According to OpenAI, as of August 7th 2025 nearly 700 million people use ChatGPT weekly around the world. As ChatGPT follows a dialogue format, it is also able to answer follow-up questions, elaborate on previous responses and rework results accordingly. Users can simply type a question or task (also known as “prompts”) into ChatGPT and it will generate relevant, conversational text responses. We explain everything you need to know about the AI-powered tool ChatGPT here, including how it works, whether it’s free to use and how you can use the tool yourself.
A shadow market has emerged for Chinese users to get access to foreign software tools. In December 2023, ChatGPT became the first non-human to be included in Nature’s 10, an annual listicle curated by Nature of people considered to have made significant impact in science. The company announced a slew of generative AI-powered features to counter OpenAI and Microsoft. ChatGPT gained one million users in five days and 100 million in two months, becoming the fastest-growing internet application in history.
Within five days of its introduction, more than one million users had signed up for a free account to interact with ChatGPT. For example, “the cat sat on the mat” is more likely to occur in English than “sat the the mat cat on” and thus would be more likely to appear in a ChatGPT response. Judges in the US and Pakistan have endorsed using ChatGPT to investigate legal questions during a case. In an American civil lawsuit, attorneys were sanctioned for filing a legal motion generated by ChatGPT containing fictitious legal decisions. In November 2025, OpenAI acknowledged that there have been “instances where our 4o model fell short in recognizing signs of delusion or emotional dependency”, and reported that it is working to improve safety.

Data Linked to You

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.

xAI claims Apple’s App Store practices give OpenAI an unfair advantage

We planned to launch our open-weight model next week.we are delaying it; we need time to run additional safety tests and review high-risk areas. The ChatGPT maker, which initially planned to release the model around mid-July, has indefinitely postponed its launch to conduct additional safety testing. While chatbots are “being used as companions, confidants, and therapists,” the study found “significant risks.” That’s more than double the volume reported by CEO Sam Altman just eight months ago, highlighting the chatbot’s explosive growth.
The AI company said the updates aim to provide tighter protections around suicide-related conversations and give parents more oversight of their children’s use. Meanwhile, founding leader Joanne Jang is spinning up a new unit called OAI Labs, focused on prototyping fresh ways for people to collaborate with AI. OpenAI is shaking up its Model Behavior team, the small but influential group that helps shape how its AI interacts with people. The move comes as OpenAI faces a wrongful death lawsuit tied to alleged chatbot interactions, underscoring rising concerns about the mental health risks of AI companions. The company says it will block flirtatious exchanges with minors and add stronger protections around discussions of suicide, even escalating severe cases to parents or authorities. CEO Sam Altman announced new policies for under-18 users of ChatGPT, tightening safeguards around sensitive conversations.

• ChatGPT is now getting group chats for everyone — Free, Go, Plus, and Pro users alike — after testing it in a few regions last week.
• However, the analysis doesn’t consider the additional energy costs incurred by ChatGPT with features like image generation or input processing.
• The FTC asked OpenAI for comprehensive information about its technology and privacy safeguards, as well as any steps taken to prevent the recurrence of situations in which its chatbot generated false and derogatory content about people.
• Users on ChatGPT’s free tier can now access the new version of Advanced Voice Mode, while paying users will receive answers that are “more direct, engaging, concise, specific, and creative,” a spokesperson from OpenAI told TechCrunch.
• 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.
• ChatGPT now has 800 million weekly active users, reflecting rapid growth across consumers, developers, enterprises, and governments, Sam Altman said.
• ChatGPT’s weekly active users increased to 300 million by December 2024 and 400 million by February 2025.

Although OpenAI notes it may not grant every request since it must balance privacy requests against freedom of expression “in accordance with applicable laws”. This includes the ability to make requests for deletion of AI-generated references about you. There are multiple AI-powered chatbot competitors such as Together, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, and developers are creating open source alternatives. OpenAI allows users to save chats in the ChatGPT interface, stored in the sidebar of the screen.

• The startup has launched an update to Advanced Voice that enables users to converse with ChatGPT out loud in a more natural and fluid sound.
• The image generator was made available to all ChatGPT users on March 31, and went viral for being able to create Ghibli-style photos.
• Researchers at Stanford University have observed that therapy chatbots powered by large language models can sometimes stigmatize people with mental health conditions or respond in ways that are inappropriate or could be harmful.
• ChatGPT is not the same AI chatbot that first burst onto the scene in 2022.
• The feature acts as a conversational search engine, providing more comprehensive and accurate answers by scouring multiple sources simultaneously.
• This has led to concern over the rise of AI slop whereby “meaningless content and writing thereby becomes part of our culture, particularly on social media, which we nonetheless try to understand or fit into our existing cultural horizon.”

