OpenAI’s 12 days of “ship-mas” have officially begun, with the company set to reveal some new features, products, and demos during all 12 days starting December 5th, just a few days shy of the second anniversary of ChatGPT’s explosive launch in 2022. According to the company, ChatGPT now has over 300 million weekly users.
The event started with the release of its improved OpenAI o1 reasoning model out of preview, along with a new $200 ChatGPT Pro subscription that offers unlimited access to GPT-4o, Advanced Voice Mode, and an exclusive version of o1 that Sam Altman says “can think even harder for the hardest problems.”
Sources tell The Verge that OpenAI will also launch Sora, its text-to-video AI generator. There’s likely a lot more to come, and we’re keeping track of all the announcements from OpenAI.
You can follow along below as we continue to report on all the latest updates.
OpenAI teases new reasoning model—but don’t expect to try it soon
Image: Alex Parkin / The VergeFor the last day of ship-mas, OpenAI previewed a new set of frontier “reasoning” models dubbed o3 and o3-mini. The Verge first reported that a new reasoning model would be coming during this event.
The company isn’t releasing these models today (and admits final results may evolve with more post-training). However, OpenAI is accepting applications from the research community to test these systems ahead of public release (which it has yet to set a date for). OpenAI launched o1 (codenamed Strawberry) in September and is jumping straight to o3, skipping o2 to avoid confusion (or trademark conflicts) with the British telecom company called O2.
Read Article >- ChatGPT now works with a few new desktop apps.
OpenAI’s 11th “ship-mas” drop: ChatGPT’s desktop app now works with Apple Notes, Notion, Quip, and some new coding apps.
CPO Kevin Weil calls it “agentic.” I tried it — it’s slow, and I don’t feel comfortable letting it access my private Notion stuff, but I could see it being useful for coding instead.
You can now call 1-800-CHATGPT
Image: The VergeFor the 10th day of “ship-mas,” OpenAI rolled out a way to call ChatGPT for up to 15 minutes for free over the phone using 1-800-CHATGPT.
The feature was a project spun up just a few weeks ago, OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil said on the livestream. Users can now call ChatGPT in the US and message via WhatsApp globally at 1-800-242-8478. The 15-minute limit is per phone number per month, so really, you could spin up a few Google Voice numbers to get as much time with it as you want.
Read Article >ChatGPT’s AI search engine is rolling out to everyone
Image: The VergeChatGPT’s AI search engine is rolling out to all users starting today. OpenAI announced the news as part of its newest 12 days of ship-mas livestream, while also revealing an “optimized” version of the feature on mobile and the ability to search with advanced voice mode.
ChatGPT’s search engine first rolled out to paid subscribers in October. It will now be available at the free tier, though you have to have an account and be logged in.
Read Article >- ‘Hey Santa, are you real or just a chatbot?’
OpenAI is rolling out Santa in Voice Mode for ChatGPT. You can activate it by tapping a snowflake icon that appears to the right of the text box, but it will only be available until the end of the year.
- OpenAI demos new Apple Intelligence features for ‘ship-mas.’
On the 5th day of ‘ship-mas,’ OpenAI demonstrated ChatGPT’s integration with Apple Intelligence across iOS and macOS, which launches today. The demo showed Siri delivering ChatGPT-generated responses, with a link to view full answers in the ChatGPT app.
The macOS integration showcased document analysis capabilities, and the new camera button on the iPhone 16 can open ChatGPT’s vision feature.
- ChatGPT’s side-by-side ‘Canvas’ view is now available to everyone.
As part of its 12 days of “ship-mas” event, OpenAI announced the release of Canvas out of preview, making it easier to view and tweak lengthy writing or sections of code generated by ChatGPT. The tool can now also execute Python code and be used within custom GPTs.
- OpenAI closed Sora applications shortly after launch.
A message currently displayed on the signup page says that account creation is temporarily unavailable due to heavy traffic. On X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company had “significantly underestimated demand” and that it’ll take a while to get everyone access to Sora.
Well that didn’t take long... Image: OpenAI / The Verge 
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OpenAI has finally released Sora
Free users can still browse a feed of AI-generated videos created by the community. Screenshot: OpenAIOpenAI launched Sora, its text-to-video AI model, on Monday as part of its 12-day “ship-mas” product release series, as The Verge previously reported it would. It’s available today on Sora.com for ChatGPT subscribers in the US and “most other countries” through a new model, Sora Turbo. This model adds features like generating video from text, animating images, and remixing videos.
With a ChatGPT Plus subscription, OpenAI says you can generate up to 50 priority videos (1,000 credits) at resolutions up to 720p with 5-second durations. The $200 per month ChatGPT Pro subscription that launched last week comes with “unlimited generations” and up to 500 priority videos while bumping the resolution to 1080p and the duration to 20 seconds. The more expensive plan also allows subscribers to download videos without a watermark and perform up to five generations simultaneously.
Read Article >OpenAI’s video generator Sora is launching today
Image: The VergeOpenAI’s highly-anticipated AI text-to-video generator, Sora, will become available to everyone today. In a video posted on Monday, Marques Brownlee confirmed its imminent release and detailed his experience using Sora over the past few weeks, calling the results “horrifying and inspiring at the same time.”
OpenAI first revealed Sora in February but only made the tool available to a select number of visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to start.
Read Article >- On the second day of ship-mas, my AI sent to me... reinforcement fine-tuning.
OpenAI just announced an alpha program for a new tool (called reinforcement fine-tuning) that lets developers train models on specific tasks, using example problems and answers. In a post after the livestream announcement, CEO Sam Altman said this will make it “really easy to create expert models in specific domains with very little training data.”
OpenAI’s ‘ship-mas’ starts with $200 ChatGPT Pro subscription
Image: OpenAIOpenAI is creating a new, more expensive tier for its flagship chatbot ChatGPT, and is bringing its “reasoning” model series out of preview with an update.
The company is releasing the full version of its o1 model (replacing o1-preview), which was initially released as a limited preview in September (code-named ‘Strawberry’). The new model will be available for ChatGPT Plus and Team users today, while Enterprise and Edu users will have access to it starting next week.
Read Article >ChatGPT now has over 300 million weekly users
Image: The VergeChatGPT now has over 300 million people using the AI chatbot each week. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed the milestone during The New York Times’ DealBook Summit on Wednesday, which comes just months after ChatGPT hit 200 million weekly users in August.
“Our product has scaled ... now we have more than 300 million weekly active users,” Altman said. “We have users sending more than 1 billion messages per day to ChatGPT.”
Read Article >OpenAI’s 12 days of ‘shipmas’ include Sora and new reasoning model
Image: Alex Parkin / The VergeHappy holidays from OpenAI. The AI startup plans to kick off a “shipmas” period of new features, products, and demos for 12 days, starting on December 5th. The announcements will include OpenAI’s long-awaited text-to-video AI tool Sora and a new reasoning model, sources familiar with OpenAI’s plans tell The Verge.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed the 12 days of announcements onstage at The New York Times’ DealBook conference on Wednesday morning, though he didn’t say exactly what was coming. OpenAI plans to launch or demo something every day for 12 days straight.
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