Microsoft-backed American artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI has announced it has surpassed one million paid business users for its enterprise services. These services include ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Team, and ChatGPT Edu.
Since the launch of ChatGPT Team in January 2024, OpenAI’s business customer base has grown from 600,000 in April to hit the one million mark this month, reflecting a 67% increase in nearly five months.
OpenAI bet on business usage seemingly paying off
ChatGPT Enterprise is designed for large organisations, providing enhanced security features, administrative tools, and extended context capabilities to support complex business needs. ChatGPT Team, meanwhile, caters to smaller teams and departments, offering collaborative workspaces and customisable settings to facilitate team-based projects and workflows. Meanwhile, ChatGPT Edu targets educational institutions, offering tools for educators and students to leverage AI for learning, research, and administrative tasks, with features specifically tailored for academic environments.
OpenAI has raised approximately $11.3bn in venture capital funding and is seeking further investment with a valuation above $100bn. The company faces substantial operational costs related to developing and running its AI models and, according to some reports, is considering introducing higher-priced subscription tiers to address these financial requirements.
Reports from The Information indicate that OpenAI executives have discussed potential subscription prices for upcoming models like “Strawberry” and “Orion,” with prices possibly reaching up to $2,000 per month. Currently, ChatGPT Plus is priced at $20 per month, while the free tier of the model is used by hundreds of millions of users each month.
Product rollouts of 2024
It’s been a busy year so far for OpenAI. In July, the firm announced SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine designed to respond to search queries conversationally with up-to-date information from the internet while citing its sources. SearchGPT is being launched to a small group of users and publishers before its planned integration into ChatGPT.
In the same month, OpenAI introduced GPT-4o mini, a more cost-effective model in its AI lineup, with pricing set at 15 cents per million input tokens and 60 cents per million output tokens. This pricing makes it more affordable than the previous GPT-3.5 Turbo model.
The GPT-4o mini achieved an 82% score on the massive multitask language understanding (MMLU) benchmark and leads in chat preferences on the language model system (LMSYS) leaderboard. It currently supports text and vision in the API, with plans to expand its capabilities to handle text, image, video, and audio inputs and outputs.
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