ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launchin November 2022.What started as a tool to supercharge productivity through writing essays and code withshort text promptshas evolved into a behemoth with300 million weekly active users. 2024 was a big year for OpenAI, from itspartnership with Applefor its generative AI offering,Apple Intelligence,the release ofGPT-4o with voice capabilities,and the highly-anticipated launch of itstext-to-video model Sora. OpenAI closed the year with “12 Days of OpenAI,” a series of 12 streams highlighting new product reveals and features. The event included the aforementioned Sora model, the rollout ofreal-time vision capabilities in Advanced Voice Mode, as well as a preview of its new “reasoning” model family:o3 and o3-mini.You can revisit all the announcementson our live blog. It wasn’t all big feature rollouts and model reveals though. OpenAI faced internal drama this year, including sizable exits of high-level execs like co-founder andlongtime chief scientist Ilya SutskeverandCTO Mira Murati.OpenAI has also been hit with lawsuits fromAlden Global Capital-owned newspapersalleging copyright infringement, as well asan injunction from Elon Muskto halt OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit. Below, you’ll find a timeline of ChatGPT product updates and releases, starting with the latest, which we’ve been updating throughout the year. If you have any other questions, check outour ChatGPT FAQ here. ChatGPT’s new beta feature, called tasks,allows users to set simple reminders. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to remind you when your passport expires in six months, and the AI assistant will follow up with a push notification on whatever platform you have tasks enabled. The feature will start rolling out to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users around the globe this week. OpenAI is introducing a new way for users tocustomize their interactions with ChatGPT.Some users found they can specify a preferred name or nickname and “traits” they’d like the chatbot to have. OpenAI suggests traits like “Chatty,” “Encouraging,” and “Gen Z.” However,some users reportedthat the new options have disappeared, so it’s possible they went live prematurely. ChatGPT Search can be fooled into generating completely misleading summaries,The Guardian has found.They found ChatGPT could be prompted to ignore negative reviews andgenerate “entirely positive” summariesby inserting hidden text into websites it created and that ChatGPT Search could also be made to spit out malicious code using this method. Microsoft and OpenAI have a veryspecific, internal definition of AGIbased on the startup’s profits, according to a newreport from The Information.The two companies reportedly signed an agreement stating OpenAI has only achieved AGI when it develops AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profit, which is far from the rigorous technical and philosophical definition of AGI many would expect. OpenAIreleased new researchoutlining the company’s approach to ensure AI reasoning models stay aligned with the values of their human developers. The startup used “deliberative alignment” to make o1 and o3“think” about OpenAI’s safety policy.According to OpenAI’s research, the method decreased the rate at which o1 answered “unsafe” questions while improving its ability to answer benign ones. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announcedthe successors to its o1 reasoning model family:o3 and o3-mini. The models are not widely available yet, but safety researchers can sign up for a preview. The reveal marks the end of the “12 Days of OpenAI” event, which saw announcements for real-time vision capabilities, ChatGPT Search, and even a Santa voice for ChatGPT. In an effort to make ChatGPT accessible to as many people as possible, OpenAI announceda 1-800 number to call the chatbot— even from a landline or a flip phone. Users can call 1-800-CHATGPT, and ChatGPT will respond to your queries in an experience that is more or less identical to Advanced Voice Mode — minus the multimodality. OpenAI is offering 15 minutes of free calling for U.S. users. The company notes that standard carrier fees may apply. OpenAI is bringing ChatGPT Searchto free, logged in users.Search gives ChatGPT the ability to access real-time information on the web to better answer your queries, but was only available for paid userswhen it launched in October.Not only is Search available now for free users, but it’s also been integratedinto Advanced Voice Mode. OpenAI is blaming one of the longest outages in its history on a “new telemetry service” gone awry. OpenAI wrote in a postmortem that the outage wasn’t caused by a security incident or recent product launch, but by atelemetry service it deployedto collect Kubernetes metrics. OpenAI announced that ChatGPT users could accessa new “Santa Mode” voiceduring December. The feature allows users to speak with ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode, but with a Christmas twist. The voice sounds, well, “merry and bright,” as OpenAI described it. Think boomy, jolly — more or less like every Santa you’ve ever heard. OpenAI released thereal-time video capabilities for ChatGPTthat it demoed nearly seven months ago. ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro subscribers can use the app to point their phones at objects and have ChatGPT respond in near-real-time. The feature can also understand what’s on a device’s screen through screen sharing. There’s more to come from OpenAI through December 23. Tune in toour live blogto stay updated. ChatGPT and Sora both experienced a major outage Wednesday. Though users suspected the outage was due to the rollout of ChatGPT in Apple Intelligence, OpenAI developer community lead Edwin Arbusdenied it in a post on X, saying the “outage was unrelated to 12 Days of OpenAI or Apple Intelligence. We made a config change that caused many servers to become unavailable.” Canvas, OpenAI’scollaboration-focused interfacefor writing and code projects, is now rolling out to all users after being in beta for ChatGPT Plus members since October 2024. The company also announced the ability to integrate Python code within Canvas as well as bringing Canvas to custom GPTs. