Business versions of ChatGPT: user numbers break the million mark

In April, there was talk of 600,000 users, but now the tech start-up OpenAI claims to have broken the one million mark for the number of users of its business applications. This was reported by the news portal Bloomberg. The launch of ChatGPT Edu in May was apparently the main reason for this.

Edu also includes OpenAI among its business applications and is subject to a fee for universities. This also applies to all other OpenAI business applications. The additional revenue is intended to help cover the very high development costs.

Strong demand could increase the price

In addition to Edu, there is also ChatGPT Team and ChatGPT Enterprise. The Team version has been available since the beginning of 2024; it offers an admin console and excludes the data entered from training. ChatGPT Enterprise was released in August 2023 for corporate use, also with enhanced data protection. Despite strong competition, there is apparently high demand for the products. This could now make OpenAI's planned new Large Language Models (LLM) more expensive.

As the news portals Quartz and Reuters report, OpenAI is planning significantly higher fees for the Strawberry and Orion projects. However, both are still under development. Strawberry is said to be particularly good at solving complex tasks without a lot of information. It is also intended to provide Orion, OpenAI's planned new flagship AI, with synthetic training material. According to media reports, OpenAI management is discussing subscription prices of up to 2,000 US dollars per month.

ChatGPT users have doubled since last fall

The user base for new OpenAI products is also growing strongly overall: according to OpenAI, 200 million people use one of the free or paid ChatGPT services every week. That's twice as many as last fall.

(mma)