ChatGPT’s advanced AI costs $200/mo. It’s now free for Windows users

Microsoft is taking an aggressive step towards lowering the price of top-tier AI reasoning, placing what appears to be unlimited access to OpenAI’s o1 model directly within Copilot’s new “Think Deeper” feature.

What’s important here is the word “free”: OpenAI released the o1 model in December, and company chief executive Sam Altman promised that it would be the most powerful model available. But it came with a catch: two subscriptions. OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro charges a whopping $200/mo for unlimited access to the model. The company’s $20/mo service, ChatGPT Plus, also allows access to the o1 model, but with limited access.

On Wednesday, Microsoft’s chief of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, announced that access to the o1 model would be available to Copilot users “everywhere at no cost.” (Update: Microsoft says there’s some sort of mysterious access limitation in place, depending on how many people use it at the time.) Access to the model will be provided by Copilot’s “Think Deeper” function, which requires a few seconds to ponder and research an answer and spit out a response. Because the Copilot app on Windows is now just a PWA, or webpage, you can access it by either the Copilot app on Windows or via copilot.microsoft.com. You’ll need to sign in with a Microsoft account.

(The “Think Deeper” control in Copilot is essentially a toggle switch. Just make sure it’s “on,” or highlighted, before you enter your query.)

Think Deeper is essentially a more thoughtful version of Copilot, which recently seems to have trended toward more cursory, shorter replies. Don’t consider it a search engine, however; when asked, Think Deeper noted that its information was current up to October 2023.

Instead, Think Deeper excels at what you might call evergreen research — relating the evaporation cycle to hurricane development, or analysis of a given situation or historical event, for example. Think Deeper will write code and explain it, too: “Write a basic Windows application that can be used to draw a maze based upon the letters of the user’s first name” produced a thorough process to develop the application, generating custom C# source files after several seconds. (I haven’t taken the time to test it out and/or debut it, however.)

Microsoft hasn’t shown any indication that it will charge for Think Deeper, either via an outright payment or subscription, or via the credit system that it sneakily implemented as part of an upgraded Microsoft 365 subscription that included Copilot Plus. A Microsoft representative didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment.

Of course, the AI industry moves like lightning, and OpenAI has already announced o3, which uses a “private chain of thought” to develop more complex answers. According to various benchmarks, o3 is significantly better at solving software engineering challenges and solving logical problems. But it almost certainly won’t be free, either.