A year after launching the first business version of its generative artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, OpenAI said it has reached over one million paid users for its subscription-based services.
OpenAI reached the one million mark five months after counting 600,000 paid users for its ChatGPT Enterprise and ChatGPT Team products, it said.
Amid the AI hype, tech companies large and small are spending millions on chips and computing power to train and run large language models. And those costs are passing on to customers.
OpenAI is reportedly considering higher-priced subscriptions for its new, more advanced large language models, which could cost even more to train and run. The company discussed prices up to $2,000 per month, The Information reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. However, that is not final, sources said. The company reportedly has an upcoming model code-named Strawberry which can reason better than its existing models and could be used to power ChatGPT, according to the Information. It is also preparing for its next flagship LLM called Orion.
What paying businesses get with ChatGPT
Last August, OpenAI released ChatGPT Enterprise, which offers users extra features including “enterprise-grade security and privacy” and “unlimited higher-speed GPT-4 access.” Five months later, the company launched ChatGPT Team for smaller companies. OpenAI released a version of the chatbot for students at universities called ChatGPT Edu in May, which therefore doesn’t count toward its 600,000 number from April. The company’s paid business services have been an effort to offset the massive costs of running its models. The free version of ChatGPT counts hundreds of millions of users each month.
The number of users represents each person a business pays for in its subscription, which varies among companies depending on size and needs, OpenAI said. Over half of the paid users are outside of the U.S., with Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom being the top three non-U.S. countries.
Over 90% of OpenAI business users reported increases in productivity, according to a survey of 4,700 business users, an OpenAI spokesperson shared with Quartz. Meanwhile, 88% reported saving time, and 75% “saw an improvement to creativity & innovation,” OpenAI said.
“From reshaping how students learn, to optimizing patient care, and transforming how governments serve their citizens, AI is redefining how people work,” Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer of OpenAI, said in a statement shared with Quartz. “We’re proud to help over a million paying business users work more productively, streamline operations, and uncover new opportunities for innovation.”