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that due to higher than expected demand, they are pausing new sign-ups for its video generator Sora and that video generations will be slower for the time being. Thecompany released Soraas part of its “12 Days of OpenAI” event followingnearly a year of teasing the product. OpenAI has finally released itstext to video model, Sora.The model can generate videos up to 20 seconds long in 1080p based on text prompts or uploaded images, and can be “remixed” through additional user prompts. Sora is available starting today toChatGPT Proand Plus subscribers (except in the EU). In Monday’s“12 Days of OpenAI” livestream,CEO Sam Altman said that ChatGPT Plus members will get 50 video generations a month, while ChatGPT Pro users will get “unlimited” generations in their “slow queue mode” and 500 “normal” generations per month. There are still more reveals to come from OpenAI through December 23. Tune in toour live blogto stay updated. On day one of its12 Days of OpenAI event,the company announced a new — and expensive — subscription plan. ChatGPT Pro is a$200-per-month tierthat provides unlimited access to all of OpenAI’s models, including the full version of its o1 “reasoning” model. The full version of o1, which wasreleased as a preview in September,can now reason about image uploads and has been trained to be “more concise in its thinking” to improve response times. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be updating all the news from OpenAI as it happenson our live blog.Follow along with us! OpenAI announced“12 Days of OpenAI,”which will feature livestreams every weekday starting December 5 at 10 a.m. PT. Each day’s stream is said to include either a product launch or a demo in varying sizes. At the New York Times’ Dealbook Summit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that ChatGPT hassurpassed 300 million weekly active users.The milestone comes just a few months after the chatbothit 200 million weekly active usersin August 2024 and just over a year afterreaching 100 million weekly active usersin November 2023. ChatGPT users discovered an interesting phenomenon: the popular chatbot refused to answer questionsasked about a “David Mayer,”and asking it to do so caused it to freeze up instantly. While the strange behavior spawned conspiracy theories, and a slew of other names being impacted, a much more ordinary reason may be at the heart of it:digital privacy requests. OpenAI is toying withthe idea of getting into ads.CFO Sarah Friartold the Financial Timesit’s weighing an ads business model, with plans to be “thoughtful” about when and where ads appear — though she later stressed that the company has “no active plans to pursue advertising.” Still, the exploration may raise eyebrows given that Sam Altman recently saidads would be a “last resort.” A group of Canadian media companies, including the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail,have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI.The companies behind the suit said that OpenAI infringed their copyrights and are seeking to win monetary damages — and ban OpenAI from making further use of their work. OpenAI announced that its GPT-4o model has been updated to feature more “natural” and “engaging” creative writing abilities as well as more thorough responses and insights when accessing files uploaded by users. ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode featureis expanding to the web,allowing users to talk to the chatbot through their browser. The conversational feature is rolling out to ChatGPT’s paying Plus, Enterprise, Teams, or Edu subscribers. OpenAI announced the ChatGPT desktop app for macOScan now read code in a handful of developer-focused coding apps,such as VS Code, Xcode, TextEdit, Terminal, and iTerm2 — meaning that developers will no longer have to copy and paste their code into ChatGPT. When the feature is enabled, OpenAI will automatically send the section of code you’re working on through its chatbot as context, alongside your prompt. Lilian Weng announced on X thatshe is departing OpenAI.Weng served as VP of research and safety since August, and before that was the head of OpenAI’s safety systems team. It’s the latest in a long string of AIsafety researchers,policy researchers,andother executiveswho have exited the company in the last year. OpenAI stated that it told around 2 million users of ChatGPT to go elsewherefor information about the 2024 U.S. election,and instead recommended trusted news sources like Reuters and the Associated Press. In a blog post, OpenAI said that ChatGPT sent roughly a million people to CanIVote.org when they asked questions specific to voting in the lead-up to the election andrejected around 250,000 requests to generate imagesof the candidates over the same period. Adding to its collection of high-profile domain names,Chat.com now redirects to ChatGPT.Last year, it was reported that HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah acquired Chat.com for $15.5 million, making it one of the top two all-time publicly reported domain sales — though OpenAI declined to state how much it paid for it. The former head of Meta’s augmented reality glasses effortsis joining OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer hardware.Kalinowski is a hardware executive who began leadingMeta’s AR glasses teamin March 2022. She oversaw the creation of Orion, the impressive