Last week, OpenAI announced that it would be launching ‘ChatGPT Business’ in the coming months, promising the enterprise customers more control over their data and teams on how they utilise the chatbot and whatnot. 

Despite these efforts, many organisations are still skeptical about using its platform, and still fear misuse of data and leakage of sensitive information. Looks like everyone has a trust issue when it comes to using OpenAI’s products and services. 

Samsung, for example, has been pretty vocal about banning ChatGPT after the blunder created by its employees, where they used it to troubleshoot proprietary code and summarise internal meeting notes. Now, the company is looking to ditch ChatGPT forever, and make its own version of an LLM-powered chatbot to prevent further mishaps from occurring. 

But, OpenAI is all about priorities – instead of focusing on the safety and ethical concerns, it is looking to woo the enterprise ecosystem with the hope of creating safer and better systems. More than anything else, its stance on safety aspects has been quite disappointing. 

Not just Samsung, several companies, including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and others have also restricted employees from using the chatbot over the fear of sharing confidential information. The list just goes on and on. 

Interestingly, the announcement of ChatGPT Business seems like a stopgap mechanism by OpenAI, or a manipulated move by Microsoft to do the dirty work to figure out enterprise use cases and fast track generative AI adoption, and fix safety flaws along the way, and later mirror it for its customers.  

Baby Microsoft 

While OpenAI’s darling Microsoft has been busy pushing its APIs into the enterprise line of products and services, OpenAI launching its own ‘enterprise-line of product’ aka ChatGPT Business doesn’t seem to make sense at all.  

With GPT-4 powering Microsoft’s Bing and Copilot X, OpenAI’s reach to businesses is being indirectly achieved. In a recent development, Microsoft is said to be testing a version of ChatGPT specifically for industries such as banks and medical establishments where data security is of priority. In spite of these, OpenAI seems to be desperately pushing their way to tap the business market as a standalone brand. 

However, the question on how ‘ChatGPT Business’ works is still a mystery as there are no details on its features. The company has only mentioned that the new subscription model will aim to give enterprises a way to control and manage their end users: which is again vague. Considering how ChatGPT Plus, a premium model, already exists with advanced capabilities of GPT-4, where does ChatGPT Business fit in?  

Old Bottle, New Wine

OpenAI is desperately trying to rebrand itself as a reliable chatbot for businesses. By stressing on AI safety measures to introduce chat privacy features, the company is coming up with announcements and releases. 

The bigger question is if OpenAI will use only consented data, how will it work on training advanced models? What sources of training will the company use?

Recently, community platforms have started to restrict their content for training by putting them behind paywalls. Reddit announced that they will restrict their content pipeline that is used to train AI models by companies like Microsoft, Google, and even OpenAI. Stack Overflow also announced their plan to charge AI developers for accessing its programming driven community questions. With this move, the availability of free data for training will be restricted. Another possible blocker for OpenAI’s training dataset. 

Castles in the Sky?

With the announcement of ChatGPT Business, many users were quick to bring up the status of ChatGPT plugins which was announced last month. ChatGPT plugins are not yet available for all users, and the plugins were available as a limited release for developers and insiders. Others are still on a waiting list.  

Pricing of the service was a question that was raised by many. With no knowledge on how the company will go about charging enterprises for ChatGPT Business, and the parameter they will use for pricing, the questions remain. 

Independent flutter developer, Christian Findlay, tweeted on the need to focus on policies pertaining to reselling ChatGPT. There were also suggestions on features for the business model.

Is Something Else Brewing? 

By charting out a crafted plan to slowly enter the enterprise space, the new announcement comes as a followup to some of the major activities the company undertook in the last few weeks. The most important being OpenAI’s emphasis on working towards AI safety features. From interviews to elaborate statements, OpenAI has been reinforcing their seriousness on making their platform safe.

They have also been investing in brand activities. The company had announced that Sam Altman will be doing a world tour visiting multiple countries in an attempt to speak to developers and users. Co-Founder, Greg Brockman highlighted the uses of ChatGPT in his recent TED talk. It did not end with that. ChatGPT was also featured in an ad featuring rapper Jack Harlow who uses the application to predict NBA playoffs. 

Yesterday, Greg Brockman tweeted about Box AI, an integration with GPT models that helps extract and organise information and insights from content, terming it ‘OpenAI for Enterprise Content’

Looking at the trajectory and the brand recognition the company is trying to achieve, it looks like OpenAI is planning something major, but until the company starts delivering, OpenAI announcements will remain ordinary.