OpenAI’s “12 days of shipmas” event doesn’t kick off for a while, but the first big announcement might’ve been revealed early.
A “feature gated” web page on OpenAI’s website refers to a “ChatGPT Pro” plan that includes all the benefits of ChatGPT Plus, as well as new goodies.
Recall that ChatGPT Plus is an upgraded version of OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT.
https://t.co/VkokDtYfkB pic.twitter.com/zXf2mQN2y8
— Tibor Blaho (@btibor91) December 5, 2024
According to the leaked page, which was uncovered by software engineer Tibor Blaho on X, ChatGPT Pro provides unlimited access to all of OpenAI’s models, including the full version of its o1 “reasoning” model, a distilled release of o1 called o1-mini, and GPT-4o.
Unlike most AI, o1, o1-mini, and other reasoning models effectively fact-check themselves. This helps them avoid some of the pitfalls that normally trip up models, with the downside being that they often take longer to arrive at solutions. O1 and o1-mini reason through tasks, planning ahead and performing certain actions that help tease out answers.
OpenAI released a preview of o1 in September. Back then, it promised to bring o1-mini to all free users of ChatGPT — but that hasn’t come to pass yet.
Also included in ChatGPT Pro is unlimited access to Advanced Voice Mode, ChatGPT’s human-like conversational feature, and a new “o1 pro mode,” which “uses more compute for the best answers to the hardest questions,” according to the page.
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O1 pro mode may simply up the “reasoning” time the model takes before it responds with an answer. In its o1 preview announcement, OpenAI said that it aimed to experiment with o1 models that reason for hours, days, or even weeks to further boost their reasoning capabilities, and this could well be a step in that direction.
All this might come at a hefty price, however. Per the page, ChatGPT Pro starts at $200 per month or £200/€229, depending on the region. Users who upgrade from ChatGPT Plus to Pro will get a prorated credit for the remainder of their subscription.
That’d make ChatGPT Pro easily OpenAI’s most expensive subscription plan yet — and 10x the cost of ChatGPT Plus.
Price hikes for the premium ChatGPT have long been rumored. By 2029, OpenAI expects it’ll charge $44 per month for ChatGPT Plus, according to reporting by The New York Times. The company has also toyed with the idea of ultra-costly business subscriptions with additional functionality and access to models under development, per The Information.
A separate leaked web page discovered by Blaho contains another surprise: mention of what could be OpenAI’s next major model. According to the page, subscribers to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Team plan will soon get access to a “limited preview” of “GPT-4.5.”
ChatGPT Team plan will offer “Limited preview of GPT-4.5” (not visible, yet) pic.twitter.com/zIVS4O7o5o
— Tibor Blaho (@btibor91) December 5, 2024
OpenAI later removed the reference to GPT-4.5 from the page. We’ll get clarity soon enough, hopefully.
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