augmented reality prototype that Meta recently showed off atits annual Connect conference. Apple is including an option to upgrade toChatGPT Plus inside its Settings app,according to an update to the iOS 18.2 betaspotted by 9to5Mac.This will give Apple users a direct route to sign up for OpenAI’s premium subscription plan, which costs $20 a month. Ina Reddit AMA,OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that a lack of compute capacity is one major factor preventing the company from shipping products as often as it’d like, including the vision capabilities for Advanced Voice Modefirst teased in May.Altman also indicated that the next major release of DALL-E, OpenAI’s image generator, has no launch timeline, and thatSora, OpenAI’s video-generating tool,has also been held back. Altman also admitted tousing ChatGPT “sometimes”to answer questions throughout the AMA. OpenAIlaunched ChatGPT Search,an evolution of theSearchGPT prototypeit unveiled this summer. Powered by a fine-tuned version of OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, ChatGPT Search serves up information and photos from the web along with links to relevant sources, at which point you can ask follow-up questions to refine an ongoing search. OpenAI has rolled out Advanced Voice Mode to ChatGPT’s desktop apps for macOS and Windows. For Mac users, that means that both ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Modecan coexist with Sirion the same device, leading the way forChatGPT’s Apple Intelligence integration. Reuters reports that OpenAI is working with TSMC and Broadcomto build an in-house AI chip,which could arrive as soon as 2026. It appears, at least for now, the company has abandoned plans to establish a network of factories for chip manufacturing and is instead focusing on in-house chip design. OpenAI announced it’s rolling out a feature that allows users to search through their ChatGPT chat histories on the web. The new feature will let users bring up an old chat to remember something or pick back up a chat right where it was left off. With therelease of iOS 18.1,Apple Intelligence features powered by ChatGPTare now available to users.The ChatGPT features include integrated writing tools, image cleanup, article summaries, and a typing input for the redesigned Siri experience. OpenAI denied reports that it is intending to release anAI model, code-named Orion,by December of this year. An OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch that they “don’t have plans to release a model code-named Orion this year,” but that leaves OpenAI substantial wiggle room. OpenAI has begun previewinga dedicated Windows app for ChatGPT.The company says the app is an early version and is currently only available to ChatGPT Plus, Team, Enterprise, and Edu users with a “full experience” set to come later this year. OpenAI struck acontent deal with Hearst,the newspaper and magazine publisher known for the San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, ELLE, and others. The partnership will allow OpenAI to surface stories from Hearst publications with citations and direct links. OpenAI introduced a new way tointeract with ChatGPT called “Canvas.”The canvas workspace allows for users to generate writing or code, then highlight sections of the work to have the model edit. Canvas is rolling out in beta to ChatGPT Plus and Teams, with a rollout to come to Enterprise and Edu tier users next week. OpenAI hasclosed the largest VC round of all time.The startup announced it raised $6.6 billion in a funding round that values OpenAI at $157 billion post-money. Led by previous investor Thrive Capital, the new cash brings OpenAI’s total raised to $17.9 billion, per Crunchbase. At the first of its 2024 Dev Day events, OpenAIannounced a new API toolthat will let developers build nearly real-time, speech-to-speech experiences in their apps, with the choice of using six voices provided by OpenAI. These voices are distinct from those offered for ChatGPT, and developers can’t use third party voices, in order to prevent copyright issues. OpenAI is planning toraise the price of individual ChatGPT subscriptionsfrom $20 per month to $22 per month by the end of the year, according to a report from The New York Times. The report notes that a steeper increase could come over the next five years; by 2029, OpenAI expects it’ll charge $44 per month for ChatGPT Plus. OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announcedthat she is leaving the companyafter more than six years. Hours after the announcement, OpenAI’s chief research officer, Bob McGrew, and a research VP, Barret Zoph,also left the company.CEO Sam Altman revealed the two latest resignations in a post on X, along with leadership transition plans. After a delay, OpenAI is finallyrolling out Advanced Voice Modeto an expanded set of ChatGPT’s paying customers. AVM is also getting a revamped design — the feature is now represented by a blue animated sphere instead of the animated black dots that were presented back in May. OpenAI is highlighting improvements in conversational speed, accents in foreign languages, and five new voices as part of the rollout. A video from YouTube creator ChromaLock showcased how to modify a TI-84 graphing calculator so that it can connect to the internetand access ChatGPT, touting it as the “ultimate cheating device.” As demonstrated in the video, it’s a pretty complicated process for the average high school student to follow — but it might stoke more concerns from teachers about the ongoing concerns about ChatGPT and cheating in schools. OpenAIunveiled a preview of OpenAI o1, also known as “Strawberry.” The collection of models are available in ChatGPT and via OpenAI’s API: o1-preview and o1 mini. The company claims that o1 can more effectively reason through math and science and fact-check itself by spending more