OpenAI now has more than 1onemillion paid users for the corporate versions of ChatGPT - a sign of growing demand from businesses for its chatbot despite significant competition.

San Francisco-based OpenAI said Thursday that the figure includes the total number of people signed up to use its ChatGPT Team and Enterprise services, which are aimed at companies, as well as people at universities using its ChatGPT Edu product. The startup previously said in April that it had 600,000 corporate ChatGPT users  - not counting Edu, which launched in May.

OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT Enterprise a year ago with extra features and privacy safeguards in a bid to boost revenue and offset the high cost of building AI products. It introduced ChatGPT Team for smaller companies in January. A long list of AI rivals have also rolled out similar services for businesses.

While OpenAI has seen a significant increase this year in paid corporate users, it’s unclear how many new businesses have signed up. A university, for example, may pay for far more user accounts than a startup. OpenAI declined to say how many paid users its corporate customers have on average.

Just under half of OpenAI’s corporate users are based in the US, the company said. Outside the US, the company’s chatbot is most popular with business users in Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom.

  - Bloomberg