There’s a new level of ChatGPT available, but its $200-a-month price tag has the company pitching it to researchers and heavy users who are trying to push boundaries with the AI chatbot.
OpenAI introduced the new plan, ChatGPT Pro, on Thursday. It’s 10 times more expensive than ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 per month. Other plans available include the $60 per month per user ChatGPT Enterprise and the $25 per month per user ChatGPT Teams.
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For the added cost, a user gets unlimited access to o1, a new AI model that OpenAI introduced on Thursday. The o1 model is better than a human expert at PhD level science questions and has a reduced error rate and faster response time compared to previous models, per OpenAI’s release video. Pro users also have unlimited access to the older GPT-4o and Advanced Voice, a capability that allows for natural spoken conversations with ChatGPT.
In contrast, the $20 ChatGPT Plus plan only offers limited access to o1 and Advanced Voice, which means that subscribers have a limit on how much they can talk to ChatGPT or use the chatbot’s most advanced model.
“A lot of people, power users of ChatGPT at this point, they really use it a lot, they want more compute than $20 a month can buy,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated in a video announcement.
On Thursday, OpenAI also introduced o1 pro mode, an AI model that the company says can tackle the hardest math, science, and programming problems. Only Pro members can access o1 pro mode.
OpenAI says that researchers, engineers, and other heavy AI users will make the best use of Pro. The AI giant awarded 10 grants of ChatGPT Pro to U.S. academics on Thursday, including aging and dementia researcher Rhoda Au, who is a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at Boston University’s Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.
ChatGPT has more than 11 million paying subscribers as of September and 200 weekly active users overall.
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