OpenAI’s chief operating officer said the company’s ChatGPT platform now serves more than 5 million paying business users, a figure that grew 66% in July alone as large-scale deployments and proof-of-concept conversions accelerated. The New York Times has reported that subscriptions to the chatbot generate about 73% of OpenAI’s revenue, underscoring the importance of enterprise uptake to the privately held firm’s business model. The surge in customers comes as OpenAI wrestles with technical headwinds in developing its next-generation model, GPT-5. According to an article by The Information, an interim system dubbed GPT-4.5, or “Orion,” was originally slated to carry the GPT-5 label but was rebranded after failing to provide a breakthrough comparable to the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4. Researchers cited a shrinking supply of high-quality training data and difficulty scaling optimization methods, suggesting that industry-wide progress in large language models may be slowing even as commercial demand rises.