• Megan Morrone

OpenAI is growing its revenue from business users and contemplating hefty price hikes for users who want access to its next-level services, per reports.

Why it matters: Generative AI is notoriously expensive to develop and run, and those costs rise exponentially with each new generational leap — like the one from OpenAI's GPT-4 to its long-awaited successor.

Driving the news: OpenAI said Thursday that it now has more than a million paying business users, up from 600,000 in April.

• By "business users," OpenAI means people who pay for ChatGPT Enterprise, Team and Edu, all of which launched in the last year.
• The company told Axios that its enterprise and education customers include Moderna, Morgan Stanley and Arizona State University.

Yes, but: OpenAI is spending tens of billions to train and deploy its next generation of models and keeps raising more fortunes from investors to pay for that work, which its estimated $2 billion in annual revenue doesn't begin to cover.

• That "money incinerator" is forcing the company to look at big price increases for monthly subscribers when it rolls out the next versions of ChatGPT, according to The Information.

Stunning stat: In internal discussions, OpenAI raised the possibility of a price tag as high as $2,000 monthly, though that sounds like an extreme scenario.

• OpenAI declined to comment on potential price increases.

Between the lines: ChatGPT is available for free, but a $20 monthly subscription offers more features. ChatGPT Team costs $25 a month, and OpenAI says ChatGPT Enterprise subscriptions vary depending on the size and needs of a company.

• Rival chatbot companies Anthropic and Inflection also recently announced enterprise versions of their software.
• Pro, team and enterprise versions of Google's Gemini, Microsoft's Copilot and Anthropic's Claude are similarly priced to ChatGPT.

The bottom line: Investors continue to throw money at OpenAI and its rivals to build ever-bigger genAI models, but sooner or later they will want to see credible evidence of a long-term payoff.

• Pushes into B2B services and subscription increases are common signs of a maturing software market.

Go deeper: OpenAI says ChatGPT usage has doubled since last year