ChatGPT Gets GPT-6 and Intelligent UI, Free Users Too

OpenAI has started moving the everyday ChatGPT conversation to GPT-6. Paying users on Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise get GPT-6 Sol in the Chat tab from 7 October, and Free and Go users get GPT-6 Luna from 8 October, according to OpenAI’s announcement. Both models came out on 22 September, for the API, ChatGPT Work and Codex; until now they had not reached the chat most people use. They arrive with a new way of answering that OpenAI calls Intelligent UI.

Answers that are partly an app

With Intelligent UI, GPT-6 decides how each reply should be laid out. A comparison can come back side by side, an explanation as a diagram, a trip as a map, and a reply can carry charts, forms and tappable buttons, while a simple question still gets plain text. The model will also build a tool on request: “You can also ask ChatGPT to create a tool for the task at hand,” the announcement says, giving a savings calculator, a bill splitter and a game as examples.

In the demonstrations OpenAI gave reporters, TechCrunch reports, ChatGPT answered a question about how an aeroplane wing produces lift with a set of diagrams, and produced a map for a multi-day hike and a personal savings calculator. Aarush Selvan, a product manager at OpenAI, told TechCrunch that ChatGPT has mostly been a text interface, and that the most useful answers are often more than text.

Where it works, and how to turn it down

The interface is rolling out gradually on the web and in updated apps, at every thinking level from Instant to Extra High. Two places are left out: the Pro level, which runs on GPT-6 Astra, and the older ChatGPT desktop apps for macOS and Windows. In the model menu GPT-6 takes the place of the option labelled Latest, GPT-5.6 Sol stays available as a separate choice, Enterprise workspaces get GPT-6 according to their administrators’ settings, and the models behind ChatGPT Work and Codex do not change, Search Engine Journal reports from OpenAI’s announcement and help pages. Anyone who finds the visuals too much can switch off Layout and visuals in the web settings, but some visual elements may still appear.

It starts answering before it has finished thinking

The second change is about waiting. GPT-6 can begin a reply while it is still reasoning or using tools and add to it as it goes, without being asked again, 9to5Mac and Search Engine Journal report. For questions that need a web search, OpenAI says GPT-6 at the Instant level starts answering 44% sooner on average than GPT-5.6 did at the same level, and that it is better at deciding when to search at all. Both figures are OpenAI’s own, and neither says how often the new visual answers get their numbers right.

Interactive answers are not entirely new to ChatGPT. Interactive charts arrived in June, and interactive explainers for more than 70 maths and science topics in March. What changes is that the model now picks the format by itself, on any subject, and that it does so on the free tier as well as the paid ones.

The free tier’s new model

For the free and Go tiers the upgrade is GPT-6 Luna, OpenAI’s cheapest GPT-6, which costs developers $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output through the API. It is the same model that faced Claude Haiku 5.5 in our Lab on 8 October and beat it by 4 points to 3 across three build briefs, winning two of them, though each of its builds shipped a fault you can see. Paying users get Sol, the middle of the family. OpenAI announced an updated GPT-6.1 Sol at DevDay on 29 September, but the ChatGPT announcement names GPT-6 Sol.

The bet behind Intelligent UI is that a chatbot answer can do the job of a small web page. If ChatGPT draws the mortgage calculator itself, there is one less reason to go looking for one, which is good news for users and an open question for the sites that built those tools and the publishers whose answers used to end in a link.