OpenAI launches o1-pro: A costly upgrade for developers

OpenAI has launched o1-pro, an upgraded and more powerful version of its o1 “reasoning” AI model, now available in its developer API for select developers. The model, which commands a high price, requires users to have spent a minimum of $5 on OpenAI’s API services.

OpenAI charges $150 per million input tokens (approximately 750,000 words) and $600 per million output tokens generated by the model. This pricing is two times that of OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 for input and ten times the cost of the standard o1 model. OpenAI aims for o1-pro’s enhanced performance to justify this substantial cost to developers.

An OpenAI spokesperson described o1-pro as a version of o1 that uses more computational power to deliver “consistently better responses” to complex problems. Despite being available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers since December, early user feedback has been mixed. Reports indicated that o1-pro struggled with tasks such as Sudoku puzzles and simple optical illusion jokes.

Moreover, internal benchmarks conducted by OpenAI last year revealed that o1-pro only performed slightly better than the standard o1 model in solving coding and math problems, while showing more reliability in answering these problems.

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