Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

OpenAI is piloting group chat in ChatGPT, letting multiple users join one conversation.

Why it matters: Giving AI access to group text dynamics could reshape how tech companies learn about our social interactions, for better or worse.

• AI makers are betting that people want bots and their friends in the same chat, but so farmost users prefer one-on-one interactions with AI.

How it works: The pilot — now running in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan — is available to Free, Go, Plus, and Pro users in the ChatGPT app on mobile, and on the web.

• Tap the people icon in the top right corner of any new or existing chat to add up to 20 users. You can also add people to a chat by sharing a link. Participants will need to set up a short profile with a name, username, and photo.
• Search, image and file upload, image generation, and dictation are all enabled, OpenAI says. Rate limits only apply when ChatGPT responds, not on messages sent by humans in group chat.
• Group chatting with ChatGPT could help users coordinate trips and events, brainstorm with work teams or hobby communities or facilitate study groups.

By the numbers: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently announced that ChatGPT has 800 million weekly users.

• If those people start adding their non-ChatGPT-using-friends to their group chats, that’s a lot of new users.

Zoom out: OpenAI isn’t the only company working on sending its bot to the group chat. Continua, a company founded by former Googler David Petrou, has been offering a similar service since this summer. The difference is that Continua lets you keep your group chats where they are, instead of asking your friends to chat in ChatGPT.

• To chat with Continua’s bot, users add its phone number to their group chats or its user name to their Discord chat.
• Petrou says including bots in your group chat is about reducing friction. “There are so many times that I’ve heard people say ‘I was planning something, and this is what ChatGPT told me,’ and then I’ll go use ChatGPT, and then I’ll get back to my friend and say, ‘Well, this is what ChatGPT told me.’ It’s almost like dueling ChatGPT responses for us.”

Between the lines: Talking to bots in groups still feels awkward for many — like asking Alexa or Siri a question in public. And then there’s the Clippy effect — where bots interrupt or are overly helpful.

• Petrou calls this “Social AI” and says that getting it right “represents one of the biggest remaining challenges in our shared quest for AGI.”

Yes, but: OpenAI and Continua have the ability to use your conversations to train future models. They both promise that all user-identifying data will be stripped from conversations first.

The bottom line: Group chatting with AI has the potential to simplify planning and reduce environmental impact, but it’s also one more way the AI companies could train their models on our personal lives.