Today OpenAI starts piloting a new feature that puts ChatGPT into shared conversations: group chats. Are you planning a dinner with friends or do you need to build an outline with colleagues? Now you can do it in the same space, with people and ChatGPT collaborating in real time.
What group chats are and how they help you
Group chats let you invite between 1 and 20 people into a conversation where ChatGPT participates as one more member. Think of it like a messaging group that also has an assistant that can compare options, summarize ideas, organize lists, or suggest itineraries.
It’s not the same as your private conversations: your personal ChatGPT memory is not shared, and ChatGPT does not create new memories from these chats during the pilot.
Where and who can use them
For now the trial is active in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan, and it’s available on web and mobile for signed-in users on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans. It’s a small rollout: OpenAI will collect feedback and decide how to expand it.
How it works in practice
- To create a group chat tap the people icon in the top-right corner of any new or existing chat. If you add it to an already open chat, ChatGPT copies that conversation and creates a new group chat to keep the original separate.
- You can invite others by sharing a link with up to 20 people; anyone in the group can share it again.
- When you join for the first time you’re asked to fill a short profile with name, username, and photo so everyone knows who’s writing.
- Group chats appear in a clear section of the sidebar for quick access.
Also enabled are search, file and image uploads, image generation, and dictation. ChatGPT’s replies are produced by GPT-5.1 Auto, which picks the best available model depending on the prompt and the user’s plan.
Privacy and control
Who sees what? You have to accept an invitation to join, everyone can see who’s in the chat, and people can leave whenever they want. Members can remove others, except the group creator, who can only leave by doing it themselves.
Important: your personal ChatGPT memory is not used in these chats and ChatGPT does not save new memories from group conversations during this phase. OpenAI says it will later explore finer controls to decide whether memory can be used in groups.
There are also safeguards for minors: if someone under 18 participates, the system automatically reduces exposure to sensitive content for everyone in the chat. Parents or guardians can disable group chats via parental controls.
Concrete examples to make it clearer
- Planning a weekend trip with friends: you create a group, compare destinations, ChatGPT generates the itinerary and the packing list while everyone comments.
- Designing a garden or decorating an apartment: you share images, upload floor plans, and ask for design ideas; ChatGPT suggests options based on the group’s preferences.
- Quick decisions like choosing a restaurant: ChatGPT acts as an impartial arbiter and can summarize tastes and dietary restrictions.
For work and school
Group chats make collaborating on projects easier: drafting an outline, researching a topic, sharing notes, and asking for summaries. ChatGPT’s replies count against the limit of the user it’s responding to, and usage limits only apply when ChatGPT replies, not to messages between people.
Limitations and what to expect
It’s a pilot: available in a few regions and on specific plans. OpenAI will gather feedback to tune ChatGPT’s social behavior in groups, refine when it should intervene or stay silent, and improve memory and privacy controls.
Does this mean we’ll all soon have ChatGPT as a member of our groups? Probably yes, but step by step. The idea is simple: turn AI from something personal into something shared that truly collaborates with the people you know.