How to use ChatGPT: A beginner’s guide to the most popular AI chatbot

Personal data has to be accurate,” said Joakim Söderberg, data protection lawyer at Noyb, in a statement. Meta also plans to bolster its presence in India by constructing a large 3GW data center in Jamnagar, Gujarat. 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. The update enables real-time conversations, and the AI assistant is said to be more personable and interrupts users less often. OpenAI has updated its AI voice assistant with improved chatting capabilities, according to a video posted on Monday (March 24) to the company’s official media channels. OpenAI also said Mark Chen would step into the expanded role of chief research officer, and Julia Villagra will take on the role of chief people officer.

• ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI.
• The laborers were exposed to toxic and traumatic content; one worker described the assignment as “torture”.
• In late March 2023, the Italian data protection authority banned ChatGPT in Italy and opened an investigation.
• ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm since its launch in November 2022.
• When further asked why it made up such a myth instead of simply saying that there was no such myth, it apologized again and said that “as a language model, my main function is to respond to prompts by generating text based on patterns and associations in the data I’ve been trained on.” ChatGPT tends not to say that it does not know an answer to a question but instead produces probable text based on the prompts given to it.
• It will keep some user interactions within ChatGPT, rather than directing people to external websites.

It is capable of writing software, answering codebase questions, running tests, and proposing pull requests. In 2025, OpenAI added several features to make ChatGPT more agentic (capable of autonomously performing longer tasks). The integration used ChatGPT to write prompts for DALL-E guided by conversations with users. According to TechCrunch, it is a service based on o3 that combines advanced reasoning and web search capabilities to make comprehensive reports within 5 to 30 minutes.
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.
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.

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.

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• The company has mostly concentrated on challenges in rigid, predictable areas such as math and programming.
• 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 has launched three members of the GPT-4.1 model — GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano — with a specific focus on coding capabilities.
• ChatGPT has experienced significant growth recently due to the launch of new models and features, such as GPT-4o, with multimodal capabilities.
• However, the company has now “evolved” its approach, as stated in a blog post published by Joanne Jang, the lead for OpenAI’s model behavior.

OpenAI has not revealed technical details and statistics about GPT-4, such as the precise size of the model. GPT-4V is a version of GPT-4 that can process images in addition to text. Shortly after the bug was fixed, users could not see their conversation history. In March 2023, a bug allowed some users to see the titles of other users’ conversations. Despite this, users may jailbreak ChatGPT with prompt engineering techniques to bypass these restrictions.

MAJOR UPDATE

This week, ChatGPT is on track to reach 700M weekly active users — up from 500M at the end of March and 4× since last year. Nick Turley, OpenAI’s VP and head of the ChatGPT app, highlighted the app’s growth on X, noting it has quadrupled in size over the past year. Despite unveiling GPT-5 as a “one-size-fits-all” AI, OpenAI is still offering several legacy AI options, including GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, and o3. Since its May 2023 launch, ChatGPT’s mobile app has amassed $2 billion in global consumer spending, dwarfing competitors like Claude, Copilot, and Grok by roughly 30 times, according to Appfigures. OpenAI introduced its most affordable subscription plan, ChatGPT Go, in India, priced at 399 rupees per month (approximately $4.57).
The lawsuits focus on GPT-4o’s tendency to be overly agreeable, despite users expressing dangerous intentions. In November 2025, seven families sued OpenAI, alleging that GPT-4o was released prematurely without safeguards, contributing to suicides and severe psychiatric harm. A Munich court ruled that ChatGPT violated German copyright law by reproducing lyrics from nine protected songs, including Herbert Grönemeyer’s hits, rejecting OpenAI’s argument that the AI only reflected learned patterns. ChatGPT is now getting group chats for everyone — Free, Go, Plus, and Pro users alike — after testing it in a few regions last week. This marks OpenAI’s first response to a case that has raised wider concerns about chatbots and mental health risks. After Adam Raine’s family sued OpenAI in August, claiming their teen used ChatGPT as a “suicide coach,” OpenAI said in a new court filing that it isn’t liable, arguing the chatbot was misused.
OpenAI is preparing to launch an AI system that will be openly accessible, allowing users to download it for free without any API restrictions. It will help organizations in Asia meet their local data sovereignty requirements when using OpenAI’s products. The new program will be accessible to users of ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, and API. The connector will soon be available for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users, with support for Enterprise and Education coming shortly, per an OpenAI spokesperson. By popular request, GPT-4.1 will be available directly in ChatGPT starting today.GPT-4.1 is a specialized model that excels at coding tasks & instruction following. OpenAI has introduced its AI coding agent, Codex, powered by codex-1, a version of its o3 AI reasoning model designed for software engineering tasks.
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).
In the reinforcement learning stage, human trainers first ranked responses generated by the model in previous conversations. ChatGPT is based on GPT foundation models that have been fine-tuned for conversational assistance. The latest model, which launched in August 2025, is GPT-5 and is hailed as being the “smartest, fastest, most useful model yet”. ChatGPT can be used for many purposes, including answering questions and explaining tricky concepts, drafting essays, writing code and even advising on health queries. But OpenAI recently disclosed a bug, since fixed, that exposed the titles of foxygold casino some users’ conversations to other people on the service. Several tools claim to detect ChatGPT-generated text, but in our tests, they’re inconsistent at best.

OpenAI returns to open source with new AI models

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 has added new controls in ChatGPT that let users adjust the chatbot’s warmth, enthusiasm, emoji use, and formatting style. Most recently though, headlines around OpenAI have focused on its competition gaining ground, with CEO Sam Altman’s “code red” internal memo shifting company focus toward its flagship chatbot. The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Privacy practices may vary based, for example, on the features you use or your age.
Popular deep learning models are trained on mass amounts of media scraped from the Internet, often utilizing copyrighted material. 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”. 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.

OpenAI unveils GPT-5, a smarter, task-ready ChatGPT

Thanks to all these capabilities, people use ChatGPT for just about everything now — writing, brainstorming, translating, coding, studying, web searching, and shopping. ChatGPT is not the same AI chatbot that first burst onto the scene in 2022. If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards.