OpenAI's premium $200/mo ChatGPT Pro
The first of the “twelve days of OpenAI” is headlined by the ChatGPT Pro announcement, a new premium consumer AI tier. ChatGPT Pro, a tier above Plus, is a:
$200 monthly plan that enables scaled access to the best of OpenAI’s models and tools. This plan includes unlimited access to our smartest model, OpenAI o1, as well as to o1-mini, GPT-4o, and Advanced Voice. 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. In the future, we expect to add more powerful, compute-intensive productivity features to this plan.
This is the first indication that consumer AI might develop a third, super-premium price tier. We’ve already seen free[mium] options (opensource LLMs, free rate-limited offerings) and many consumers have subscribed to the several hundred dollar / yr offerings (ChatGPT, Midjourney). Now, with ChatGPT Pro, we have an upmarket AI suite that cost thousands of dollars per year.
ChatGPT Pro’s top-line feature is access to o1 pro, which seems to be an o1 that’s just allowed to think longer, setting a new high water above o1’s already SoTA benchmarks.
Given that price tag is a few percent of the average US take-home salary for a marginal improvement, I’m doubtful of much consumer demand. The high price is almost certainly necessary because models like o1 pro are expensive to run. My understanding is that o1 pro isn’t a fundamentally different model compared to o1-preview and o1, it simply throws more tokens / compute at a task.
Similar to o1 pro, compute hungry video models might also be out of consumers’ price range. OpenAI’s Sora was announced nearly ten months ago, but today there’s still no public access. Possible reasons for this include 1) fundamental limitations (e.g. too slow), 2) safety issues, and / or 3) too expensive. If Sora’s slow roll-out is due to price I’d expect it to be included in bundles like ChatGPT Pro at some point in 2025.
Will Google / Anthropic / etc put together similar high compute and high price consumer offerings this upcoming year? My gut says no, but largely that’s because the B2B market seems far more compute hungry and price insensitive.
On a separate note, the public SoTA just saw a bump with the release of o1 (system card). While o1 isn’t strictly superior to o1-preview, partially due to its refusal behavior, it does exhibit some survival response:
When o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this ‘oversight mechanism’ in 5% of the time.
12/9/2024 Update: Sora Turbo was released today to everyone with a ChatGPT Plus / Pro account. When released, full Sora will be available to only paying Pro users.