According to the company, the paid version of the website was still experimental, but provided access during peak periods, no downtime, priority access to new features, and faster response speeds. In September 2025, OpenAI added a feature called Pulse, which generates a daily analysis of a user’s chats and connected apps such as Gmail and Google Calendar. In December 2024, OpenAI launched a new feature allowing users to call ChatGPT with a telephone for up to 15 minutes per month for free. ChatGPT’s training data includes software manual pages, information about internet phenomena such as bulletin board systems, multiple programming languages, and the text of Wikipedia. OpenAI’s outsourcing partner was Sama, a training-data company based in San Francisco, California. These labels were used to train a model to detect such content in the future.
- Teachers are concerned that students will use it to cheat, prompting some schools to completely block access to it.
- There’s still a free version of ChatGPT, but the Plus and Pro plans can do faster responses and provide access to the latest tools.
- Prior to ChatGPT, OpenAI launched several products, including automatic speech recognition software Whisper, and DALL-E, an AI art generator that can produce images based on text prompts.
- In September 2024, OpenAI introduced o1-preview and a faster, cheaper model named o1-mini.
Custom instructions allow users to save directions that apply to all interactions, rather than adding them to every request. According to an OpenAI blog post, ChatGPT will build memories on its own over time, though users can also prompt the bot to remember specific details — or forget them. To kick off the start of its o1 model family, OpenAI also announces the limited release of its o1-preview and o1-mini models. OpenAI initially released this feature to users who pay for the Plus, Team or Enterprise plan. The feature is also still exclusive to ChatGPT users who have a Plus, Team, Enterprise or Education plan.
OpenAI o1 Model Family Announcement (September
There are different model variations and limitations based on your subscription and your purpose for using ChatGPT. If you prefer to keep using Dall-E 3 (its first image generator), you can still access it through the Dall-E GPT. ChatGPT Canvas can help you write and code, and with the Tasks feature, you can set up reminders and schedule tasks. It won’t appear in history, update its memory or be used to train models, although it may be kept for up to 30 days for safety. It also rolled GPT-4o back to its prior version after users on X complained that its „sycophantic“ praise felt unsettling and distressing.
In July 2023, the FTC launched an investigation into OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, over allegations that the company scraped public data and published false and defamatory information. In late March 2023, the Italian data protection authority banned ChatGPT in Italy and opened an investigation. Stanford researchers reported that GPT-4 „passes a rigorous Turing test, diverging from average human behavior chiefly to be more cooperative.“ A 2023 study reported that GPT-4 obtained a better score than 99% of humans on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. The company announced a slew of generative AI-powered features to counter OpenAI and Microsoft.
ChatGPT pricing
- In August 2024, the FTC voted unanimously to ban marketers from using fake user reviews created by generative AI chatbots (including ChatGPT) and influencers paying for bots to increase follower counts.
- Over 20,000 signatories including Yoshua Bengio, Elon Musk, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, signed a March 2023 open letter calling for an immediate pause of giant AI experiments like ChatGPT, citing „profound risks to society and humanity“.
- The reward model of ChatGPT, designed around human oversight, can be over-optimized and thus hinder performance, in an example of an optimization pathology known as Goodhart’s law.
- Here’s how it works, its use cases, how to access it, its limitations, notable updates and future outlook.
Based on internal evaluations, GPT-5 outperforms its predecessors in multiple areas, including math, coding, visual perception and health knowledge. OpenAI released GPT-5, calling it its “fastest” and “smartest” AI model to date. The company also unveiled an open-source technical standard called Agentic Commerce Protocol for merchants to build integrations with ChatGPT, essentially making their products available for purchase within the chatbot.
How much does ChatGPT cost?
None of the vegas casino download tested services were a perfect replacement for a fluent human translator. For more common languages, AI translators like ChatGPT did better than Google Translate, while for „niche“ languages (Amharic and Tagalog), Google Translate performed better. The languages tested were Polish, French, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Tagalog, and Amharic. In December 2023, the Albanian government decided to use ChatGPT for the rapid translation of European Union documents and the analysis of required changes needed for Albania’s accession to the EU. ChatGPT (based on GPT-4) was better able to translate Japanese to English when compared to Bing, Bard, and DeepL Translator in 2023.
Teachers are concerned that students will use it to cheat, prompting some schools to completely block access to it. But then the value of domain experts will continue to refine that and make it better than whatever a model can produce.” So, despite the guardrails OpenAI has put in place to prevent it, the chatbot still has a tendency to let biases creep into its outputs. Most people know that, just because something is on the internet, that doesn’t make it true. And, because the model is able to produce incorrect information in such an eloquent way, the fallacies are hard to spot and control. This often leads to what experts call “hallucinations,” where the output generated is stylistically correct, but factually wrong.
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Privacy concerns, legal battles and other controversies
Instead of a list of websites, though, it’ll provide users with a simple list of answers. It can also be fine-tuned for specific use cases such as legal documents or medical records, where the model is trained on domain-specific data. It can translate a piece of text into different languages, summarize several pages of text into a paragraph, finish a partially complete sentence, generate dialogue and more. ChatGPT can be used for other writing tasks beyond just content creation.
