OpenAI's Reasoning Model Is Now Free on Copilot

Following a surge in popularity for Chinese AI app Deepseek and its free reasoning model this week, frequent OpenAI collaborator Microsoft is helping America’s AI leader drop the paywall on its own reasoning model, giving all Copilot users free access to OpenAI o1.

Notice the distinct lack of a “Plus” or “Pro” after “Copilot.” You won’t need specialized hardware for this, nor will you need a ChatGPT or Copilot subscription. The news came via a LinkedIn post from Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, wherein the executive said Copilot’s “Think Deeper” feature is now “free and available for all users of Copilot.”

Think Deeper began testing in October and essentially gives the chatbot more time (about 30 seconds) to consider your request before providing an answer. It doesn’t have access to the internet, so it can’t search for real-time information, but in turn, it can walk you through the steps it took to arrive at an answer, and will supposedly self-correct. 

The goal here is to make the AI better at handling complex topics and STEM-related prompts—for example, OpenAI says that o1 can solve 83% of problems on the International Mathematics Olympiad, while non-reasoning model GPT-4o can only solve 13%.

To use Think Deeper in Copilot, simply click or tap the “Think Deeper” button while entering your prompt. If you don’t see it, it might take a little bit to roll out to you—I’m also in the same boat.

Suleyman didn’t specify any limits to the new o1 model access, although I’d assume they’re the same as the free version of Copilot’s other limits, which means you might not have access during peak times. But it’s still a better deal than on ChatGPT’s own site, where limited o1 access costs $20 a month and unlimited access costs $200 a month. 

The sudden shift towards a free option for o1 can’t help but feel like a response to Deepseek’s R1, which that company claimed matched o1 on several metrics. But whatever decisions are being made behind the scenes at OpenAI and Microsoft, the timing couldn’t be better for users—Deepseek is already facing severe privacy issues, including chat logs that were left exposed for anyone to see.

That said, Microsoft is still playing as many angles as it can here. While Microsoft services have yet to make Deepseek R1 immediately available to consumers, it’s already been integrated into Microsoft’s AI developer tools.

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