GPT-6 launches with an interactive interface, while OpenAI raises the price of heavy use

OpenAI has launched GPT-6. According to the source note, it comes with a feature called 'Intelligent UI'. Instead of plain text, the model can answer with interactive charts and buttons. Alongside it comes a model named GPT-6.1 Soul.

The pricing news matters as much as the model. OpenAI has added a $500-a-month plan. It has also halved the usage limit on its $200-a-month plans. In practice, a subscriber who keeps paying $200 now gets about half the usage they had before. Doing the same amount of work now means paying more than twice as much.

The note gives no benchmarks, no technical details on GPT-6.1 Soul and no reason for the cuts. So we cannot say how GPT-6 compares with GPT-5.6 Sol, which our own index puts behind Anthropic's Fable 5. We also cannot say what 'Soul' adds. For now, all we know is the name.

Our reading: the answer becoming an interface is a real shift. A chatbot that hands you charts and buttons stops being a text box. It becomes an app that writes itself as you ask. That fits a pattern we keep seeing: the fight is moving from who has the smartest model to who controls the layer people actually work in.

The pricing is the uncomfortable part. Halving a premium plan's limit tells us the cost of serving heavy use, especially agentic use, is still high. Power users who rely on it every day pay for that first. In the short term, access to the best tools splits by budget, and that is a real inequality.

In the long term, we stay optimistic. The cost per unit of intelligence keeps falling, and open-weight models are putting pressure on closed ones from below. That should eventually pull these prices down. The watch-point is whether $500 becomes the new benchmark for professional use, or a short-lived peak until competitors respond.