OpenAI’s plan to celebrate the holidays with the 12 Days of OpenAI started 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 level 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 skills. The model breaks down questions and tasks into smaller parts and resolves them all before responding to a user. The idea is that OpenAI o1 improves the accuracy and usability of ChatGPT’s responses. The preview had its standout moments, but the general release is even several steps higher and includes more features.
According to OpenAI’s testing, OpenAI o1 can solve 83% of the problems in the International Mathematical Olympiad qualifying exam, a vast improvement over GPT-4o, which scored only 13%. The new model makes fewer errors than the preview version, reducing the number of major errors by 34%. The model’s response time has also been improved, which is essential as the preview version was significantly slower than GPT-4o.
It’s not just about pure problem-solving skills either. The general release of OpenAI o1 adds the missing image processing feature available with GPT-4o, but with the strengthened 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 any given part fits into a larger machine.
You can see how it works in a post on X from OpenAI below.
OpenAI o1 is now no longer available in ChatGPT. What has changed since the preview? A faster, more powerful reasoning model that’s better at coding, math, and writing.o1 now supports image uploading, allowing it to apply reasoning to images for more detailed and actionable answers. pic.twitter.com/hrLiID3MhJDecember 5, 2024
$200 ChatGPT Pro
The power of OpenAI o1 comes with a commensurate cost of computing power. Therefore, free ChatGPT users and even those who pay $20 for ChatGPT Plus will not 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 provide 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 usage limitations, OpenAI o1 is a distinct improvement over GPT-4o that ChatGPT users at the free and $20 levels will want to play with. OpenAI o1 is not GPT-5, the massive upgrade that OpenAI fans have been looking forward to, but it is not nothing.
With talk of stalled progress on recent AI models, OpenAI will need OpenAI o1 and everything else it has announced over the next eleven days to stay ahead of growing competition from the likes of Google Gemini, Meta AI and other AI chatbots .
The main question, of course, is how the new model’s sense of humor compares to the preview form. Judging from this real example, there is still a lot of work to be done:
“Santa is trying to get LLM to do a math problem
Push really hard and it doesn’t work
How did he solve it?
He used learning reindeer enforcement”