On the seventh day of OpenAI's 12 Days extravaganza, ChatGPT is finally adopting a project from Claude that has been sorely missing — projects. This will allow users to group chats and data, making it easier to tailor ChatGPT to your needs.
Every weekday until December 20 the AI lab is making at least one product, service or feature announcement. It is safe to say it has been a mixed bag so far. We've had Sora, ChatGPT Canvas, o1, Advanced Voice and several "stocking stuffers."
ChatGPT Projects is available globally from today but it is being slowly rolled out, so some users may have to wait a while. They started the rollout during the live stream in lieu of a terrible Christmas joke.
OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil led the Projects announcement live along with Drew Schuster, and Thomas Dimson who joined OpenAI when the AI lab acquired Global Illuminations.
Projects is a feature I've been waiting for in ChatGPT. It is one of the main things that keeps pulling me back to Claude. I can, for example, share a dozen notes and files on a novel I'm writing and every new chat within the project can access that data. I don't need to keep sharing documents each time I start a session.
ChatGPT Projects lets you group anything available within ChatGPT together including your custom data, conversations, GPTs and simple chats.
Every chat within that project can access any information within the project, or you can just use the project like a folder to group together similar chats.
You can use any ChatGPT feature including SearchGPT, Canvas and coding.
During the demo, OpenAI showed the ability to start a chat from within the project, as well as adding files and even tagging in existing chats.
One example use case of a project is to organize a Secret Santa. This allowed for the upload of rules, budget and a spreadsheet with a list of who gets what. Within this you can also give ChatGPT specific instructions just for that project, overriding the main instructions you might have given to ChatGPT generally.
Within an individual chat you can ask the AI to pull in data stored within the chat and even have it adapt the data or create new tables based on the data.
One word of warning from the demo — be specific. If you ask ChatGPT to write an email based on data it could include 'secret' details of who wants what for Christmas.
Another example shown during the 12 Days live stream involved coding a personal website. You can give it custom instructions on the technology you want to use as well as content you want included — and ChatGPT can build the website. You'll still need to find a way to host it yourself though.
12 Days of OpenAI: The biggest announcements
- [Day Six] ChatGPT with Advanced Voice: Advanced Voice is one of the best features of ChatGPT and with this new update it can see you, the world and even your phone screen thanks to Vision.
- [Day Six] Santa voice: Throughout December ChatGPT Advanced Voice is getting a new Santa Voice. The first time you use it, OpenAI will even reset your Advanced Voice messages to zero so you can talk for longer.
- [Day Five] ChatGPT with Apple Intelligence: Apple Intelligence got a huge update with the release of iOS 18.2 including the inclusion of ChatGPT. This brings with it enhanced vision and text capabilities right from the Siri window.
- [Day Four] ChatGPT Canvas launch: OpenAI has finally unleashed ChatGPT Canvas, its text and code editor, to all users. It is also being made available for use with Custom GPTs and gets the ability to run Python code.
- [Day Three] OpenAI launches Sora: OpenAI's artificial intelligence video generation tool, Sora, is official and enables you to generate videos and images in nearly any style from realistic to abstract. It's a whole new product for the company on a separate page from ChatGPT.
- [Day Two] Fine-tuning AI models: In a roundtable, OpenAI devs focused on the power behind OpenAI's models and reinforcement fine-tuning for AI models tailored for complex, domain-specific tasks to make them work in specific fields like science, finance and medicine.
- [Day One] ChatGPT Pro Tier: Sam Altman and his roundtable announced a Pro tier of ChatGPT meant for scientific research and complex mathematical problem solving that you can get for $200 a month (this also comes with unlimited o1 use and unlimited Advanced Voice).
- [Day One] ChatGPT o1 model: OpenAI's 12 Days of AI kicked off with a rather awkward roundtable live session where Altman and his team announced that the o1 reasoning model is now fully released and no longer in public preview.
