Why Your Company May Buy OpenAI’s New $200-a-Month ChatGPT Pro Subscription

Soon after OpenAI launched its now world-famous ChatGPT chatbot, it began to charge for its services—giving people who paid unlimited access to the latest version of its AI system, while offering limited access and older AI models to non-paying users. ChatGPT has since improved and evolved, but OpenAI has kept a subscription system in place—it now costs $20 a month, and it guarantees access to the company’s latest innovations, like the super-smart GPT-o1 AI model and the impressively, if not eerily, humanlike, Advanced Voice mode, introduced earlier this year.

Now OpenAI’s taking its revenue-generating system up a notch, with an expensive $200-a-month subscription that offers even more to users. It’s a clever move, financially speaking, for the leading AI brand, and it may actually be something your company chooses to pay for.

So what do you get for $2,400 a year—10 times what paying ChatGPT users get right now? Quite a lot. Announcing the new subscription tier yesterday during a holiday season promotion called the “12 days of OpenAI,” the company revealed that the ChatGPT Pro subscription would give users access to its latest AI models as they’re released. This now includes GPT-o1 Pro, which the AI maker said represents a significant jump up on the o1-preview model that paying ChatGPT users have had access to until now. As part of the new release, users with the existing subscription get access to the full o1 model, said to make mistakes 34 percent less frequently, and respond to user queries about 50 percent faster, tech news site ZDNet reported. 

The o1 Pro tier beats that, OpenAI said, and includes more computer power dedicated to the “reasoning” system that sets the o1 models apart from earlier GPTs the company has released. That means it may be better than ever at thinking its way through complicated problems that its users have tasked it with. Without going into too much technical detail, the company’s blog post shows benchmarks measuring o1 Pro against its earlier AI models, demonstrating the Pro version is better at “competition math,” “competition code,” and “PhD-level science questions.”

In the future, OpenAI said it expects to also “add more powerful, compute-intensive productivity features to this plan,” which it thinks will provide a way “for researchers, engineers, and other individuals who use research-grade intelligence daily to accelerate their productivity and be at the cutting edge of advancements in AI.”

This all sounds impressive, but with an emphasis on “PhD-level science” and the ability to solve complex math and coding problems, you may wonder what’s in the latest ChatGPT model that makes it appealing for your own company? It’s all about those high-level smarts that ChatGPT is touting, starting with coding. Developers are increasingly turning to AIs like CHatGPT to help solve difficult coding issues, and the coding power of an AI can even be useful to non-code experts in a company who need to solve small computing issues. A smarter ChatGPT means its more likely to help with tricky code.

The other smarts help too—though your company may not need to solve hard math or science issues to advance and expand, these metrics likely mean ChatGPT o1 Pro’s reasoning and problem-solving powers are higher across the board. If you already use AIs to streamline your office tasks, polish up your business model, or even help create a startup strategy, then a smarter AI is likely to serve you better. 

From OpenAI’s point of view, the offering of GPT o1 Pro is a smart business move with lessons for your own company. Its AI is already in high demand, so the company is making hay while the sun shines (and before competitors catch up). Offering an expensive subscription may tempt businesses or individuals who are seeking the best AI edge to help their own work to pay up—even signing up a million subscribers at the new tier would generate $2.4 billion a year in revenue for OpenAI.

Meanwhile, it’s worth remembering that this was just day one of OpenAI’s promotional push. Let’s see what comes next—it could be even more useful for your company.