The company says people can ask super-specific questions using natural language and receive customized results. Some ChatGPT users have noticed a new feature called “Study Together” appearing in their list of available tools. The company says this dynamic approach helps the model outperform GPT-5 on key coding benchmarks, including bug fixes and large-scale refactoring.
CEO Sam Altman said that the company is delaying the release of its open model, which had already been postponed by a month earlier this summer. ChatGPT now receives 2.5 billion prompts daily from users worldwide, including roughly 330 million from the U.S. Unlike human therapists, AI tools aren’t bound by doctor-patient confidentiality, he noted. OpenAI said the chatbot was on track to hit 700 million weekly active users in the first week of August, up from 500 million at the end of March. General Services Administration (GSA) added OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to its approved AI vendor list, allowing agencies to access these tools through preset contracts without negotiating pricing. Most users will want Auto, but the additional control will be useful for some people.Rate limits are now 3,000 messages/week with GPT-5 Thinking, and then extra capacity on GPT-5 Thinking…
OpenAI says enterprise use of its AI tools has surged, with ChatGPT message volume up 8x since late 2024 and workers saving up to an hour a day. Disney is putting $1 billion into OpenAI as a way to dive into AI, letting users on Sora create videos using over 200 Disney characters, at least for the first year exclusively. The update comes as OpenAI races to keep up with Google’s Gemini and Nano Banana Pro in AI image generation. OpenAI has released GPT Image 1.5, a new version of ChatGPT Images that’s faster and better at following instructions and making precise edits. This makes it one of the fastest-growing apps in terms of revenue, outpacing rivals like TikTok, Disney+, and HBO Max. OpenAI also faced its share of internal drama, including the notable exits of high-level execs like co-founder and longtime chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and CTO Mira Murati.
- OpenAI said it has taken steps to effectively clarify and address the issues raised; an age verification tool was implemented to ensure users are at least 13 years old.
- Aidan Clark, OpenAI’s VP of research, is spearheading the development of the open model, which is in the very early stages, sources familiar with the situation told TechCrunch.
- It can take detailed prompts and produce realistic images in minutes.
- As ChatGPT follows a dialogue format, it is also able to answer follow-up questions, elaborate on previous responses and rework results accordingly.
- It is capable of writing software, answering codebase questions, running tests, and proposing pull requests.
App Functionality
Geoffrey Hinton, one of the “fathers of AI”, voiced concerns that future AI systems may surpass human intelligence. In 2025, Israel signed a $6M contract with the US based firm Clock Tower X that aimed to influence ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok by taking advantage of retrieval-augmented generation. In October 2025, OpenAI banned accounts suspected to be linked to the Chinese government for violating the company’s national security policy. OpenAI said it has taken steps to effectively clarify and address the issues raised; an age verification tool was implemented to ensure users are at least 13 years old. In late March 2023, the Italian data protection authority banned ChatGPT in Italy and opened an investigation. ChatGPT has never been publicly available in China because OpenAI prevented Chinese users from accessing their site.
OpenAI rolls out an updated image generation model
OpenAI unveiled Pulse, a new ChatGPT feature that delivers personalized morning briefings overnight, encouraging users to start their day with the app. OpenAI launched a new AI shopping feature in ChatGPT ahead of the peak holiday shopping window to help users research potential purchases. On the same day, Disney notably launched a lawsuit against Google alleging “massive” copyright infringement occurring in its AI models. Free users are limited in how many images they can generate per day or in a rolling window (see OpenAI’s support page for current rate limits).
Are there alternatives to ChatGPT?
- The AI startup will work with governments to assist with increasing data center capacity and customizing OpenAI’s products to meet specific language and local needs.
- According to OpenAI, as of August 7th 2025 nearly 700 million people use ChatGPT weekly around the world.
- OpenAI made a notable change to its content moderation policies after the success of its new image generator in ChatGPT, which went viral for being able to create Studio Ghibli-style images.
- ChatGPT has experienced significant growth recently due to the launch of new models and features, such as GPT-4o, with multimodal capabilities.
- These rankings were used to create “reward models” that were used to fine-tune the model further by using several iterations of proximal policy optimization.
The Guardian questioned whether any content found on the Internet after ChatGPT’s release “can be truly trusted” and called for government regulation. In June 2023, hundreds of people attended a “ChatGPT-powered church service” at St. Paul’s Church in Fürth, Germany. Between March and April 2023, Il Foglio published one ChatGPT-generated article a day on its website, hosting a special contest for its readers in the process. Efforts to ban chatbots like ChatGPT in schools focus on preventing cheating, but enforcement faces challenges due to AI detection inaccuracies and widespread accessibility of chatbot technology. Opinions are especially varied on what constitutes appropriate use of ChatGPT in education.
AI Chatbot – Ask Me Anything
The company claims o3 is the most advanced reasoning model it has developed, while o4-mini is said to provide a balance of price, speed, and performance. The system is designed to prevent models from giving advice that could potentially lead to harmful attacks, as stated in OpenAI’s safety report. OpenAI has rolled out a new system to monitor its AI reasoning models, o3 and o4 mini, for biological and chemical threats. Questions have been raised regarding OpenAI’s transparency and procedures for testing models after a difference in benchmark outcomes was detected by first- and third-party benchmark results for the o3 AI model.
