OpenAI: Piloting Group Chats in ChatGPT

OpenAI:

To start a group chat tap the people icon in the top right corner of any new or existing chat. When you add someone to an existing chat, ChatGPT creates a copy of your conversation as a new group chat so your original conversation stays separate. You can invite others directly by sharing a link with one to twenty people, and anyone in the group can share that link to bring others in. When you join or create your first group chat, you’ll be asked to set up a short profile with your name, username, and photo so everyone knows who’s in the conversation. Group chats can be found in a new clearly-labeled section of the sidebar for easy access. [...]

Group chats are separate from your private conversations. Your personal ChatGPT memory is not used in group chats, and ChatGPT does not create new memories from these conversations. We’re exploring offering more granular controls in the future so you can choose if and how ChatGPT uses memory with group chats.

Currently rolling out in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan. Rate limits and advanced model usage depend on the group member to whom ChatGPT replies. Pretty clever, and I can imaging a lot of ways this would be useful, both for family/friends and for work collaboration. I like the idea that this is built into ChatGPT, not an AI bot in a regular messaging app. This way, you know with certainty which of your chats are being seen and read by an AI bot.

We’ve also taught ChatGPT new social behaviors for group chats. It follows the flow of the conversation and decides when to respond and when to stay quiet based on the context of the group conversation. You can always mention “ChatGPT” in a message when you want it to respond. We’ve also given ChatGPT the ability to react to messages with emojis, and reference profile photos — so it can, for example, use group members’ photos when asked to create fun personalized images within that group conversation.

This is a really hard problem to solve. Wavelength, the late great private group messaging app whose team I advised from 2023 to 2024 (when the app shuttered), added AI chatbots (with customizable personalities) in June 2023. Wavelength’s AI bots only responded when mentioned explicitly.

★ Monday, 17 November 2025