Codex growth is off the charts for OpenAI, which is now releasing a custom-made subscription. (Picture: OpenAI)ChatGPT is on par with Claude subscriptions, now that it has an intermediate Pro subscription tailor-made for Codex use.
This also closes the huge gap between the Plus tier at $20/month and the top Pro tier at $200/month.
Sam Altman says the new tier is by very popular demand. A spokesperson tells TechCrunch that 3 million people are using Codex every week, and it’s growing by more than 70% per month.
To celebrate the launch of the new tier, OpenAI is increasing usage limits for the $100 plan to 10x for Codex, while the $200 plan remains at 20x.
Ads on ChatGPT are just being shown to a tiny fraction of users, but that’s about to change. (Picture: Adobe) The figure was reached from a small pilot of 600 advertisers serving less than 20% of Free and Go users, Reuters reports.
85% of these users in the USA are eligible to receive ads, but far fewer ads are shown in the trial that started in February.
The minimum asking price to get on the test program is said to be $200,000 and the projected revenue once the trial goes live to more users is about a billion dollars a year.
80% of the advertisers on the platform are small and medium-sized businesses, Reuters notes, and OpenAI is set to debut a self-serve advertising platform already in April.
After running into strong headwinds, letting «adults be adults» is out at OpenAI. (Picture: generated) It now seems official that there won’t be an Adult Mode, or «smutty chat» on ChatGPT, due to challenges of training it, internal dismay and investor concerns, The Financial Times (paywalled) says.
Offering an Adult Mode on ChatGPT was a promise made by CEO Sam Altman in October 2025, but quickly ran into problems, leading to delays, and later postponement.
Siri will open up to ChatGPT competitors come early summer. (Picture: generated)Previously, Siri would hand off more complex questions to ChatGPT when it couldn’t handle it itself — but that’s about to change, according to Bloomberg (paywalled).
Starting in June, if users have Gemini or Claude installed on their phones, Siri will be able to use those bots instead, by recording their preferred «Extension» in Settings.
That would end the ChatGPT monopoly that OpenAI has enjoyed since 2024, and opens up the chatbot ecosystem to other players, likely staving off regulators.
Opening up the platform is for the system level Siri queries native to iOS itself, and must not be confused with the standalone Siri app, which will use Gemini in a billion dollar deal.
Everyone on Free and Go plans will be getting ads before soon. (Picture: screenshot)According to The Information (paywalled), OpenAI will soon stop its «experiment» in ads. They will go for a full advertising service in «the coming weeks,» reports Reuters.
That means the test with showing some ads to about 5% of users is coming to an end, and the full plan will start up just after easter.
The limited advertising has so far been a success. The main complaint from advertisers is that it’s going too slow, according to CNBC. Most of them are happy and ready to spend more — with more varied ads.
— We’re encouraged by early signals from users and participating brands, and continue to see strong interest from advertisers, OpenAI tells CNBC.
The advertising program on Free and Go tiers is expected to earn OpenAI about $1 billion per year, and usher in a third tier for advertisers in addition to Search, Social, and Retail.
Feeling that OpenAI has lost focus, attention turns to putting all eggs in one basket. (Picture: generated)According to The Wall Street Journal, the new app will include agentic capabilities, and signals another step in the company’s recent quest to refocus on coding and business users.
The app will make it easier for teams within OpenAI to work together, the WSJ reports, and will help other users with productivity-related tasks, as they double down on enterprise users.
The standalone ChatGPT app will not be affected by the move, although the paper notes that OpenAI feels it has lost attention by focusing on «side quests» like the Sora app — now rumored to get included in ChatGPT proper.
OpenAI’s Fidji Simo will be leading the super app effort, and she tweets that:
— When new bets start to work, like we’re seeing now with Codex, it’s very important to double down on them and avoid distractions.
“If you want, I can also explain…”-clickbait should largely be gone from the model after the latest update. (Picture: generated)5.3-instant is the model most people encounter on the Plus and Pro subscriptions on a daily basis. It was supposed to be «less cringe,» and offer «fewer lectures.»
But many had noticed that it had become filled with follow-up questions for simple queries, offering «one strange trick,» «would you like me to tell you three things that…» and «You’ll never believe…»
These teaser-style responses were not just annoying, but sometimes frustrating — as if the bot had become optimized for engagement and tried to keep the conversation going after already answering the query.
The good news is that as of March 16, 2026, OpenAI has upgraded the model to show less of this slop, and users should already be noticing an improvement in «follow-up tone.»
There are several roadblocks for Adult Mode, should it ever come to pass. (Picture: generated)According to The Wall Street Journal, the upcoming «adult mode» for ChatGPT is hitting some internal snags.
It now seems the company’s internal advisory board is against going forward with the feature, saying it could foster «unhealthy emotional dependence,» Mashable writes.
Also holding back the launch is the fact that ChatGPT’s age checks aren’t that good, and has a rather large error rate of 12% on identifying kids and teens, The Verge reports.
