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OpenAI releases a new AI model, but it’s eye-wateringly expensive

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OpenAI has released its latest model, o1-pro, an updated version of its reasoning model o1 — but it’s not going to come cheap.

“It uses more compute than o1 to provide consistently better responses,” OpenAI said in its announcement. The company went on to say it offered new features including: “Supports vision, function calling, Structured Outputs, and works with the Responses and Batch APIs. ”

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With the additional computing power required to run the new model, OpenAI says, inevitably comes a higher cost. But the price is considerably steep: $150 per 1 million input tokens, and $600 per 1 million output tokens. And as TechCrunch points out, such high costs put it at twice the price of OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 and ten times the price of the baseline o1.

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“O1-pro in the API is a version of o1 that uses more computing to think harder and provide even better answers to the hardest problems,” an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch. “After getting many requests from our developer community, we’re excited to bring it to the API to offer even more reliable responses.”

All of this makes it clear that OpenAI is aiming o1-pro at developers rather than everyday users. The model is currently available to select developers on tiers 1–5 (those who have spent a certain amount of money on OpenAI’s API services in the past), with higher tier developers able to send more requests within a given time period.

However, whether developers will be willing to shell out this much money for the new model remains unclear. When o1-pro was rolled out as part of ChatGPT Pro a few months ago, user response was not particularly positive.

Users on Reddit complained that the model is “pathetic” and that it looked good in benchmarks but wasn’t that useful in real world scenarios. Others disagreed, though, saying that they found o1-pro particularly good for programming especially when the model was given full and detailed instructions on exactly what they wanted their code to do.

You can access o1-pro on OpenAI’s development platform now, if you’re willing to spend the money.

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