ChatGPT Shifts Focus to Commercial Applications as Interest Declines
OpenAI announced on Monday that it is introducing a commercial edition of ChatGPT, their highly popular artificial intelligence model, as they face a decrease in user engagement since its groundbreaking launch nine months ago.
ChatGPT Enterprise offers business customers a premium version of the bot with “enterprise-grade” security and privacy improvements over previous versions, OpenAI said in a blog post.
The issue of data security has become an important issue for OpenAI, as large companies such as Apple, Amazon and Samsung prevented employees from using ChatGPT for fear of exposing sensitive information.
“Today marks another step toward an AI assistant for work that helps with all tasks, is tailored to your organization, and protects your company’s data,” OpenAI said.
The enterprise version of ChatGPT resembles Bing Chat Enterprise, an offering from Microsoft that uses the same OpenAI technology through a major partnership.
ChatGPT Enterprise is powered by GPT-4, OpenAI’s most powerful model, just like ChatGPT Plus, the company’s subscription version for individuals, but business customers get special benefits like better speed.
“We believe that artificial intelligence can help and elevate our work lives in all areas and make teams more creative and productive,” the company said.
It added that companies such as Carlyle, The Estée Lauder Companies and PwC were early adopters of ChatGPT Enterprise.
The release comes as ChatGPT struggles to maintain the momentum that made it the world’s fastest-downloading app in the weeks following its launch.
That departure was taken up last month by Threads, a Twitter competitor to Facebook owner Meta.
According to analytics company Likeweb, ChatGPT traffic dropped by nearly 10 percent in June and again in July due to school summer vacation.
Likeweb estimates that around a quarter of ChatGPT users worldwide are between the ages of 18 and 24.
OpenAI also faces opposition from news publishers and other platforms — including X, as Twitter is now known, and Reddit — which now block OpenAI crawlers from mining their data for AI model training.
The studies published on Monday by the Pew Research Center, the organizer of the opinion poll, also showed doubts about artificial intelligence and ChatGPT in particular.
Two-thirds of US respondents who had heard of ChatGPT say their biggest concern is that the government won’t go far enough in regulating its use.
The study also found that the use of ChatGPT for learning and work tasks has increased from 12 percent in March to 16 percent of those who heard about ChatGPT in July.
Pew also reports that 52 percent of Americans say they are more worried than excited about the increased use of artificial intelligence.
