Open AI launches ChatGPT pro that performs human-like reasoning, to cost $200 a month

Open AI has introduced an advanced-priced tier for its chatbot ChatGPT featuring unlimited access to its most powerful artificial intelligence designs. Announced via a livestreamed event on Thursday, the ChatGPT pro is set to cost $200 (N150,000) a month. 

Open AI highlighted that the new advanced model has been upgraded to perform human-like reasoning tasks and offers access to an expanded version of its current reasoning model — o1.

In addition to the latest Open AI software development, Open AI also offers a ChatGPT Plus subscription for $20 (N15,000) a month, which is a tenth of the new option’s cost. 

The tech giant previously released a preview of the new model in September where the company said it has been enhanced to solve competitive math and code problems in a faster and better way. 

“As an early model, it doesn’t yet have many of the features that make ChatGPT useful, like browsing the web for information and uploading files and images. But for complex reasoning tasks, this is a significant advancement and represents a new level of AI capability. Given this, we are resetting the counter back to 1 and naming this series OpenAI o1,” the company said in a statement during the preview.

Open AI also pointed out that the announcement of the new ChatGPT pro will be 12 days of live-streamed product events. In a Wednesday post on X Wednesday, OpenAI said it’s planning “a bunch of new things, big and small.”

The new feature release comes when the San Francisco-based Open AI is looking to raise billions in funding and faces heightened competition in the race to develop more sophisticated artificial intelligence systems. Like other competitors in the AI industry such as Google and Anthropic, Open AI has been working to convince customers and businesses to pay for its software. This will help offset the high costs of building cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems.

Other tech giants have also ventured into the building of reasoning ability with their advanced AI models. Also, Open AI, Google, and others have also been working to build more convincing models that can field challenging queries by taking extra time to compute an answer.

The “reasoning” process could help improve the performance of leading AI systems at a time when Open AI and some of its rivals are seeing diminishing returns from their costly efforts to build better models. 

African languages in Open AI and Meta’s model

Within the  AI model’s improved capabilities, Orange – a French telecommunications company announced a partnership with ChatGTP owner, Open AI, and Facebook parent company, Meta, last week. The project is set to witness the incorporation of West African languages into large language models (LLMs) for artificial intelligence. The partnership was announced in a statement seen by Technext. 

Orange says the partnership is part of its commitment to digital inclusion and focus on driving growth in the Middle East and Africa. The partnership with OpenAI and Meta is expected to bring about a fine-tuning of AI Large Language models (LLMs) to understand regional languages in Africa that today are not understood by any Gen AI model. 

The initiative will commence in the first half of 2025. It will initially focus on incorporating two regional languages; Wolof, which is spoken by 16 million people in West Africa, and Pulaar, spoken by six million people in West Africa. 

The statement noted that the long-term goal of the partnership is to work with many AI technology providers to enable future models to recognize all African languages spoken and written across Orange’s 18-country footprint in the region.

“This innovative project aims to develop custom AI models capable of allowing customers to communicate naturally in their local languages with Orange for customer support and sales. These open-source AI models will also be provided externally by Orange with a free license for non-commercial use such as for public health, public education, and many other services,” the statement reads.

By fine-tuning leading AI models such as OpenAI’s ‘Whisper’ speech model and Meta’s ‘Llama’ text model with diverse examples of these languages, we will enable them to better understand these regional languages. Orange’s vision is to make AI and other related advances accessible to all, including illiterate populations, who are currently unable to benefit from the potential of artificial intelligence. The initiative is a blueprint for how AI can benefit those currently excluded.

Read More: Orange partners Open AI and Meta to incorporate African languages into large language models.