With new healthcare-focused hires, it aims to simplify access to fragmented medical data — an area where Big Tech has struggled — through its conversational AI approach. OpenAI is exploring the consumer health sector, developing AI tools like personal health assistants and data aggregators, according to a report by Business Insider. OpenAI’s new ChatGPT shopping feature lets users get product recommendations by describing features or sharing photos to find similar items at different prices. The model will roll out to paid ChatGPT users and developers in three versions — Instant, Thinking, and Pro — tailored for everything from everyday tasks to complex reasoning and high-accuracy work. The data underscores OpenAI’s push to win enterprise customers as competition heats up from Google, Anthropic, and open-model rivals, a recurring theme you’ll see in recent updates. OpenAI has updated its guidelines for users under 18 and released new resources for parents to promote safer interactions with ChatGPT.
Referrals from ChatGPT to news sites are rising but not enough to offset search declines
After introducing a data residency program in Europe in February, OpenAI has now launched a similar program in Asian countries including India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. OpenAI said in a post on X that it has launched its GPT-4.1 and GPT4.1 mini AI models in ChagGPT. The feature enables ChatGPT to retrieve information across users’ own services to answer their questions. 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). Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, will lead the company’s global expansion and manage corporate partnerships as CEO Sam Altman shifts his focus to research and products, according to a blog post from OpenAI. The protocol is currently available in the Agents SDK, and support for the ChatGPT desktop app and Responses API will be coming soon, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said. The organization originally estimated that the best-performing configuration of o3 it tested, o3 high, would cost approximately $3,000 to address a single problem. The Arc Prize Foundation, which develops the AI benchmark tool ARC-AGI, has updated the estimated computing costs for OpenAI’s o3 “reasoning” model managed by ARC-AGI. OpenAI plans to sunset GPT-4, an AI model introduced more than two years ago, and replace it with GPT-4o, the current default model, per changelog. Samantha Lock of The Guardian noted that it was able to generate "impressively detailed" and "human-like" text. Kevin Roose of The New York Times called it "the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public". In August 2024, OpenAI announced it had created a text watermarking method but did not release it for public use, saying that users would go to a competitor without watermarking if it publicly released its watermarking tool.OpenAI introduces ChatGPT Pulse for personalized morning briefs
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. 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.- While chatbots are “being used as companions, confidants, and therapists,” the study found “significant risks.”
- Stanford researchers reported that GPT-4 "passes a rigorous Turing test, diverging from average human behavior chiefly to be more cooperative."
- Since Google launched its AI Overviews in May 2024, the percentage of news searches that don’t lead to clicks on news websites has increased from 56% to nearly 69% by May 2025.
- Several tools claim to detect ChatGPT-generated text, but in our tests, they’re inconsistent at best.
- Using OpenAI’s latest default model for ChatGPT, GPT-4o, as a reference, nonprofit AI research institute Epoch AI found the average ChatGPT query consumes around 0.3 watt-hours.
OpenAI promises to make changes to prevent future ChatGPT sycophancy
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 ChatGPT Health, says 230 million users ask about health each week
In February 2023, OpenAI launched a premium service, ChatGPT Plus, that costs US$20 per month. It has an additional feature called "agentic mode" that allows it to take online actions for the user. In October 2025, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas, a browser integrating the ChatGPT assistant directly into web navigation, to compete with existing browsers such as Google Chrome and Safari.- 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.
- 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.
- ChatGPT is not the same AI chatbot that first burst onto the scene in 2022.
- 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."
- The feature acts as a conversational search engine, providing more comprehensive and accurate answers by scouring multiple sources simultaneously.