OpenAI is launching group chats in ChatGPT (www.theverge.com)

OpenAI is rolling out group chats in ChatGPT globally, letting any logged-in user invite up to 20 people into a shared conversation. Group chats are created from an existing thread (via the “people” icon) and participants join by link; users supply a display name, username, and photo, and ChatGPT can react with emoji and reference profile photos when generating personalized images. The assistant has been trained to “go along with the flow,” deciding when to interject or stay silent unless explicitly mentioned, and you can control membership, notifications, and give custom instructions for the bot. OpenAI also says ChatGPT won’t pull from or add to your personal memories inside group chats, and rate limits only apply when the assistant sends messages. For the AI/ML community, this is notable for multi-user interaction and context management at scale: ChatGPT in groups runs on “GPT‑5.1 Auto,” which dynamically selects the best model available for each prompt and user, and includes turn-taking behavior learned to avoid interrupting conversations. That raises engineering questions about state tracking, prompt routing, privacy boundaries (link-based invites and no-group-memory policy), and resource allocation (rate limits tied to bot responses). The feature nudges ChatGPT toward collaborative workflows—planning, drafting, decision-making—while highlighting trade-offs between immediacy, personalization, and shared-data governance.