OpenAI announced on Monday its biggest news ever since ChatGPT was launched: ChatGPT Enterprise is the AI chatbot for business, and will be available from Monday.
Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s COO, told CNBC that the tool had been under development for “under one year” with more than 20 different companies. ChatGPT Enterprise comes with GPT-4, no usage limits, performance up to twice as fast as previous versions and API credits. Lightcap stated that the pricing for its enterprise version would not be announced publicly and that “it will depend on each company’s size and use cases.” The beta users of Lightcap Enterprise included Block, Canva, and The Estee Lauder Co.
In April, the startup closed a 300 million share sale with investors such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and a valuation of between $27 billion and $29 billion. ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly users two months after its launch in November. This broke records for the fastest growing consumer application ever.
Lightcap and OpenAI report that more than 80% Fortune 500 companies have teams using ChatGPT.
ChatGPT Enterprise is a key difference between the consumer version and ChatGPT Enterprise. ChatGPT Enterprise allows clients to enter company data in order to customize ChatGPT to their industries and specific use cases. However, some of these features are not yet available for Monday’s launch. ChatGPT Enterprise, a tier for smaller teams that will be available in the future, is also planned by the company. However, a date has not been specified.
Lightcap told CNBC, that launching the enterprise version before the business tier “gives us more time to interact with teams and better understand the deployment process” before we open the system up fully.
CNBC: More From CNBC
OpenAI stated in a recent blog post that, “We don’t train our models on your conversations or business data and we do not learn from you.” They also noted that the conversation data of clients would be encrypted at both rest and transit. Lightcap stated that the company logs aggregate data about how its tool is used. This includes performance metadata, among other things.
ChatGPT Enterprise debuts as AI arms race heats up between chatbot leaders like OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. Tech giants are racing not only to launch new apps but also to introduce new features. OpenAI released its iOS app in May. The Android app was launched in July. Microsoft and Google are regularly updating their Bing chatbots with visual searches. Anthropic, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI executives, launched Claude 2 in July. This was months after raised $750 million through two funding rounds.
ChatGPT is an expensive service to run, as are many large language models. According to a tweet from CEO Sam Altman in December, each chat costs OpenAI “single digit cents.” This suggests that running the service for up to 100 million users a month may cost millions of dollars.
Lightcap, a CNBC analyst, said that the biggest challenge in developing ChatGPT Enterprise was to determine how to prioritize features.
He said that out of all of the things shipping over the next few months, “the priority of how you pull forward those things was based on how the people are using the products — and what the people really want, and what is empowering — I would say the topic of much debate on the team.”
Code Interpreter is a ChatGPT feature that was renamed Advanced Data Analysis. Lightcap stated that the team had questioned if the feature was important for ChatGPT enterprise and that “it sat on a list of things we think are equally or even more exciting.” However, the feedback from companies prompted them to offer it sooner than later.
OpenAI’s blog states that it plans to “onboard as many enterprises as possible over the next few week.”
