OpenAI’s plan to celebrate the holiday season with the 12 Days of OpenAI began with a gift for ChatGPT users and a possible envelope full of cash for the company. The company announced the official release of the OpenAI o1 model for ChatGPT and a new $200 subscription tier for businesses called ChatGPT Pro.
OpenAI o1 debuted as a preview option for ChatGPT a few months ago, with the company boasting about the model’s improved reasoning and logic abilities. The model breaks down questions and tasks into smaller parts and solves each before responding to a user. The idea is that OpenAI o1 improves the accuracy and usefulness of ChatGPT’s answers. The preview had its standout moments, but the general release is several steps up from even that and includes more features.
According to OpenAI’s tests, OpenAI o1 can solve 83% of the problems in the International Mathematics Olympiad qualifying exam, a massive improvement on GPT-4o, which only scored 13%. The new model makes fewer errors than the preview version, cutting down on major mistakes by 34%. The model’s response time is also improved, which is key since the preview version was notably slower than GPT-4o.
It’s not just about raw problem-solving power, either. OpenAI o1’s general release adds the missing image processing feature available with GPT-4o but with the boosted logic of the new model. You can upload photos, and the model can analyze, explain, or even create step-by-step guides based on what it sees. It can transcribe handwriting, estimate relative size, and even explain how a random part fits into a larger machine.
You can see how it works in a post on X from OpenAI below.
OpenAI o1 is now out of preview in ChatGPT.What’s changed since the preview? A faster, more powerful reasoning model that’s better at coding, math & writing.o1 now also supports image uploads, allowing it to apply reasoning to visuals for more detailed & useful responses. pic.twitter.com/hrLiID3MhJDecember 5, 2024
$200 ChatGPT Pro
The power of OpenAI o1 comes with a commensurate cost in computing power, which is why free ChatGPT users and even those paying $20 for ChatGPT Plus won’t have unlimited access to the new model.
If you want that, you’ll have to pay ten times the ChatGPT Plus price for ChatGPT Pro. Because of that price point, the $200 monthly fee is aimed at businesses and professional groups, but it does come with unlimited access to the new model. ChatGPT Pro also includes better, exclusive versions of the GPT-4o model and the Advanced Voice feature. OpenAI is also setting up a grant program to give medical researchers free access to ChatGPT Pro.
Even with limits on use, OpenAI o1 is an undeniable improvement on GPT-4o that ChatGPT users at the free and $20 level will want to play with. OpenAI o1 is not GPT-5, the enormous upgrade that OpenAI fans are salivating for, but it’s not nothing.
With rumors of stalled progress on recent AI models, OpenAI will need OpenAI o1 and whatever else it announced during the next 11 days to stay ahead of the burgeoning competition from the likes of Google Gemini, Meta AI, and other AI chatbots.
Of course, the most important question is how the new model’s sense of humor compares to its preview form. Judging from this real example, there’s plenty of work to be done:
“Santa trying to get LLM to do a math problem
Prompting really hard and not working
How did he fix it?
He used Reindeer enforcement learning”