time considering all parts of a command or question. Unlike ChatGPT, o1 can’t browse the web or analyze files yet, is rate-limited and expensive compared to other models. OpenAI says it plans to bring o1-mini access to all free users of ChatGPT, but hasn’t set a release date. An artist and hacker founda way to jailbreak ChatGPTto produce instructions for making powerful explosives, a request that the chatbot normally refuses. An explosives expert who reviewed the chatbot’s output told TechCrunch that the instructions could be used to make a detonatable product and was too sensitive to be released. OpenAI announced ithas surpassed 1 million paid usersfor its versions of ChatGPT intended for businesses, including ChatGPT Team, ChatGPT Enterprise and its educational offering, ChatGPT Edu. The company said that nearly half of OpenAI’s corporate users are based in the US. Volkswagen is taking itsChatGPT voice assistant experimentto vehicles in the United States. Its ChatGPT-integrated Plus Speech voice assistant is an AI chatbot based on Cerence’s Chat Pro product and a LLM from OpenAI and will begin rolling out on September 6 with the 2025 Jetta and Jetta GLI models. As part of the new deal,OpenAI will surface stories from Condé Nast propertieslike The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Bon Appétit and Wired in ChatGPT and SearchGPT. Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch implied that the “multi-year” deal will involve payment from OpenAI in some form and a Condé Nast spokesperson told TechCrunch that OpenAI will have permission to train on Condé Nast content. TechCrunch’s Maxwell Zeff has beenplaying around with OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode,in what he describes as “the most convincing taste I’ve had of an AI-powered future yet.” Compared to Siri or Alexa, Advanced Voice Mode stands out with faster response times, unique answers and the ability to answer complex questions. But the feature falls short as an effective replacement for virtual assistants. OpenAI has banned a cluster of ChatGPT accountslinked to an Iranian influence operationthat was generating content about the U.S. presidential election.OpenAI identified five website frontspresenting as both progressive and conservative news outlets that used ChatGPT to draft several long-form articles, though it doesn’t seem that it reached much of an audience. OpenAI has found that GPT-4o, which powers the recently launched alpha ofAdvanced Voice Modein ChatGPT, can behave in strange ways. In a new “red teaming” report, OpenAI reveals some ofGPT-4o’s weirder quirks,like mimicking the voice of the person speaking to it or randomly shouting in the middle of a conversation. After a big jump following the release of OpenAI’snew GPT-4o “omni” model,the mobile version of ChatGPT has now seenits biggest month of revenue yet.The app pulled in $28 million in net revenue from the App Store and Google Play in July, according to data provided by app intelligence firm Appfigures. OpenAI has built a watermarking tool that could potentially catch students who cheat by using ChatGPT — butThe Wall Street Journal reportsthat the company is debating whether to actually release it. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is researching tools that can detect writing from ChatGPT, but said it’s takinga “deliberate approach” to releasing it. OpenAI is giving users their first access toGPT-4o’s updated realistic audio responses.The alpha version is now available to a small group of ChatGPT Plus users, and the company says the feature will gradually roll out to all Plus users in the fall of 2024. The release follows controversy surrounding thevoice’s similarity to Scarlett Johansson,leading OpenAI to delay its release. OpenAI istesting SearchGPT,a new AI search experience to compete with Google. SearchGPT aims to elevate search queries with “timely answers” from across the internet, as well as the abilityto ask follow-up questions.The temporary prototype is currently only available to a small group of users and its publisher partners, like The Atlantic, for testing and feedback. A new report fromThe Information, based on undisclosed financial information, claims OpenAI could lose up to $5 billion due to how costly the business is to operate. The report also says the company could spend as much as $7 billion in 2024 to train and operate ChatGPT. OpenAI released its latest small AI model,GPT-4o mini. The company says GPT-4o mini, which is cheaper and faster than OpenAI’s current AI models, outperforms industry leading small AI models on reasoning tasks involving text and vision. GPT-4o mini will replace GPT-3.5 Turbo as the smallest model OpenAI offers. OpenAI announced a partnership with theLos Alamos National Laboratoryto study how AI can be employed by scientists in order to advance research in healthcare and bioscience. This follows other health-related research collaborations at OpenAI, includingModernaandColor Health. OpenAI announced it has trained a model off of GPT-4,dubbed CriticGPT, which aims to find errors in ChatGPT’s code output so they can make improvements and better help so-called human “AI trainers” rate the quality and accuracy of ChatGPT responses. OpenAI and TIME announceda multi-year strategic partnershipthat brings the magazine’s content, both modern and archival, to ChatGPT. As part of the deal, TIME will also gain access to OpenAI’s technology in order to develop new audience-based products. OpenAI planned to start rolling out itsadvanced Voice Modefeature to a small group of ChatGPT Plus users in late June, but it sayslingering issues forced it to postponethe launch to July. OpenAI says Advanced Voice Mode might not launch for all ChatGPT Plus customers until the fall, depending on whether it meets certain internal safety and reliability checks. ChatGPT for macOS