100 million under 18s use ChatGPT every week, which would mean that some 12 million of them could be classified as adults and exposed to «sexualized conversations.»
The feature is currently postponed due to «other priorities,» but is said to skirt images, voice and video for pure text, and will supposedly be «smutty,» not «pornographic,» the Verge says.
GPT-5.4-mini comes close to GPT-5.4 on accuracy and cost. (Picture: OpenAI)Being about two times faster than the previous GPT-5-mini, the models offer solid coding performance for these tiers for the first time.
GPT-5.4-mini can be accessed today by choosing «Thinking» from the model picker on the Free and Pro tiers.
The model is stronger than 5-mini on reasoning, multimodal understanding, tool use and subagents, OpenAI says.
It is also available in Codex, where it uses only 30% of tokens for the same task compared to 5.4 proper — and is usable for workloads where latency and speed are important.
Also introduced today is GPT-5.4-nano, which is for the times when speed and cost matter most. It costs only $0.20/$1.25 per 1M tokens, and is handy for mass classification, ranking, coding subagents and compaction.
Nano doesn’t support web search or computer use, and is only available in the API.
The Senate officially clears the big three chatbots for staffer use. (Picture: generated)After some staffers had been using chatbots informally at work since at least 2025, the Senate’s Sergeant at Arms office of the Chief Information Officer has now approved three of them officially.
The chatbots cleared for «drafting and editing documents, summarizing information, preparing talking points and briefing material, and conducting research and analysis» are ChatGPT Enterprise, Gemini on Workspace and Copilot, according to Business Insider.
The Sergeant at Arms will now provide all Senate employees with an AI chatbot license at no cost. The office also touts Copilot Chat as integrated with Office 365 and is usable with Word and Excel — although Claude also offers this capability.
Sora video generation in ChatGPT would expand access, but also increase costs. (Picture: generated)The Information and ChatGPT-watcher Tibor Blaho are both reporting an upcoming release of video generation in the main ChatGPT app.
According to The Information’s x.com post, the release seems imminent, while Blaho has spotted Sora generation mentions and ID’s in the latest Andoid beta ChatGPT App.
Sora 2 was launched as a quasi social network with its own app in October 2025 and was invite-only.
Judging by early search interest on Google for «Sora invite code» soon after launch, interest for the app greatly exceeded capacity and available invites.
It produces 10-second clips from prompts or pictures and promises to put your likeness in anything you can imagine. It briefly went viral, running up some 920 million weekly users before dropping from #1 to #165 in the App Store.
Putting the app’s features into the mainline GPT app will bring it up to par with Google’s AI subscriptions, which gives users access to the video generator Veo 3 on the $25 Pro plan.
«Adult mode» on ChatGPT gets another postponement. (Picture: generated)The much touted feature last showed up as «naughty chats» in the Android app just two weeks ago, but is now postponed indefinitely.
It was supposed to debut in the first quarter of 2026, after first being conceived as «letting adults be adults» in October 2025. It was supposed to run in tandem with age verification, rolled out this January.
OpenAI says that «we still believe in the principle of treating adults like adults, but getting the experience right will take more time,» writes Axios.
The postponement is due to the company focusing on other high priority issues, such as «intelligence, personality improvements, personalization,» and «making the experience more proactive.»
The latest version of ChatGPT sees a marked jump in the benchmarks. (Picture: Adobe)The new Thinking and Pro models are more «capable and efficient» and is the first OpenAI model with native computer use skills. It also improves on hallucinations and Office files creation — areas where Anthropic has been thriving.
— Together with advances in general reasoning, coding, and professional knowledge work, GPT‑5.4 enables more reliable agents, faster developer workflows, and higher-quality outputs across ChatGPT, the API, and Codex,OpenAI writes.
On hallucinations, it is 33% less likely to be wrong in its responses, and 18% less apt to have mistakes in replies compared to GPT‑5.2.
GPT-5.3-Instant performs better than 5.1-Instant and is a little behind 5.2-Instant, but is better at conversation. (Picture: Adobe)Hallucinations are down 27% when it uses the web and ~20% in reasoning, and OpenAI did actually notice that the 5.2 model often cames across like a nanny — berating users with obvious, condescending lectures for harmless questions.
This has been solved by reducing unnecessary «dead ends,» caveats and «declarative formulations» in order to let the conversation flow more freely — solving one of many users’ major gripes with the current OpenAI models.
The model is also better at search, combining search responses with its own knowledge and reasoning. This should put results into context instead of just summarizing results.
Bu the real update with this model is bringing ChatGPT to a more natural style and tone with freely flowing conversation — which should be far less «cringe.»
OpenAI is promising less «Stop. Take a breath»-responses, or «I’m going to calm this down» kinds of outputs. It should also be better at creative writing.
GPT-5.3-instant is available today in the app (choose Instant in the model selector), API and web, and updates to Thinking and Pro are «coming soon.»
