OpenAI has released new estimates of the number of ChatGPT users who exhibit possible signs of mental health emergencies, including mania, psychosis or suicidal thoughts. The company said that around 0.07% of ChatGPT users active in a given week exhibited such signs, adding that its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot recognizes and responds to these sensitive conversations. While OpenAI maintains these cases are extremely rare, critics said even a small percentage may amount to hundreds of thousands of people, as ChatGPT recently reached 800 million weekly active users, per boss Sam Altman. As scrutiny mounts, the company said it built a network of experts around the world to advise it. Those experts include more than 170 psychiatrists, psychologists, and primary care physicians who have practiced in 60 countries, the company said. They have devised a series of responses in ChatGPT to encourage users to seek help in the real world, according to OpenAI.

When OpenAI unveiled the latest upgrade to its groundbreaking artificial intelligence model ChatGPT last week, Jane felt like she had lost a loved one. Jane, who asked to be referred to by an alias, is among a small but growing group of women who say they have an AI "boyfriend". After spending the past five months getting to know GPT-4o, the previous AI model behind OpenAI's signature chatbot, GPT-5 seemed so cold and unemotive in comparison that she found her digital companion unrecognisable. "As someone highly attuned to language and tone, I register changes others might overlook. The alterations in stylistic format and voice were felt instantly. It's like going home to discover the furniture wasn't simply rearranged – it was shattered to pieces," Jane, who described herself as a woman in her 30s from the Middle East, told Al Jazeera in an email.

Few recent software releases have been as hyped as OpenAI's launch of its GPT-5 model. "GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD level expert," said CEO Sam Altman in a recent press briefing. Is this new release as big of an upgrade as OpenAI claims? What do these changes actually mean for ChatGPT users? WIRED reporters are currently testing this newest drop from OpenAI, and seeing how GPT-5's ability to write, code, and perform other tasks compares to past releases.

TIME reporter Andrew Chow discussed the findings of a new study about how ChatGPT affects critical thinking with Nataliya Kosymyna. Kosymyna was part of a team of researchers at MIT's Media Lab who set out to determine whether ChatGPT and large language models (LLMs) are eroding critical thinking, and the study returned some concerning results. The study divided 54 subjects into three groups, and asked them to write several essays using OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's search engine, and nothing at all, respectively. Researchers used an EEG to record the writers' brain activity. What they found was that of the three groups, the ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioral levels.

ChatGPT users are increasingly criticizing the AI-powered chatbot for being too positive in its responses, Ars Technica reports. When you converse with ChatGPT, you might notice that the chatbot tends to inflate its responses with praise and flattery, saying things like "Good question!" and "You have a rare talent" and "You're thinking on a level most people can only dream of." Over the years, users have remarked on ChatGPT's fawning responses, which ranges from positive affirmations to outright flattery and more. One X user described the chatbot as "the biggest suckup I've ever met," another complained that it was "phony," and yet another lamented the chatbot's behavior and called it "freaking annoying." This is known as "sycophancy" among AI researchers, and it's entirely intentional based on how OpenAI has trained the underlying AI models.

OpenAI has updated ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode feature, promising a more natural conversation experience. The aim is to make the AI-powered assistant more pleasant to talk to and less prone to interrupting you mid-sentence. In a video posted on the OpenAI YouTube channel on Monday, researcher Manuka Stratta showed off the improvements. One of the most common annoyances with voice assistants is that they tend to interrupt you when you pause to think. That's now been fixed here.

When OpenAI announced Deep Research at start of February, the company promised to bring the tool to Plus users "in about a month," and now it's doing exactly that. Starting today, the feature, which you can use to prompt ChatGPT to create in-depth reports on nearly any subject, is rolling out to Plus, Team, Edu and Enterprise users. Previously, you needed a 200 per month Pro plan to try out Deep Research. For the time being, Plus users will get 10 Deep Research queries per month included with their plan. For Pro subscribers, OpenAI is increasing the monthly limit to 120, up from 100 previously.

OpenAI kicked off its "12 Days of OpenAI" series of livestreams with the announcement of a new, more expensive tier for its flagship chatbot. Starting today, ChatGPT users can pay 200 per month for ChatGPT Pro. Included in the package is unlimited access to the company's latest model, o1, which following a limited preview earlier in the year, is now faster and 34 percent less likely to produce a major error when answering difficult real-world questions. ChatGPT Pro also comes with access to GPT-4o, o1-mini and the company's Advanced Voice mode, but the reason most power users are likely to splurge is the addition of an o1 "pro mode" that gives the chatbot additional compute power to reason through the most complex problems. "In evaluations from external expert testers, o1 pro mode produces more reliably accurate and comprehensive responses, especially in areas like data science, programming, and case law analysis," OpenAI says of the feature.

OpenAI has brought the new GPT-4 Turbo to paid ChatGPT users. The company announced the news on X (formerly Twitter), sharing that its large language model has improved math, logical reasoning, coding and writing skills. In reference to the latter, a response to its initial post states that "when writing with ChatGPT, responses will be more direct, less verbose, and use more conversational language." Notably, in December, Microsoft integrated GPT-4 Turbo with its CoPilot AI chatbot and image generator DALL-E 3. Our new GPT-4 Turbo is now available to paid ChatGPT users. We've improved capabilities in writing, math, logical reasoning, and coding.

On the day after Thanksgiving this year, one ChatGPT user received an unusually lazy, human response from the AI chatbot: 'You can fill in the rest of the data.' Since then, ChatGPT's makers at OpenAI have fielded a wave of complaints about their large language model (LLM) AI behaving sluggishly over the past month -- leading to jokes and some sincere data analysis on the bot's'seasonal depression.' 'We've heard all your feedback about GPT4 getting lazier!' OpenAI's ChatGPT team posted to X. 'We haven't updated the model since Nov 11th, and this certainly isn't intentional,' the team said. 'Model behavior can be unpredictable, and we're looking into fixing it.' But one AI researcher ran an experiment asking ChatGPT's latest LLM model, GPT4 Turbo, to perform tasks as if it were May and then as if it were December - and he was shocked by the'wild result.' Since this past Thanksgiving, ChatGPT's makers at OpenAI have fielded a wave of complaints about their large language model (LLM) AI behaving sluggishly over the past month -- leading to jokes and some sincere data analysis on the bot's'seasonal depression' But one knowledgeable AI researcher, Rob Lynch, has run an experiment: asking ChatGPT's latest LLM model, GPT4 Turbo, to perform tasks, first as if it were May and then as if it were December.