I’ve covered the models and modes above, but here’s a reminder of all the core features (as of October 2025). Apart from models, there are modes and tools in ChatGPT that allow you to go beyond basic chatting. To get started, simply go to chatgpt.com or install the official app from the Apple App Store or Google Play. There’s even a Projects feature that keeps all your chats organized, plus a Library to manage all your generated images. This year alone, OpenAI peppered us with new models, modes, and features to play with inside the AI.
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. 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.
During his speech, which was partly written by the program, he warned that it could result in cheating, job losses, discrimination, disinformation, and uncontrollable military applications. 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. Google’s Bard (now Gemini) launched on February 6, 2023, one day before Microsoft’s announcement of Bing Chat (now Microsoft Copilot). 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”. As before, OpenAI has not disclosed technical details such as the exact number of parameters or the composition of its training dataset.

Paid tier

The tools are part of OpenAI’s new Responses API, which enables enterprises to develop customized AI agents that can perform web searches, scan through company files, and navigate websites, similar to OpenAI’s Operator product. We trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, in a post on X, that the company has trained a “new model” that’s “really good” at creative writing.

OpenAI eyes consumer health market with AI-powered tools

MCP, an open-source standard, helps AI models generate more accurate and suitable responses to specific foxygold casino queries, and lets developers create bidirectional links between data sources and AI applications like chatbots. Researchers at Stanford University have observed that therapy chatbots powered by large language models can sometimes stigmatize people with mental health conditions or respond in ways that are inappropriate or could be harmful. OpenAI has launched a new API feature called Flex processing that allows users to use AI models at a lower cost but with slower response times and occasional resource unavailability. Instead, it should be used as a tool to generate text or complete language-based tasks, and any information provided by the model should be verified with credible sources.” Even answers to questions about computer programming languages, an unlikely source of hallucinations, have proved inaccurate so often that the popular programming question-and-answer site Stack Overflow temporarily banned answers from ChatGPT. Despite decades of using AI, Wall Street professionals report that consistently beating the market with AI, including recent large language models, is challenging due to limited and noisy financial data. In the 2020s, the rapid advancement of deep learning-based generative artificial intelligence models raised questions about the copyright status of AI-generated works, and about whether copyright infringement occurs when such are trained or used.
In a series of posts on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company’s new image-generation tool’s popularity may cause product releases to be delayed. The image generator was made available to all ChatGPT users on March 31, and went viral for being able to create Ghibli-style photos. More than 130 million users have created over 700 million images since ChatGPT got the upgraded image generator on March 25, according to COO of OpenAI Brad Lightcap. AI researcher Tibor Blaho spotted a new “ImageGen” watermark feature in the new beta of ChatGPT’s Android app.

OpenAI unveils ChatGPT Health, says 230 million users ask about health each week

Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. ZDNET’s recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. When asked if there really was such a Greek myth, ChatGPT apologized and replied that there was no such myth but that it had created a fable based on its understanding of Greek mythology. The model can add two-digit numbers (e.g., 23 + 56) with complete accuracy, but for multiplying two-digit numbers (e.g., 23 × 56), it produces the right answer only about 30 percent of the time. By means of a series of such tests, a computer’s success at “thinking” can be measured by its probability of being misidentified as the human subject.
OpenAI rolled out new tools designed to help developers and businesses build AI agents — automated systems that can independently accomplish tasks — using the company’s own AI models and frameworks. The company’s CEO Sam Altman said on Wednesday, however, that the release of the image generation feature to free users would be delayed due to higher demand than the company expected. The company has updated its policies to allow ChatGPT to generate images of public figures, hateful symbols, and racial features when requested. The offer will let millions of students use OpenAI’s premium service, which offers access to the company’s GPT-4o model, image generation, voice interaction, and research tools that are not available in the free version. The new models stand out from previous reasoning models because they can use ChatGPT features like web browsing, coding, and image processing and generation.

Sam Altman aims to make ChatGPT more personalized by tracking every aspect of a person’s life

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. 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. The chatbot has also been criticized for its limitations and potential for unethical use. Users can interact with ChatGPT through text, audio, and image prompts.
This year alone, the app has generated $1.35 billion, a 673% increase from the same period in 2024, averaging nearly $193 million per month, or 53 times more than its nearest rival, Grok. This move aims to expand OpenAI’s presence in its second-largest market, offering enhanced access to the latest GPT-5 model and additional features. OpenAI, facing a lawsuit from the parents of a 16-year-old who died by suicide, said in its blog that it has implemented new safeguards for ChatGPT, including stronger detection of mental health risks and parental control features.