Why You Can Trust CNET ChatGPT's $200 Pro Tier Unlocks the Full Power of o1
OpenAI's o1 model is its most advanced, being able to "reason."
OpenAI unveiled a new $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro tier for its AI chatbot on Thursday. The Pro tier will give unlimited access to its most powerful o1 model, the company said at its 12 Days of OpenAI livestream.
Along with unlimited use of the o1 model, ChatGPT Pro includes access to OpenAI's advanced voice mode. The o1 model is also multimodal, meaning that it can take input from photos as well. A new o1 Pro mode gives users greater compute power to tackle difficult problems.
OpenAI is gearing Pro mode toward power users who aren't getting enough of the o1 preview model and need ChatGPT to deliver more accurate results. These users tend to be researchers, engineers or coders. During the livestream, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pressed that coders, in particular, were demanding a more powerful model with greater accuracy.
According to the livestream, users would complain about how slow o1 preview was in responding to questions, even basic questions like, "hello." The new o1 is much better at delivering quick answers to easy questions and taking the time it needs for harder queries.
"We ran a pretty detailed suite of human evaluations of this model and what we found was that it made major mistakes about 34% less often than o1 preview while thinking fully about 50% faster," said Max Schwarzer, a research scientist at OpenAI during the livestream.
The tech industry is on track to spend $200 billion on AI in 2024 alone. The hype around AI has catapulted the values of Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta and Google stock. The lingering question is how these investments in AI will pay off. Sure, subscriptions could be one way to bring in revenues, but it'll take many millions of subscribers to make up for the costs of running these models.
OpenAI, however, is aiming to lead the AI arms race by developing the world's most advanced models. That's because some analysts believe that the AI market might become a winner-takes-all race. If that is the case, considering OpenAI has embedded itself with Microsoft, and is the tech backing Apple Intelligence, it puts the startup in a strong position.
There are still 11 more days of announcements from OpenAI that will drop in the coming weekdays.
For more on AI, check out CNET's AI Atlas hub and list of the best AI chatbots.