What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is OpenAI's AI assistant — in the company's current wording, "an artificial intelligence-based service that you can access via the internet or app", designed to answer questions and follow instructions by learning patterns from large amounts of text, images, audio and video. In practice it is one interface over several capabilities: conversation, web search, file analysis, image generation and editing, voice, and multi-step agentic work. It is free to use, with four paid tiers above that.
- Made by
- OpenAI not publicly traded
- Released
- Nov 30, 2022 as a research preview
- Free tier
- Yes GPT-5.6 Luna, with ads
- Cheapest paid
- $8/mo ChatGPT Go
- Most common paid
- $20/mo ChatGPT Plus
- Top tier
- $200/mo Pro, 20x Plus usage
- You own the output
- Yes free or paid alike
- Prices verified
- 2026-07-16 vendor plan sheet
OpenAI's own "What is ChatGPT?" page is four years out of date.
This is worth knowing before you check our answer against the vendor's. OpenAI's help centre has an article titled What is ChatGPT? that displays a recent update stamp and still says the product "is not connected to the internet", that it "has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021", and that it is "fine-tuned from GPT-3.5". Every one of those was true in 2022 and none is true now — ChatGPT searches the web, runs GPT-5.6-series models, and reads files, images and audio.
The current definition lives in a different article, How ChatGPT and our foundation models are developed, updated three days before we read it. That one describes ChatGPT as a service reachable by web or app, used for organising and summarising information, translation, coding, research and analysis, completing multi-step tasks across tools, analysing or generating images, and everyday work — learning patterns from text, images, audio and video. That is the definition this page uses.
The same article explains the mechanism in plain terms, and it is the most useful thing anyone can know about the product: the model predicts the next most likely token, one at a time, using weights adjusted during training. It explicitly does not store copies of its training data. And because several completions are always plausible, the same question can produce different answers on different days — that is designed behaviour, not a fault.
One commercial fact that surprises people, from OpenAI's own FAQ: you own the output you create with ChatGPT, including the right to reprint, sell and merchandise it, regardless of whether it came from a free or paid plan.
What it actually does in 2026.
"ChatGPT" now names a family rather than a feature. What sits behind the box, on current documentation:
- Chat — unlimited everyday text conversation on every tier, with a picker exposing reasoning effort from Instant to Extra High.
- Web search — available including on the free tier.
- Files — PDFs, spreadsheets, presentations and documents up to 512 MB, analysed and summarised.
- Images — generation and editing on all tiers via ChatGPT Images 2.0.
- Voice — spoken conversation, and meeting transcription on paid macOS.
- Work and Codex — agentic execution and software development, on paid plans.
Which of these you get depends on your plan, and the boundaries move often.
Five consumer positions: Free (with advertising in a growing list of countries), Go at $8/mo, Plus at $20/mo, and Pro at $100 or $200/mo, plus Business, Enterprise and Edu for organisations. There is no annual billing on any consumer tier.
What you are buying up the ladder is mostly allowance and model access rather than features — Go excludes GPT-5.6 Sol entirely, and the two Pro tiers are identical in capability and differ only in headroom. Prices here come from our verified plan sheet, checked 2026-07-16; the full breakdown is on the pricing page.
Any definition written more than a few months ago overstates the product in specific ways. Removed or retired during 2026 alone:
- Sora — the video-generation app, discontinued 26 April 2026. ChatGPT does not make videos.
- Atlas — the ChatGPT browser, stopped working 9 August 2026.
- Creating custom GPTs — no longer available on any personal plan; it now requires a Business, Enterprise or Edu workspace.
- Group chats, the DALL·E GPT (30 August 2026), and a long list of models including GPT-4o and o3.
This is the single strongest argument for dating every claim about this product, which is why every page here carries one.
Three clarifications that account for a lot of confusion:
It is not a search engine, though it can search. It generates the most likely next token, and OpenAI's own documentation notes it will occasionally make up facts. Treat citations as leads, not evidence — see how accurate it is.
It is not OpenAI. OpenAI is the company; ChatGPT is one of its products, alongside the API, Codex and Sora. That distinction decides who bills you and under which terms — see who owns it.
It is not open source. The weights, training data and application are closed, whatever an AI-generated summary may tell you — the details are here.
The three products people weigh it against.
If you are asking what ChatGPT is, the next question is usually whether to use it or something else. Each of these is a full side-by-side with pricing derived from the same verified sources as this page.
Frequently asked.
Quick follow-ups people search after this question.