OpenAI has another great achievement! The number of paid users for ChatGPT has exceeded 11 million, demonstrating the significant success of OpenAI's commercialization process.

According to the tech media The Information, Brad Lightcap, the COO of OpenAI, recently stated that these 11 million paid users include 10 million paying subscribers and 1 million high-priced commercial plan users. Such a large user base has brought in substantial income for OpenAI - over $0.225 billion per month and an annualized revenue of $2.7 billion. The demand for AI-driven tools in the market is still very strong.

If we include the revenue from selling AI models to application developers, OpenAI's revenue for the next 12 months is expected to reach about $4 billion, surpassing the approximately $3.4 billion annualized revenue in mid this year and the $1.6 billion annualized revenue by the end of 2023.

Rapid growth also comes with high costs. The large user base and ongoing R&D investment have resulted in OpenAI losing billions of dollars annually. According to earlier reports from The Information, to fill the funding gap, OpenAI plans to transform its corporate structure from a nonprofit organization to a for-profit model to attract more investment. The company is in negotiations with investors, including funds supported by the UAE government, with a goal of raising up to $7 billion in funding.

This financing round is expected to bring OpenAI's valuation to $150 billion, nearly double that of Nvidia, a leading global AI chip design company.

As of now, ChatGPT offered by OpenAI has three subscription options: Plus, Team, and Pro, catering to different needs from individual users to large enterprises.

• ChatGPT Plus is priced at $20 per month. This version offers priority access, fast response, and access to GPT-4, but it has a more basic performance and functionality compared to the Pro and Team versions.
• ChatGPT Team is designed for small teams and businesses, and the specific price is usually determined based on the team size and the required services. The company has stated that less than half of OpenAI's enterprise users are located in the USA. Outside of the USA, ChatGPT is most popular among commercial users in Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom;
• ChatGPT Pro is priced at $200 per month and offers higher usage limits, faster response times, and additional features.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has released a preview version of the o1 'Strawberry' model, marking a new stage in the competition of large AI models.

The o1 series models will be rolled out in stages to paid users, free users, and developers, with developers having a relatively high price for usage:

• ChatGPT Plus and Team users can access o1-preview and o1-mini immediately.
• Enterprise and Education users will gain access next week.
• Developers with an API usage level of 5 (having consumed $1000 and been more than 30 days since the first payment) can now use these two models, with a rate limit of 20RPM.
• OpenAI also plans to make o1-mini available to all free users of ChatGPT in the future.

Once upon a time, OpenAI was widely known for its non-commercial intentions. However, as AI technology continues to advance, the resources and technology required to make these models smarter are becoming increasingly complex. OpenAI has had to gradually shift towards commercial operations to support larger-scale hardware investments.