Developers can use GPT-4.5 through OpenAI’s API until July 14; then, they will need to switch to GPT-4.1, which was released on April 14. It is unclear whether OpenAI intends to launch the social network as a standalone application or incorporate it into ChatGPT. Epoch AI, the research institute behind FrontierMath, discovered that o3 achieved a score of approximately 10%, which was significantly lower than OpenAI’s top-reported score. However, multiple independent tests indicate that the model is less reliable than previous OpenAI releases. Aidan Clark, OpenAI’s VP of research, is spearheading the development of the open model, which is in the very early stages, sources familiar with the situation told TechCrunch.
August 2025
What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved into a behemoth with 300 million weekly active users. ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022. Settle a dinner table debate, or practice a new language. Just keep in mind that advanced features, history/memory, and higher limits require an account. It can take detailed prompts and produce realistic images in minutes.
Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, will lead the company’s global expansion and manage corporate partnerships as CEO Sam Altman shifts his focus to research and products, according to a blog post from OpenAI. The protocol is currently available in the Agents SDK, and support for the ChatGPT desktop app and Responses API will be coming soon, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said. The organization originally estimated that the best-performing configuration of o3 it tested, o3 high, would cost approximately $3,000 to address a single problem. The Arc Prize Foundation, which develops the AI benchmark tool ARC-AGI, has updated the estimated computing costs for OpenAI’s o3 “reasoning” model managed by ARC-AGI. OpenAI plans to sunset GPT-4, an AI model introduced more than two years ago, and replace it with GPT-4o, the current default model, per changelog.
OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, letting U.S. users purchase products directly from Etsy and, soon, over a million Shopify merchants without leaving the conversation. The partnership is part of OpenAI’s broader effort to develop AI-driven e-commerce tools, including collaborations with Etsy and Shopify. OpenAI has launched its AI browser, ChatGPT Atlas, starting on Mac, letting users get answers from ChatGPT instead of traditional search results. The company says it has improved ChatGPT’s responses by consulting more than 170 mental health experts to handle such conversations more appropriately than earlier versions. OpenAI revealed that a small but significant portion of ChatGPT users, more than a million weekly, discuss mental health struggles, including suicidal thoughts, psychosis, or mania, with the AI.
In July 2023, the FTC launched an investigation into OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, over allegations that the company scraped foxygold casino public data and published false and defamatory information. Italian regulators assert that ChatGPT was exposing minors to age-inappropriate content, and that OpenAI’s use of ChatGPT conversations as training data could violate Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. ChatGPT also provided an outline of how human reviewers are trained to reduce inappropriate content and to attempt to provide political information without affiliating with any political position. GPT-4o’s ability to generate images was released later, in March 2025, when it replaced DALL-E 3 in ChatGPT.
Showing ChatGPT users a tiny disclaimer that the chatbot can make mistakes clearly isn’t enough. OpenAI wants to incorporate Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) into all of its products, including the ChatGPT desktop app. OpenAI made a notable change to its content moderation policies after the success of its new image generator in ChatGPT, which went viral for being able to create Studio Ghibli-style images.
GPT-5 was launched on August 7, 2025, and is publicly accessible through ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and via OpenAI’s API. Released in February 2025, GPT-4.5 was described by Altman as a “giant, expensive model”. In September 2024, OpenAI introduced o1-preview and a faster, cheaper model named o1-mini. On July 18, 2024, OpenAI released GPT-4o mini, a smaller version of GPT-4o which replaced GPT-3.5 Turbo on the ChatGPT interface. GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a multilingual, multimodal generative pre-trained transformer developed by OpenAI and released in May 2024. In November 2023, OpenAI launched GPT-4 Turbo with a 128,000 token context window.
ChatGPT includes a built-in image generator that’s powered by GPT-4o. Ask it to find, for example, the best humidifier available — and specify any features or a price range. You can probably tell by now that ChatGPT is far more than a simple chatbot. Once you’ve chosen a model and even a mode or tool in ChatGPT, it’s time to finally ask something.
Like other large language models, ChatGPT can sometimes “hallucinate,” a term used to describe the tendency for such models to respond with inaccurate or misleading information. Buzzfeed data scientist Max Woolf said that ChatGPT had passed the Turing test in December 2022, but some experts claim that ChatGPT did not pass a true Turing test because in ordinary usage ChatGPT often states that it is a language model. The American media company Buzzfeed announced that it would use OpenAI tools, such as ChatGPT, to produce content, such as quizzes, that would be personalized for readers. Language models produce text based on the probability for a word to occur based on previous words in the sequence. Many individuals use ChatGPT and comparable large language models mental health and emotional support. As of 2023, there were several pending U.S. lawsuits challenging the use of copyrighted data to train AI models, with defendants arguing that this falls under fair use.

