Want to access OpenAI's new o1 model? You have two options, and ChatGPT is not required

If you’re an avid AI user, you’ll likely want to try out OpenAI’s recent o1 model as it boasts some of the most advanced reasoning capabilities yet. However, if you use another model, you may not want to make an OpenAI account or subscribe. With these two platforms, you don’t have to. 

Also: OpenAI expands o1 model availability. See who gets access and how much

On Monday, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas shared via an X post that Perplexity added a “reasoning” focus in beta, powered by OpenAI o1-mini. The experience is limited to users of Perplexity Pro, which retails for $20 per month. 

Although Perplexity is an AI search engine, Srinivas added that users won’t be able to access the reasoning focus in Search because of o1’s slower performance. Rather, Srinivas encourages customers to use Perplexity for puzzles, math, and coding. 

Perplexity Pro users have a limit of 10 uses per day; other perks include access to leading AI models, such as GPT-4o, Claude 3 Sonnet/Opus, and Sonar Large 32k based on Llama 3 70b. 

Another alternative is You.com, which offers OpenAI’s o1-preview and o1-mini with a Pro plan that costs $20 per year. The company does not specify the limits for using this model. 

Still, You.com has an advantage because it offers nearly all the leading AI models, including GPT-4o, Clade 3.5 Sonnet, Llama 3, Mistral Large 2, Gemini 1.5 Flash, Command R, and more. 

Of course, the most direct way to access the o1 models is via ChatGPT. All users can access o1-mini, with ChatGPT Plus users having 50 messages per day and free users having a limit that has yet to be shared, presumably lower. 

ChatGPT Plus users can also access o1-preview with a limit of 50 weekly messages, and the subscription cost is the same as the other premium AI subscriptions noted above — $20 per month. Other perks of ChatGPT Plus include unlimited access to data analysis, file uploads, vision, and web browsing and creating custom GPTs.