What’s the story
OpenAI is preparing to launch a series of compute-heavy products, but not all of them will be free.
CEO Sam Altman announced on X that while the company intends to make AI more affordable in the long run, its upcoming offerings may come with additional costs.
Some features will be exclusive to Pro subscribers and others might require extra fees due to their high computational demands.
Altman’s clarification on access challenges
Altman clarified that the company’s recent decisions are not aimed at making access difficult forever.
Instead, they are intended to push the limits of what can be achieved with today’s models when pushed to their computational limits.
He said, “We want to learn what happens when we throw a lot of compute at interesting new ideas,” stressing that the long-term goal is still reducing intelligence costs “down as aggressively as we can.”
New compute-intensive offerings on the horizon
Altman has announced that OpenAI will soon launch new compute-intensive AI offerings. These will be available only to Pro subscribers at first due to the associated costs.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro subscription, launched last year, gave researchers and developers scaled access to the company’s most powerful AI models.
These included GPT-5 Pro, which is designed to handle complex tasks with improved accuracy and reasoning.