isnow available for all users. With the app, users can quickly call up ChatGPT by using the keyboard combination of Option + Space. The app allows users to upload files and other photos, as well as speak to ChatGPT from their desktop and search through their past conversations. Apple announced atWWDC 2024that it isbringing ChatGPT to Siri and other first-party appsand capabilities across its operating systems. The ChatGPT integrations, powered by GPT-4o, will arrive on iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia later this year, and will be free without the need to create a ChatGPT or OpenAI account. Features exclusive to paying ChatGPT userswill also be available through Apple devices. Scarlett Johanssonhas been invited to testifyabout thecontroversy surrounding OpenAI’s Sky voiceat a hearing for the House Oversight Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation. In a letter, Rep. Nancy Mace said Johansson’s testimony could “provide a platform” for concerns around deepfakes. ChatGPT was downtwice in one day:onemulti-hour outagein the early hours of the morning Tuesday and another outage later in the day that is still ongoing. Anthropic’s Claude and Perplexity also experienced some issues. The Atlantic and Vox Media have announcedlicensing and product partnerships with OpenAI. Both agreements allow OpenAI to use the publishers’ current content to generate responses in ChatGPT, which will feature citations to relevant articles. Vox Media says it will use OpenAI’s technology to build“audience-facing and internal applications,”while The Atlantic will builda new experimental product called Atlantic Labs. OpenAI announced a new deal with managementconsulting giant PwC. The company will become OpenAI’s biggest customer to date, covering 100,000 users, and will become OpenAI’s first partner for selling its enterprise offerings to other businesses. OpenAI announced in a blog post that it hasrecently begun training its next flagship modelto succeed GPT-4. The news came in an announcement of its new safety and security committee, which is responsible for informing safety and security decisions across OpenAI’s products. On the The TED AI Show podcast, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner revealed that the board did not know about ChatGPTuntil its launch in November 2022.Toner also said that Sam Altman gave the board inaccurate information about the safety processes the company had in place and that he didn’t disclose his involvement in the OpenAI Startup Fund. The launch of GPT-4o has driven the company’sbiggest-ever spike in revenue on mobile, despite the model being freely available on the web. Mobile users are being pushed to upgrade to its $19.99 monthly subscription, ChatGPT Plus, if they want to experiment with OpenAI’s most recent launch. After demoing its new GPT-4o model last week,OpenAI announced it is pausing one of its voices, Sky, after users found that it sounded similar to Scarlett Johansson in “Her.” OpenAI explainedin a blog postthat Sky’s voice is “not an imitation” of the actress and that AI voices should not intentionally mimic the voice of a celebrity. The blog post went on to explain how the company chose its voices: Breeze, Cove, Ember, Juniper and Sky. OpenAI announcednew updates for easier data analysis within ChatGPT. Users can now upload files directly from Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, interact with tables and charts, and export customized charts for presentations. The company says these improvementswill be added to GPT-4oin the coming weeks. OpenAIannounced a partnership with Redditthat will give the company access to “real-time, structured and unique content” from the social network. Content from Reddit will be incorporated into ChatGPT, and the companies will work together to bring new AI-powered features to Reddit users and moderators. OpenAI’s spring update event saw the reveal ofits new omni model, GPT-4o,which has ablack hole-like interface, as well as voice and vision capabilities that feel eerily like something out of “Her.” GPT-4o is set to roll out “iteratively” across its developer and consumer-facing products over the next few weeks. The company announced it’s building a tool, Media Manager, that willallow creators to better control how their content is being usedto train generative AI models — and give them an option to opt out. The goal is to have the new toolin place and ready to use by 2025. In a newpeek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions, OpenAI also releaseda new NSFW policy. Though it’s intended to start a conversation about how it might allow explicit images and text in its AI products, it raises questions about whether OpenAI — or any generative AI vendor — can be trusted to handle sensitive content ethically. In a new partnership,OpenAI will get access to developer platform Stack Overflow’s APIand will get feedback from developers to improve the performance of their AI models. In return, OpenAI will include attributions to Stack Overflow in ChatGPT. However, the deal was not favorable to some Stack Overflow users —leading to some sabotaging their answer in protest. Alden Global Capital-owned newspapers, including the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Denver Post,are suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.The lawsuit alleges that the companies stole millions of copyrighted articles “without permission and without payment” to bolster ChatGPT and Copilot. OpenAI has partnered with another news publisher in Europe,London’s Financial Times, that the company will be paying for content access. “Through the partnership, ChatGPT users will be able to see select attributed summaries, quotes and rich links to FT journalism in response to relevant queries,”the FT wrote in a press release. OpenAI isopening a new office in Tokyoand has