All About ChatGPT For Teams and Why It Matters To You.
Most people in the tech space have heard about OpenAI’s GPT store by now (if you haven’t, here’s the official release from OpenAI). Simply stated, the GPT store allows developers to create apps that can be monetized more directly than GPT Plugins. The GPT Store, delayed for several months, was finally released on January 10th.
For some reason, OpenAI’s GPT For Teams update, released the same day, has been largely overshadowed by this announcement. In my opinion, this may have more of an impact to the world at large in the near- to mid-term than ChatGPT Store, and this is not a jump onto an AI hype train.
The Privacy Pink Elephant
One of the biggest stumbling blocks to the widespread adoption of Generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Meta’s LLaMa within the business world has been privacy. One golden rule of the internet age is that if something is free online, you’re most likely paying with your private information as currency; ChatGPT is no exception. If you upload a spreadsheet, resume, or any other data into ChatGPT with personal or confidential information inside, that information is now permanently a part of the GPT database. That also means that theoretically speaking, the information you’ve typed or uploaded into ChatGPT can now be output to any other ChatGPT user with the right amount of prompting.
Some solutions emerged early on to “hash” (to mask) sensitive data such as names and phone numbers within GPT (including our favorite solution), but for the average user concerned about privacy, it was best not to use LLMs at all. This privacy concern led to many Fortune 100 companies publicly blocking or banning ChatGPT and other LLMs, despite the open secret that employees within these companies were still finding ways to use them anyway.
GPT Enterprise: Not The Panacea, But It's Good
As a response to these concerns, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Enterprise in August 2023. This platform allows enterprise users the assurance of enhanced data encryption and the promise that “customer prompts or data are not used for training models'', according to OpenAI’s website. It also includes solutions that allow administrators to monitor GPT usage within the workplace, and also grants users increased caps on messages.
However, this peace of mind comes at a price; according to online sources, the cost for this service starts at roughly $60/user per month with a minimum of 150 users required to start a contract (that’s $9k/month). This cost is substantially more than the cost for the hashing solutions, other AI such as Microsoft’s Copilot, or taking the privacu risk of using a free generative AI solution.
Although OpenAI’s website suggests that major companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Lowes, JetBlue, and others are users of GPT Enterprise, I’d imagine that GPT Enterprise hasn’t enjoyed widespread adoption. My reasoning? If everyone saw fit to pay for it, we would have never seen OpenAI’s "other" latest release: ChatGPT For Teams
ChatGPT For Teams: A Poor Man's ChatGPT Enterprise
On January 10, OpenAI also announced a new pricing and feature tier for ChatGPT: ChatGPT For Teams (sometimes referred to as ChatGPT Team on the OpenAI website). It serves as a middle-of-the-road solution that offers some of the privacy and control features of ChatGPT Enterprise at a price closer to ChatGPT Plus, the $20/mo paid tier of ChatGPT that allows users access to apps, customized “GPTs”, plugins, Dall-E, and ChatGPT 4.0.
Pricing for ChatGPT For Teams starts at $25 per user per month if paid annually with a minimum of 2 user seats; effectively $50/month. If paid month-to-month, the price elevates to $30/month. GPT For Teams includes all the functionality of GPT Plus and also provides a variety of administrative and data-sharing capabilities, similar to ChatGPT Enterprise. Most importantly, OpenAI says ChatGPT Team doesn’t train itself on users’ data, which allows for greater privacy for Team users. However, it lacks the advanced data encryption features of GPT Enterprise.
This pricing and feature set of Chat GPT For Teams suggests that this product is intended for small businesses or for small teams within larger businesses that may already be using ChatGPT Plus. Small businesses may not have the budget or personnel to afford or necessitate ChatGPT Enterprise, and Enterprise-level clients may want to only implement GPT for small, specialized teams before investing in a full-scale rollout. This is the perfect middle ground to accommodate those users.
You might be asking "how we can be sure that the data from GPT For Teams isn’t collected by OpenAI?" The truth is, we don’t. To their credit, as a company that's newer to public scrutiny, people have fewer reasons not to trust OpenAI than they have to trust Google or Meta, even if OpenAI is part-owned by Microsoft, Google and Meta’s largest competitor.
Looking Into The Future: The Long-Term Implications and Trends of GPT For Teams
As stated earlier, I believe Chat GPT For Teams will have further-reaching short- to mid-term implications than the GPT Store.
In my opinion, outside of education (and that’s why we exist as consultants and why there’s Aiducation.ai), the privacy issue was the last remaining roadblock to widespread adoption of Chat GPT in the business world. Now small businesses can easily and ethically shoulder the task load of a much larger workforce. Many small businesses stand to benefit from these new efficiencies in the near-term.
As we often say in our AI training classes- the first professional jobs that will be replaced- or at least consolidated- by AI will be those that currently require a 2-year education as a job qualification. Now, anyone with a basic understanding of prompting and critical reasoning can take on junior- or entry-level jobs that typically require an associate degree, such as junior analyst, developer, researcher, customer service representative, paralegal, or helpdesk support. Theoretically speaking, there are only two things stopping your collegiate intern from running regression analysis on customer sales data that’s been uploaded into ChatGPT, then creating advanced visualizations and reports based upon this data. First, the intern may not know how to prompt for these capabilities; secondly the intern may have no idea whether GPT is hallucinating or not. This marks the beginning of a shift in how experienced professionals in these fields are in engaged in the workplace: in the near future, experienced professionals will be needed most for their experience and acumen; efficiently checking the work of LLMs such as GPT.
Wrapping Up
The release of ChatGPT For Teams is not just a step forward for OpenAI, but is also a leap forward for the business world at large. It symbolizes another step shift towards more widespread, inclusive, ethical, and efficient use of AI technology. It’s exciting to envision how this will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of work, collaboration, and innovation. As users, it’s up to us to continue finding ways to use these tools responsively and innovatively. It's only then that we'll really get to experience the true potential of AI in the workplace.
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-MRD
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