an announcement regarding X hinting at new ChatGPT functionalities expected to be unveiled in the near future. These enigmatic functionalities will incur higher operational costs, hence access cannot be assured for the most affordable premium subscription, which is the ChatGPT Plus tier priced at $20/month. “In the upcoming weeks, we will be introducing several new compute-heavy offerings,” Altman remarked. “Due to the related expenses, certain features will initially be restricted to Pro subscribers, and some new products will entail extra charges.”
“Our goal continues to be to drive down the costs of intelligence as much as we can and to make our services accessible to a wide audience, and we are optimistic about achieving this over time,” Altman added. “However, we also aim to explore what’s feasible when we apply a substantial amount of compute, at today’s model expenses, to intriguing new concepts.”
It remains uncertain why the CEO hinted at the new features over the weekend or what they could entail. This is not the first instance where ChatGPT Pro users have gained exclusive access to new, compute-demanding features. ChatGPT Operator, OpenAI’s initial AI agent, serves as one such example. Additionally, ChatGPT Pro users were the pioneers in gaining access to functionalities such as Deep Research and the GPT-4.5 model prior to their wider release. Concerning GPT-5, ChatGPT Pro users benefit from elevated usage limits and exclusive entry to the GPT-5 Pro model.