plans for a GPT-4 model optimized specifically for the Japanese language. The move underscores how OpenAI will likely need to localize its technology to different languages as it expands. According to Reuters, OpenAI’sSam Altman hosted hundreds of executivesfrom Fortune 500 companies across several cities in April, pitching versions of its AI services intended for corporate use. Premium ChatGPT users — customers paying for ChatGPT Plus, Team or Enterprise — can now usean updated and enhanced version of GPT-4 Turbo. The new model brings with it improvements in writing, math, logical reasoning and coding, OpenAI claims, as well as a more up-to-date knowledge base. You can now use ChatGPTwithout signing up for an account, but it won’t be quite the same experience. You won’t be able to save or share chats, use custom instructions, or other features associated with a persistent account. This version of ChatGPT will have “slightly more restrictive content policies,” according to OpenAI. When TechCrunch asked for more details, however, the response was unclear: “The signed out experience will benefit from the existing safety mitigations that are already built into the model, such as refusing to generate harmful content. In addition to these existing mitigations, we are also implementing additional safeguards specifically designed to address other forms of content that may be inappropriate for a signed out experience,” a spokesperson said. TechCrunch found that the OpenAI’s GPT Storeis flooded with bizarre, potentially copyright-infringing GPTs. A cursory search pulls up GPTs that claim to generate art in the style of Disney and Marvel properties, but serve as little more than funnels to third-party paid services and advertise themselves as being able to bypass AI content detection tools. In acourt filing opposing OpenAI’s motion to dismiss The New York Times’ lawsuitalleging copyright infringement, the newspaper asserted that “OpenAI’s attention-grabbing claim that The Times ‘hacked’ its products is as irrelevant as it is false.” The New York Times also claimed that some users of ChatGPT used the tool to bypass its paywalls. At a SXSW 2024 panel, Peter Deng, OpenAI’s VP of consumer product dodged a question on whetherartists whose work was used to train generative AI models should be compensated. While OpenAI lets artists “opt out” of and remove their work from the datasets that the company uses to train its image-generating models, some artists have described the tool as onerous. ChatGPT’s environmental impact appears to be massive. According to areport from The New Yorker, ChatGPT uses an estimated 17,000 times the amount of electricity than the average U.S. household to respond to roughly 200 million requests each day. OpenAI released a newRead Aloud featurefor the web version of ChatGPT as well as the iOS and Android apps. The feature allows ChatGPT to read its responses to queries in one of five voice options and can speak 37 languages, according to the company. Read aloud is available on both GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 models. As part of a new partnership with OpenAI,the Dublin City Council will use GPT-4to craft personalized itineraries for travelers, including recommendations of unique and cultural destinations, in an effort to support tourism across Europe. New York-based law firm Cuddy Law was criticized by a judge forusing ChatGPT to calculate their hourly billing rate. The firm submitted a $113,500 bill to the court, which was then halved by District Judge Paul Engelmayer, who called the figure “well above” reasonable demands. ChatGPT users found that ChatGPT was givingnonsensical answers for several hours, prompting OpenAI to investigate the issue. Incidents varied from repetitive phrases to confusing and incorrect answers to queries. The issue was resolved by OpenAI the following morning. The dating app giant home to Tinder, Match and OkCupid announced an enterprise agreement with OpenAIin an enthusiastic press release written with the help of ChatGPT. The AI tech willbe used to help employees with work-related tasksand come as part of Match’s $20 million-plus bet on AI in 2024. As part of a test,OpenAI began rolling out new “memory” controlsfor a small portion of ChatGPT free and paid users, with a broader rollout to follow. The controls let you tell ChatGPT explicitly to remember something, see what it remembers or turn off its memory altogether. Note that deleting a chat from chat history won’t erase ChatGPT’s or a custom GPT’s memories — you must delete the memory itself. Initially limited to a small subset of free and subscription users, Temporary Chat lets you have a dialogue with a blank slate. With Temporary Chat, ChatGPT won’t be aware of previous conversations or access memories but will follow custom instructions if they’re enabled. But, OpenAI says it may keep a copy of Temporary Chat conversations for up to 30 days for “safety reasons.” Paid users of ChatGPT cannow bring GPTs into a conversationby typing “@” and selecting a GPT from the list. The chosen GPT will have an understanding of the full conversation, and different GPTs can be “tagged in” for different use cases and needs. Screenshots provided to Ars Technica found thatChatGPT is potentially leaking unpublished research papers, login credentials and private informationfrom its users. An OpenAI representative told Ars Technica that the company was investigating the report. OpenAI has been toldit’s suspected of violating European Union privacy, following a multi-month investigation of ChatGPT by Italy’s data protection authority. Details of the draft findings haven’t been disclosed, but in a response, OpenAI said: “We want our AI to learn about the world, not about private individuals.” In an effort to win the trust of parents and policymakers,OpenAI announced it’s partnering