ChatGPT launched in 2022 to massive fanfare. Demand was so high that OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot, introduced a premium plan called ChatGPT Plus. For $20 monthly, ChatGPT Plus subscribers enjoy faster chatbot response times, priority access to new features, and guaranteed access during peak times.
Demand has remained high from individual and enterprise users, spurring OpenAI to announce ChatGPT Pro recently. For $200 monthly, OpenAI promises near unlimited access to its most advanced model, o1, and an o1 pro mode that uses more computing resources to output better answers to users’ queries.
However, at $200 monthly, ChatGPT Pro is expensive for most users. You likely need detailed information and third-party evaluation to help you decide if it’s a good investment, and you’ve arrived at the right place for that.
This guide will explore ChatGPT Pro, its features, and what you should know about it.
What is ChatGPT Pro?
ChatGPT Pro is the latest tier of OpenAI’s ChatGPT lineup. It’s the most premium tier, unlocking access to OpenAI’s most advanced models and features. This premium tier costs $200 monthly.
The monetary investment can be worthwhile for businesses and professionals requiring the most advanced AI tools. For example, researchers and engineers will benefit from having access to OpenAI’s most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models to help them solve problems.
Let's compare the features of ChatGPT’s free, Plus, and Pro tiers:
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ChatGPT Pro is designed for professionals who require academic-level intelligence from a chatbot. If your work centers on solving complicated problems and running intensive AI workloads, ChatGPT Pro can be a worthwhile investment. However, casual users might be better off with the free or Plus versions.
The defining feature of ChatGPT Pro is the o1 pro mode. It’s an advanced version of the o1 model that harnesses more computing resources than usual to find answers to complex issues.
Why is ChatGPT Pro a paid subscription?
ChatGPT and other AI models require high-performing graphics processing units (GPUs) to analyze enormous data volumes. These GPUs analyze data and train AI models to output similar data. ChatGPT relies mainly on Nvidia H100 GPUs, which are costly and consume significant electrical power.
The $200 ChatGPT Pro subscription provides access to higher GPU resources for analyzing data and formulating answers to complex queries. Thanks to these resources, the o1 pro mode produces more accurate and reliable answers, especially in analytical fields like data science and programming.
What is o1 pro mode?
o1 pro mode is an enhanced version of ChatGPT’s o1 model. It analyzes data longer to provide more reliable and comprehensive responses. As OpenAI's presentation implies, o1 pro mode essentially lets users request more computing power to solve demanding tasks. This ability to request additional computing resources is helpful for professionals in complex fields like data science and case law analysis.
Because o1 pro mode can take a long time to process complex requests, ChatGPT shows a progress bar to keep users updated. This bar provides a visual representation of the model's "thinking" process as it analyzes data to provide reliable answers.
In the illustration below from OpenAI’s demo, the user asks ChatGPT a complex biological question about what protein fits six outlined criteria. ChatGPT starts "thinking" about an answer. It informs the user on the current step in its analysis, letting them know that it isn’t just wasting time for the sake of it.
After analyzing information for 53 seconds, ChatGPT provides a detailed answer to the user’s query. The user can see ChatGPT’s analytical steps on the right side, illustrating how the o1 pro mode harnesses more computing resources to solve demanding problems.
How does the o1 pro mode work?
o1 pro mode uses the same mechanisms as the o1 model, albeit with more computing resources to solve problems. Its core features are:
- Reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought reasoning
- Utilizing more computing resources in the inference phase
Reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought reasoning
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning technique that teaches software how to take actions to achieve optimal outcomes. It imitates the human mind's trial-and-error process for analyzing information and answering user queries correctly.
Reinforcement learning algorithms teach ChatGPT to optimize for behaviors resulting in positive or negative events. This is similar to how the human mind interprets signals like food intake as positive and hunger as negative and learns to adopt behaviors that reward positive signals and avoid negative ones.
A large-scale reinforcement learning algorithm teaches o1 how to analyze information productively. Chain-of-thought reasoning teaches the model to break down complex queries into smaller steps before solving them. These techniques are helpful in analytical fields like coding, where solving a problem requires a step-by-step approach.
Utilizing more computing resources in the inference phase
The inference phase is the duration when the o1 model generates a response to a prompt. When you feed the model a question, it draws on the vast data it’s trained on to predict the likely answer. This process occurs in two stages:
Prefill
Your text query is converted into tokens and then numerical values that the model can understand. Tokens represent words or parts of words; the model processes and builds on your input tokens to generate new tokens for the response.
Decode
The model generates a series of vector embeddings - this is how the learning algorithm translates your input prompts. Then, drawing from the data it’s trained on, the model predicts which token will be next, iterating this process until completing its response. Finally, it translates the tokens back into human-readable language.
The more GPU power available to o1 during the inference process, the better. That’s precisely what the o1 pro mode does. It allocates more processing power to the inference phase, enabling the model to analyze queries longer and generate more detailed responses. OpenAI also dedicates more computing resources to train the underlying model to provide more accurate answers.