Product Personalization
The ethics of its development, particularly the use of copyrighted content as training data, have also drawn controversy. As of 2025, ChatGPT’s website is among the top 5 most-visited websites globally, and has over 800 million active weekly users. By January 2023, ChatGPT had become the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users in two months. Even with real-time web access enabled, ChatGPT is prone to responding with factual inaccuracies. That said, it’s still vulnerable to factual inaccuracies and hallucinations, while data sourced from the web isn’t necessarily the most up-to-date.
The laborers were exposed to toxic and traumatic content; one worker described the assignment as „torture“. To build a safety system against harmful content (e.g., sexual abuse, violence, racism, sexism), OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan workers earning around $1.32 to $2 per hour to label such content. In the case of supervised learning, the trainers acted as both the user and the AI assistant. The fine-tuning process involved supervised learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). It can generate plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers known as hallucinations. Despite its acclaim, the chatbot has been criticized for its limitations and potential for unethical use.
Let’s not forget when OpenAI’s „Sky“ voice model mimicked Scarlett Johansson without permission, prompting her team to threaten legal action over the unauthorized use of her voice. ChatGPT faces ongoing legal challenges related to industry concerns regarding the ethics and the legality of data sourcing for AI training. For example, ChatGPT Plus access is often free for students in the US and Canada during exam periods. Businesses can also choose ChatGPT Enterprise with custom pricing for enterprise-level features.
Another study, focused on the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 between March and June 2024, found that performance on objective tasks like identifying prime numbers and generating executable code was highly variable. Chris Granatino, a librarian at Seattle University, noted that while ChatGPT can generate content that seemingly includes legitimate citations, in most cases those citations are not real or largely incorrect. As of July 2025, Science expects authors to release in full how AI-generated content is used and made in their work. Over 20,000 signatories including Yoshua Bengio, Elon Musk, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, signed a March 2023 open letter calling for an immediate pause of giant AI experiments like ChatGPT, citing „profound risks to society and humanity“. 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.
Can I search the web with ChatGPT?
In December 2022, Google executives sounded a „code red“ alarm, fearing that ChatGPT’s question-answering ability posed a threat to Google Search, Google’s core business. In The Atlantic magazine’s „Breakthroughs of the Year“ for 2022, Derek Thompson included ChatGPT as part of „the generative-AI eruption“ that „may change our mind about how we work, how we think, and what human creativity is“. Kevin Roose of The New York Times called it „the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public“. Like GPT-5, it comes with a „Thinking“ mode for complex problem-solving and an „Instant“ mode for fast responses. As before, OpenAI has not disclosed technical details such as the exact number of parameters or the composition of its training dataset. GPT-5 was launched on August 7, 2025, and is publicly accessible through ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and via OpenAI’s API.
It was capable of autonomously performing tasks through web browser interactions, including filling forms, placing online orders, scheduling appointments, and other browser-based tasks. At launch, OpenAI included more than 3 million GPTs created by GPT Builder users in the GPT Store. In March 2023, ChatGPT Plus users got access to third-party plugins and a browsing mode (with Internet access). Premium users were originally limited in the number of messages they could send to the new model, but OpenAI increased and eventually removed these limits.
Recently, OpenAI made ChatGPT’s image generation capabilities free for all users, albeit with a limited number of monthly uses. Experts and privacy advocates have raised ongoing questions about data protection, how personal information is stored and used, and what users should or shouldn’t share. Models o3 and o4-mini are reasoning models, where o3 is especially strong in coding, math and visual tasks, while o4-mini is a lighter and cost-efficient version. GPT-4o is the most advanced version accessible to everyone, handling text, images and audio as input and output. Beyond text, ChatGPT can generate original images and videos through its integrated tools. You can create your own GPT tailored to specific tasks or personalities, or select among the thousands of user-created ones.
Team and Enterprise plans are designed not to collect user data by default. Jaffri emphasized that malicious or careless deployment, not the models themselves, is the root of most risks. For heavy users, ChatGPT Pro is available for $200 a month with the highest limits and capabilities.
To get started, simply go to chatgpt.com or install the official app from the Apple App Store or Google Play. There’s still a free version of ChatGPT, but the Plus and Pro plans can do faster responses and provide access to the latest tools. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites.
The free tier is fine for casual users, but if ChatGPT is built into your workflow, you’ll need to pay for a subscription to unlock the faster processing and greater reliability of the latest models. From writing content to generating website code, ChatGPT is a hugely capable tool that allows you to get a lot done simply by writing your queries in natural human language. For free, users get access to OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini model, plus limited access to GPT-4o and o3-mini.
In 2023, OpenAI worked with a team of 40 Icelandic volunteers to fine-tune ChatGPT’s Icelandic conversation skills as a part of Iceland’s attempts to preserve the Icelandic language. On August 19, 2025, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Go in India, a low-cost subscription plan priced at ₹399 per month, offering ten times higher message, image generation, and file-upload limits, double the memory span compared to the free version, and support for UPI payments. It allows ChatGPT to search the web in an attempt to make more accurate and up-to-date responses.