with Common Sense Mediato collaborate on AI guidelines and education materials for parents, educators and young adults. The organization works to identify and minimize tech harms to young people and previously flagged ChatGPT aslacking in transparency and privacy. Aftera letter from the Congressional Black Caucusquestioned the lack of diversity in OpenAI’s board, the companyresponded. The response, signed by CEO Sam Altman and Chairman of the Board Bret Taylor, said building a complete and diverse board was one of the company’s top priorities and that it was working with an executive search firm to assist it in finding talent. Ina blog post, OpenAI announced price drops for GPT-3.5’s API, with input prices dropping to 50% and output by 25%, to $0.0005 per thousand tokens in, and $0.0015 per thousand tokens out. GPT-4 Turbo also got a new preview model for API use, which includes an interesting fix thataims to reduce “laziness”that users have experienced. OpenAI has suspended AI startup Delphi, whichdeveloped a bot impersonating Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.)to help bolster his presidential campaign. The ban comes just weeks after OpenAI published a plan to combat election misinformation, which listed “chatbots impersonating candidates” as against its policy. Beginning in February,Arizona State University will have full access to ChatGPT’s Enterprise tier, which the university plans to use to build a personalized AI tutor, develop AI avatars, bolster their prompt engineering course and more. It marks OpenAI’s first partnership with a higher education institution. After receiving the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for her novel The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy, author Rie Kudanadmitted that around 5% of the book quoted ChatGPT-generated sentences“verbatim.”Interestingly enough, the novel revolves around a futuristic world with a pervasive presence of AI. In a conversation with Bill Gates on theUnconfuse Mepodcast, Sam Altman confirmed an upcoming release of GPT-5 that will be “fully multimodal with speech, image, code, and video support.” Altman said users can expect to see GPT-5 drop sometime in 2024. OpenAI is forming aCollective Alignment teamof researchers and engineers to create a system for collecting and “encoding” public input on its models’ behaviors into OpenAI products and services. This comes as a part of OpenAI’s public program to award grants to fund experiments in setting up a “democratic process” for determining the rules AI systems follow. In a blog post, OpenAI announcedusers will not be allowed to build applications for political campaigning and lobbying until the company works out how effective their tools are for “personalized persuasion.” Users will also be banned from creating chatbots that impersonate candidates or government institutions, and from using OpenAI tools to misrepresent the voting process or otherwise discourage voting. The company is also testing out a tool that detects DALL-E generated images and will incorporate access to real-time news, with attribution, in ChatGPT. Inan unannounced update to its usage policy, OpenAI removed language previously prohibiting the use of its products for the purposes of “military and warfare.” In an additional statement, OpenAI confirmed that the language was changed in order to accommodate military customers and projects that do not violate their ban on efforts to use their tools to “harm people, develop weapons, for communications surveillance, or to injure others or destroy property.” Aptly called ChatGPT Team, the new plan provides a dedicated workspace for teams of up to 149 people using ChatGPT as well as admin tools for team management. In addition to gaining access to GPT-4, GPT-4 with Vision and DALL-E3, ChatGPT Team lets teams build and share GPTs for their business needs. After some back and forth over the last few months,OpenAI’s GPT Store is finally here. The feature lives in a new tab in the ChatGPT web client, and includes a range of GPTs developed both by OpenAI’s partners and the wider dev community. To access the GPT Store, users must be subscribed to one of OpenAI’s premium ChatGPT plans — ChatGPT Plus, ChatGPT Enterprise or the newly launched ChatGPT Team. Following a proposedban on using news publications and books to train AI chatbotsin the U.K., OpenAI submitted a plea to the House of Lords communications and digital committee. OpenAI argued that it would be “impossible” to train AI models without using copyrighted materials, and that they believe copyright law “does not forbid training.” OpenAI published a public responseto The New York Times’s lawsuit against them and Microsoft for allegedly violating copyright law, claiming that the case is without merit. In the response, OpenAI reiterates its view that training AI models using publicly available data from the web is fair use. It also makes the case that regurgitation is less likely to occur with training data from a single source and places the onus on users to “act responsibly.” After beingdelayed in December,OpenAI plans to launch its GPT Storesometime in the coming week, according to an email viewed by TechCrunch. OpenAI says developers building GPTs will have to review the company’s updated usage policies and GPT brand guidelines to ensure their GPTs are compliant before they’re eligible for listing in the GPT Store. OpenAI’s update notably didn’t include any information on the expected monetization opportunities for developers listing their apps on the storefront. In an email,OpenAI detailed an incoming updateto its terms, including changing the OpenAI entity providing services to EEA and Swiss residents to OpenAI Ireland Limited. The move appears to be intended to shrink its regulatory risk in the European Union, where the company has been under scrutiny over ChatGPT’s impact on people’s privacy. ChatGPT is a general-purpose chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to generate text after a user enters a prompt, developed by tech startupOpenAI. The chatbot uses GPT-4, a large language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. November 30, 2022 is when ChatGPT was released for public use. Both the free version of ChatGPT and the paid ChatGPT Plus are regularly updated with new GPT models. The most recent model isGPT-4o. There is a free version ofChatGPTthat only requires a sign-in in addition to the paid version,ChatGPT Plus. Anyone can use ChatGPT! More and more tech companies andsearch enginesare utilizing the chatbot to automate text or quickly answer user questions/concerns. Multiple enterprises utilize ChatGPT, although others maylimit the use of the AI-powered tool. Most recently,Microsoft announcedat its 2023 Build conference that it is integrating it ChatGPT-based Bing experience into Windows 11. A Brooklyn-based 3D display startupLooking Glass utilizes ChatGPTto produce holograms you can communicate with by using ChatGPT.  And nonprofit organizationSolana officially integrated the chatbotinto its network with a ChatGPT plug-in geared toward end users to help onboard into the web3 space. A chatbot can be any software/system that holds dialogue with you/a person but doesn’t necessarily have to be AI-powered. For example, there are chatbots that are rules-based in the sense that they’ll give canned responses to questions. ChatGPT is AI-powered and utilizes LLM technology to generate text after a prompt. Due to the nature of how these models work, they don’t know or care whether something is true, only that it looks true. That’s a problem when you’re using it to do your homework, sure, but when it accuses you of a crime you didn’t commit, that may well at this point be libel. We will see howhandling troubling statements produced by ChatGPTwill play out over the next few months as tech and legal experts attempt to tackle the fastest moving target in the industry. Yes,there is a free ChatGPT mobile appfor iOS and Android users. It’s not documented anywhere that ChatGPT has a character limit. However, users have noted that there are some character limitations after around 500 words. Everyday examples include programming, scripts, email replies, listicles, blog ideas, summarization, etc. Advanced use examples include debugging code, programming languages, scientific concepts, complex problem solving, etc. It depends on the nature of the program. While ChatGPT can write workable Python code, it can’t necessarily program an entire app’s worth of code. That’s because ChatGPT lacks context awareness — in other words, the generated code isn’t always appropriate for the specific context in which it’s being used. Yes. OpenAI allows users to save chats in the ChatGPT interface, stored in the sidebar of the screen. There are no built-in sharing features yet. Yes. There aremultiple AI-powered chatbotcompetitors such asTogether, Google’sGeminiand Anthropic’sClaude, and developers arecreating open sourcealternatives. OpenAI has said that individuals in “certain jurisdictions” (such as the EU) can object to the processing of their personal information by its AI models by filling outthis form. This includes the ability to make requests for deletion of AI-generated references about you. Although OpenAI notes it may not grant every request since it must balance privacy requests against freedom of expression “in accordance with applicable laws”. The web form for making a deletion of data about you request is entitled “OpenAI Personal Data Removal Request”. In its privacy policy, the ChatGPT maker makes a passing acknowledgement of the objection requirements attached to relying on “legitimate interest” (LI), pointing users towards more information about requesting an opt out — when it writes: “Seeherefor instructions on how you can opt out of our use of your information to train our models.” Recently, Discord announced that it had integrated OpenAI’s technology into its bot named Clyde wheretwo users tricked Clyde into providing them with instructions for making the illegal drug methamphetamine(meth) and the incendiary mixture napalm. An Australian mayor has publicly announcedhe may sue OpenAI for defamationdue to ChatGPT’s false claims that he had served time in prison for bribery. This would be the first defamation lawsuit against the text-generating service. CNET found itself in the midst of controversy afterFuturism reportedthe publication was publishing articles under a mysterious byline completely generated by AI. The private equity company that owns CNET, Red Ventures, wasaccusedof using ChatGPT for SEO farming, even if the information was incorrect. Several major school systems and colleges,including New York City Public Schools, have banned ChatGPT from their networks and devices. They claim that the AI impedes the learning process by promoting plagiarism and misinformation, a claim thatnot every educator agrees with. There have also been cases of ChatGPTaccusing individuals of false crimes. Several marketplaces host and provide ChatGPT prompts, either for free or for a nominal fee. One isPromptBase. Another isChatX. More launch every day. Poorly. Several tools claim to detect ChatGPT-generated text, but in ourtests, they’re inconsistent at best. No. But OpenAIrecentlydisclosed a bug, since fixed, that exposed the titles of some users’ conversations to other people on the service. None specifically targeting ChatGPT. But OpenAI isinvolvedin at least one lawsuit that has implications for AI systems trained on publicly available data, which would touch on ChatGPT. Yes. Text-generating AI models like ChatGPT have a tendency to regurgitate content from their training data.

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