The graphs below from OpenAI demonstrate the importance of computing power to the accuracy of the o1 model. They track the model's performance when solving questions from the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME).
As the graphs show, the higher the computing power dedicated to training and testing o1, the better it performed in solving complex math problems.
The o1 pro mode performs even better than the basic o1 model. That’s what ChatGPT Pro unlocks.
o1 pro mode benchmarks
Accuracy
o1 pro mode has higher accuracy than the basic o1 model when solving mathematical problems. The graphs below demonstrate higher accuracy, thanks to the greater computing power allocated to its training and inference.
The first benchmark is the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) of 2024. It is a complex, three-hour test that determines qualification for the U.S. Mathematical Olympiad. The o1 pro mode had higher pass accuracy than the o1 and o1-preview models.
The second benchmark is Codeforces, a prominent platform for competitive programming contests. o1 pro mode performed impressively in this platform’s programming contests, far better than o1-preview but showing little improvement over the o1 model.
The third benchmark evaluates o1 pro mode's efficiency in GPQA, a challenging dataset of complex scientific questions posed by biology, physics, and chemistry experts. o1 pro mode again performed impressively, though with little difference from the o1 and o1-preview models.
Reliability
Then, OpenAI used a stricter 4/4 reliability benchmark, implying the model has to provide correct answers in four out of four attempts, not just one, to be considered successful. Below are the results:
The three benchmarks show greater performance differences. o1 pro mode is more reliable at getting the correct answers than the o1 and o1-preview models. This higher reliability and accuracy is what ChatGPT Pro users pay for. It gives users a trusted model they can depend on to answer complex analytical questions.
How to access the o1 pro mode
Accessing the o1 pro mode is straightforward after paying for ChatGPT Pro. Just select "o1 pro mode" from the model picker in ChatGPT's interface. Then, you can ask it questions and get more accurate and reliable answers.
As mentioned earlier, the o1 pro mode uses more computing resources and takes longer to analyze information and give the correct answers. Depending on the complexity of your query, you might wait some minutes for answers. ChatGPT's interface shows a progress bar that keeps you updated during the wait.
If you switch to another conversation while o1 pro mode is working, you’ll get notified in-app when its answer is ready.
Read our guide to find out more about ChatGPT 01.
ChatGPT Pro use cases
$200 monthly to access o1 pro mode is a considerable investment. Let’s examine some use cases where it can be a worthwhile purchase.
Financial modeling
Financial analysts often analyze massive data volumes to generate accurate insights. For example, you could be tasked with analyzing a company's 20-year financial results to help predict its future performance. o1 pro mode is better at analyzing such data and extracting insights to help you make informed decisions.
Legal analysis
Legal experts often sift through numerous case documents for insights to build strong arguments. o1 pro mode can help you analyze case files to extract these insights, reducing the time you’ll spend doing it manually.
You can upload legal documents for ChatGPT Pro to study. Then, you’ll ask it questions based on those documents. o1 pro mode’s processing power enables legal experts to extract more accurate and reliable insights than the base o-1 or GPT4o models.
Medical diagnostics
o1 pro mode can help medical experts analyze data to diagnose illnesses. For example, it can analyze a patient's medical records to diagnose ailments and suggest treatment options.
Though it’s more accurate and reliable than most AI models, the o1 pro mode isn’t perfect. Medical experts should pair it with human expertise to make informed decisions.
Programming
Earlier, we mentioned the o1 pro mode’s stellar performance in a competitive programming benchmark. With unlimited access to OpenAI’s GPU resources, this model can help you generate code to solve complex problems. You can feed it a query and expect well-written code to solve it.
o1 pro mode can also analyze existing code to identify errors or optimize it for greater speed. It can rewrite code for enhanced readability and assist in generating documentation for an existing codebase.
Scientific research
o1 pro mode is a helpful assistant for scientists working on complex problems. It can help analyze vast datasets to extract insights that guide scientists' decisions.
Suppose you’re tasked with analyzing a solar panel’s power output under different weather conditions for a year. You’ll take minute-by-minute power output readings over 365 days, equaling 525,600 minutes. Analyzing this large dataset manually will be difficult, but ChatGPT Pro makes it easy.
With o1 pro mode’s advanced computing prowess, you can analyze the power output data to extract valuable insights, such as the relationship between cloud cover and solar panel efficiency. This is just an example of the experiment o1 pro mode helps scientists conduct. It’s capable of analyzing more complex datasets to fetch helpful insights.
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We’re impressed by ChatGPT Pro’s features, anchored by the more powerful o1 pro mode. At $200 monthly, it’s a pricey purchase, but it offers good value for professionals dealing with complex mathematical problems.
OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT Pro on the first day of a promised "12 days of OpenAI." The company will unveil more features over the next two weeks, so stay tuned.
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