OpenAI now has more than 1 million paid business users

OpenAI now has more than 1 million paying users across its business products, ChatGPT Enterprise, Team and Edu, according to an announcement made by the company on Thursday.

The figure is a rise from the 600,000 users it had in April, indicating that CEO Sam Altman's push to get enterprises to adopt ChatGPT for corporate use is paying off. Separately, the Information reported on Thursday that OpenAI executives have discussed higher-priced subscriptions for upcoming large-language models such as its reasoning-focused Strawberry and a new flagship LLM dubbed Orion.

In early internal talks at OpenAI, subscription prices ranging up to $2,000 per month were discussed, the report said, citing one person with direct knowledge of the numbers. ChatGPT Plus currently costs $20 a month. The free tier of the model is used by hundreds of millions of users every month.

OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, is working on "Strawberry" with the aim to enabling AI models to perform deep research, Reuters exclusively reported earlier in July. Strawberry includes a specialised way of what is known as "post-training" OpenAI's generative AI models, or adapting the base models to hone their performance in specific ways after they have already been "trained" on reams of generalised data, the report said.

The reported pricing discussions come after media reports said Apple and chip giant Nvidia were in talks to invest in OpenAI as part of a new fundraising round that could value the ChatGPT maker above $100 billion. The AI startup behind the wildly popular ChatGPT application last week said the chatbot had amassed more than 200 million weekly active users, doubling from the number it had in the last fall season.