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

As of late 2025, GPT-5 Auto is the default model for most conversations. You can try ChatGPT without an account in many regions, but signing in unlocks advanced features like saved chat history, conversation sharing, custom instructions, and higher usage limits. There are also desktop apps for Windows and macOS that add systemwide shortcuts for quickly launching ChatGPT and sharing your screen, files, or screenshots directly in a chat. In my experience, the web version offers the fullest range of features available. 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.

  • That’s more than double the volume reported by CEO Sam Altman just eight months ago, highlighting the chatbot’s explosive growth.
  • It was capable of autonomously performing tasks through web browser interactions, including filling forms, placing online orders, scheduling appointments, and other browser-based tasks.
  • Additionally, using a model’s outputs might violate copyright, and the model creator could be accused of vicarious liability and held responsible for that copyright infringement.
  • In the competition to develop advanced programming models, GPT-4.1 will rival AI models such as Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and DeepSeek’s upgraded V3.
  • 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.
  • OpenAI first previewed the model in December alongside a more capable system called o3.

OpenAI offers ChatGPT Enterprise to federal agencies for just $1

For instance, an analyst could use the company’s slide deck and documents to develop an investment thesis. OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT’s conversational voice mood for all paid users across different markets and platforms. O3-pro is available for ChatGPT and Team users and in the API, while Enterprise and Edu users will get access in the third week of June. In addition to that, the chatbot requires 0.34 watt-hours of electricity to operate. The participants were asked to write multiple SAT essays using tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the Google search engine, or without any tools. They found that ChatGPT users showed minimal brain engagement and consistently fell short in neural, linguistic, and behavioral aspects.

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Users interact with ChatGPT through conversations which consist of text, audio, and image inputs and outputs. ChatGPT is frequently used for translation and summarization tasks, and can simulate interactive environments such as a Linux terminal, a multi-user chat room, or simple text-based games such as tic-tac-toe. The laborers were exposed to toxic and traumatic content; one worker described the assignment as “torture”.
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.

Can I search the web with ChatGPT?

This includes text-to-image models such as Stable Diffusion and large language models such as ChatGPT. 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. The model can also generate new images based on existing ones provided in the prompt.

Are there alternatives to ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI.

  • This feature is rolling out to ChatGPT Pro and Plus users first, excluding those in the U.K., EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland.
  • In December 2022, the question-and-answer website Stack Overflow banned the use of ChatGPT for generating answers to questions, citing the factually ambiguous nature of its responses.
  • ChatGPT is a chatbot and AI assistant built on large language model (LLM) technology.
  • ChatGPT has never been publicly available in China because OpenAI prevented Chinese users from accessing their site.
  • OpenAI charges $150 for every million tokens (about 750,000 words) input into the model and $600 for every million tokens the model produces.
  • Although OpenAI notes it may not grant every request since it must balance privacy requests against freedom of expression “in accordance with applicable laws”.

OpenAI’s new “company knowledge” update for ChatGPT lets Business, Enterprise, and Education users search workplace data across tools like Slack, Google Drive, and GitHub using GPT‑5, per a report by The Verge. 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 was released on November 30, 2022, by the American company OpenAI and almost immediately disturbed academics, journalists, and others because of concern that it was impossible to distinguish human- from ChatGPT-generated writing. In January 2023, the International Conference on Machine Learning banned any foxygold casino undocumented use of ChatGPT or other large language models to generate any text in submitted papers. Some, including Nature and JAMA Network, “require that authors disclose the use of text-generating tools and ban listing a large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT as a co-author”.
While OpenAI has a similar deleted data retention policy for ChatGPT, the retention period for ChatGPT is only 30 days, which is 60 days shorter than Operator’s. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Gov designed to provide U.S. government agencies an additional way to access the tech. OpenAI first previewed the model in December alongside a more capable system called o3. OpenAI announced a new AI “agent” called deep research that’s designed to help people conduct in-depth, complex research using ChatGPT. To use ChatGPT in any form through the native mobile app, you will still need to be logged in. In response to pressure from rivals like DeepSeek, OpenAI is changing the way its o3-mini model communicates its step-by-step “thought” process.
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 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.
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.
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.

The chatbot provides recommendations, images, and reviews of products in various categories such as fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics. OpenAI has added a few features to its ChatGPT search, its web search tool in ChatGPT, to give users an improved online shopping experience. Over the weekend, users on social media criticized the new model for making ChatGPT too validating and agreeable. OpenAI for Countries is part of efforts to support the company’s expansion of its AI data center Project Stargate to new locations outside the U.S., per Bloomberg. 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. The ChatGPT deep research feature is in beta and lets developers connect with GitHub to ask questions about codebases and engineering documents.
Open AI introduced a new section called “library” to make it easier for users to create images on mobile and web platforms, per the company’s X post. OpenAI has released two new reasoning models, o3 and o4 mini, just two days after launching GPT-4.1. Flex processing is available in beta on the o3 and o4-mini reasoning models for non-production tasks like model evaluations, data enrichment, and asynchronous workloads. OpenAI introduced o3 in December, stating that the model could solve approximately 25% of questions on FrontierMath, a difficult math problem set. The company skipped that step — sending safety cards for GPT-4.1 — claiming in a statement to TechCrunch that “GPT-4.1 is not a frontier model, so there won’t be a separate system card released for it.”
Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is a large language model developed by OpenAI and the fourth in its series of GPT foundation models. In September 2025, following the suicide of a 16-year-old, OpenAI said it planned to add restrictions for users under 18, including the blocking of graphic sexual content and the prevention of flirtatious talk. It was capable of autonomously performing tasks through web browser interactions, including filling forms, placing online orders, scheduling appointments, and other browser-based tasks. These images are generated with C2PA metadata, which can be used to verify that they are AI-generated.

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