OpenAI has reached a major milestone, reporting that it now has more than 1 million paying users across its platform.

The firm has almost doubled its paying user base since April, when it reported having 600,000 paying subscribers for its ChatGPT products.

Those 1 million users include people signed up to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT Team and Enterprise services, which are aimed at companies, along with its ChatGPT Edu product for people at universities.

That meteoric rise is in part down to CEO Sam Altman’s push to get companies using ChatGPT in the workplace, who Reuters reported in April had pitched the company’s AI services to hundreds of leaders at Fortune 500 companies.

It also reflects the rise in value of the company, which stood at around $86 billion (£65.3 billion) in October last year but has already reached $100 billion (£75.9 billion) as of August, according to multiple media reports. 

Corporate products have been rolled out by the company in a bid to boost profits and offset the costs of new AI development. ChatGPT Enterprise, launched in August last year offered improved security and privacy features, while the Teams product, released in January, provides AI models and tools for businesses to improve productivity, creativity, and data analysis.

OpenAI hasn’t confirmed how many individual users its corporate customers have on average, but has said that just under half of OpenAI’s corporate users are based in the US. 

“From reshaping how students learn, to optimizing patient care and transforming how governments serve their citizens, AI is redefining how people work,” OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said in the statement.

“We’re proud to help over a million paying business users work more productively, streamline operations and uncover new opportunities for innovation.”

Pricing for these products starts at $20–$30 (£15–£23) a month, but OpenAI is considering prices of up to $2,000 (£1519) for subscriptions to use upcoming LLM’s like its reasoning-based Strawberry and Orion models, according to new reports from The Information citing insiders with direct knowledge.

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One million paying subscribers might not seem like much, especially compared to the estimated 200 million weekly active users of ChatGPT worldwide, but it is remarkable considering OpenAI only started charging for its premium tier products in February 2023.

Although the free tier of the model is still used by hundreds of millions of individuals, OpenAI’s moves to encourage more corporate users to the platform should help bolster its finances to develop new products like SearchGPT, the prototype AI-powered search engine that puts OpenAI in direct competition with Google, and it’s biggest backer, Microsoft.