OpenAI adds o3 Pro to ChatGPT and drops o3 price by 80 per cent, but open-source AI is delayed

India Today

4 days ago

OpenAI has been busy. This morning, we woke up to a bunch of updates from the AI company. To begin with, OpenAI has released o3 Pro, its most advanced reasoning model to date, for Pro and Team users of ChatGPT. The release of the new model also comes with a dramatic 80 per cent price cut for the standard o3 model, which makes it more accessible for developers and researchers around the world. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also announced that the company has had to push back the release of its open-source model until later this summer.advertisemento3 Pro lands in ChatGPTOpenAI has launched a new o3 Pro model, which it says is its most capable AI model yet. o3 Pro is available to Pro and Team users in ChatGPT and through OpenAI's API. It replaces the earlier o1 Pro model and is designed to deliver even more reliable and accurate answers across complex domains like science, programming, mathematics, and education.
OpenAI described o3 Pro as a 'version of our most intelligent model, o3, designed to think longer and provide the most reliable responses.' The company notes that in internal and external academic evaluation, o3 Pro has consistently outperformed both o3 and its predecessors, especially in clarity, accuracy, instruction-following, and comprehensiveness. advertisement
Although o3 Pro uses the same underlying model as o3, it is optimised for dependability. OpenAI says reviewers have ranked the model higher across key tasks in science and data analysis. As OpenAI puts it, 'We recommend using it for challenging questions where reliability matters more than speed, and waiting a few minutes is worth the tradeoff.'
Notably, o3 Pro is also equipped with tools that enhance its capabilities, including the ability to browse the web, analyse documents, interpret visual inputs, run Python code, and use memory for more personalised interactions. However, these advanced tools mean its responses typically take longer to generate than those of o1 Pro.Despite the rollout, a few features remain unavailable in o3 Pro for now. Temporary chats are currently disabled due to a technical issue, and the model cannot yet generate images or use the Canvas interface. Users looking for image generation are advised to stick with GPT-4o, o3, or o4-mini.Enterprise and Edu customers will gain access to o3 Pro the following week.
A massive price cut for o3Alongside the launch of o3 Pro, OpenAI has also slashed the cost of using the o3 model by 80 per cent – a move that makes the model more accessible and affordable to developers. The cost of using o3 now stands at $2 per million input tokens and $8 per million output tokens, with additional discounts for cached (previously seen) prompts. This is a major reduction from the previous rates of $10 and $40 respectively. As OpenAI researcher Noam Brown pointed out on X, this update represents a significant shift in affordability for developers.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed the price drop on X, posting, 'we dropped the price of o3 by 80%!! excited to see what people will do with it now. think you'll also be happy with o3-pro pricing for the performance :)'
advertisementThe new pricing places OpenAI in sharper competition with rivals like Google DeepMind's Gemini 2.5 Pro, which charges between $1.25 and $2.50 for input and up to $15 for output tokens, depending on prompt size. Gemini also offers Google Search integration, but with extra fees beyond a certain usage limit.Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 remains the priciest competitor, charging $15 per million input tokens and $75 for output. DeepSeek's Reasoner and Chat models, on the other hand, lead the low-cost tier with rates as low as $0.035 for cached inputs during off-peak hours.Open-source model postponedWhile the launch of o3 Pro and the price drop for the o3 model are widely welcomed, OpenAI's open-source model has hit a delay. Originally expected in June 2025, the model will now arrive later, following a surprise development by the research team. The exact timeline for the release has not yet been disclosed. In a post on X, Altman explained, 'We are going to take a little more time with our open-weights model, i.e. expect it later this summer but not June.' He added that the delay is due to the team achieving something 'unexpected and quite amazing,' which still needs more time to polish.advertisementThe open-source model is expected to rival high-performing open reasoning models such as DeepSeek R1, with OpenAI aiming to raise the bar for open-access large language models.
OpenAI CEO reveals cost of a single ChatGPT queryAlongside these product updates, Altman has also addressed questions about the environmental cost of using ChatGPT. In a blog post published on Tuesday, he shared that each ChatGPT query consumes about 0.34 watt-hours, which is roughly what an oven uses in a second or a high-efficiency lightbulb in a couple of minutes.In terms of water usage, Altman revealed that the average query consumes 0.000085 gallons of water, or 'roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.' These figures, he explained, are part of a broader vision where 'the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity.'