatGPT’s current standard version set at a $20 monthly rate. Nonetheless, the company is keen to emphasize the broader array of features and options for customers.
Here's everything you need to know about the ChatGPT Pro subscription service, and whether it’s worth making the plunge.
What's in ChatGPT Pro?
There are now three individual versions of ChatGPT — Free, Plus, and Pro — as well as two group versions, Team and Enterprise.
Free only has access to GPT-3.5, with limited access to image generation, web browsing, and standard voice mode.
The Paid version, at $20 a month, includes access to GPT-4, limited access to o1 and o1-mini, faster processing speeds, more reliability, and full access to browsing, image generation, and advanced voice mode.
Access to the more advanced o1 and o1-mini models are limited to 50 messages apiece each per day.
For $200 a month, the Pro subscriber tier includes access to GPT-4 plus other advanced models, as well as faster processing, longer context windows, and advanced voice tools.
Beyond GPT-4, ChatGPT Pro includes "unlimited access" — there is a fair-use policy that deems it "near unlimited" — to its "smartest" model, OpenAI o1, as well as o1-mini and GPT-4o.
"It also includes o1 pro mode, a version of o1 that uses more compute to think harder and provide even better answers to the hardest problems," the company said in a blog post.
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"In the future, we expect to add more powerful, compute-intensive productivity features to this plan." The pricing page suggested that access to o1 pro mode is limited.
That model "thinks longer for the most reliable responses," OpenAI noted, but the firm added: "Since answers will take longer to generate, ChatGPT will display a progress bar and send an in-app notification if you switch away to another conversation."
OpenAI said the Pro subscription plan will continue to get more capabilities, including a wider range of file uploads. The firm also suggested some features will trickle down to "other subscribers", presumably meaning those working from the lower-tier versions of ChatGPT.
Who is this for?
ChatGPT Pro's cost reveals plenty about its potential users - people who need the best, not just any other old text generation tool.
OpenAI says the Pro subscription is for researchers, engineers, and "other individuals who use research-grade intelligence."
Indeed, the o1 pro mode bests even OpenAI's latest model on math, science, and coding benchmarks, with the firm revealing external tests showed o1 pro mode was more reliable and comprehensive in data science, programming, and case-law analysis than other versions of its model.
Of course, not all researchers who might benefit from ChatGPT Pro will be able to afford that price, so OpenAI is offering ten grants to medical researchers at American institutions.
Be warned though, OpenAI has strict terms of use that ban sharing account credentials or access with anyone else, reselling access or using ChatGPT to power a third-party service, and abusive usage, such as automatically extracting data.
The firm has robust guardrails in place to spot such misuse.
Other tools including Sora
Beyond the models, ChatGPT Pro will have access to Advanced Voice, a technology unveiled earlier this year amid controversy that the demo voice sounded a bit too much like actress Scarlett Johansson.
ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers will have "extended access" to the newly released Sora video generation system that can create clips from a text prompt. OpenAI first unveiled the video system in February.
In ChatGPT Plus, users will get 50 priority videos a month, which refers to the speed with which they are generated, at a resolution of up to 720p.
Meanwhile, Pro users will be able to generate 500 priority videos at up to 1080p resolution and an unlimited number of "relaxed" videos and download them without a watermark.
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