ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an AI assistant from OpenAI. People use it to ask questions, write and edit text, brainstorm, analyse documents and data, write and debug code, generate images, learn new subjects and carry out tasks, through a conversational interface on the web, desktop and mobile apps. Its launch in November 2022 marked a turning point for artificial intelligence. ChatGPT reached a huge user base faster than almost any consumer product before it, introduced the general public to large language models and started the wave of generative AI products and investment that followed. It remains the most widely used AI assistant. The product has expanded far beyond text chat. It can search the web and cite sources, analyse uploaded files such as PDFs and spreadsheets, run code to analyse data and create charts, generate and edit images, and hold real-time voice conversations. Custom GPTs let users and companies build specialised assistants for particular tasks, projects organise chats and files around a goal, memory allows it to remember preferences across conversations, and deep research produces long, sourced reports on complex questions. Agent capabilities let it carry out multi-step tasks on the web on the user's behalf. ChatGPT has a free tier and paid subscriptions that offer more capable models, higher usage limits and advanced features, plus Team and Enterprise plans with administration, privacy commitments and data controls for organisations. Developers access the underlying models separately through OpenAI's API. The limitations are those of current language models. It can state incorrect information confidently, its knowledge has cut-off dates unless it searches, and outputs need checking for important decisions. Privacy and data-handling policies matter for sensitive information, and organisations often prefer business plans that exclude their data from training. Alternatives include Claude from Anthropic, known for writing quality and long documents; Google Gemini, integrated with Google's services; Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 users; Perplexity for answer-engine search with citations; Meta AI inside Meta's apps; and Mistral's Le Chat. Choose ChatGPT when you want the most widely used general-purpose AI assistant with a broad feature set.