Hey there, 

ChatGPT has received a new update that changes its answers in a big way. On October 7th, OpenAI started rolling out a new interactive experience within ChatGPT’s answers. Now it can create diagrams, maps, games and more as a part of its larger answer. This new feature was made available to all users so you’ll start seeing these in your chats. This week we’ll look at exactly what’s changed, five things you can try yourself, and how Claude and Gemini compare. 

What changed in ChatGPT's answers

OpenAI is calling their new interactive experience Intelligent UI. The idea is simple: instead of answering every question with a chunk of text, ChatGPT will create visuals and interactive pieces with charts, buttons, and more. So if you ask for a comparison, ChatGPT might give you a side-by-side layout, and if you ask about how something works, you could get a diagram that you can click through. The interesting thing is that ChatGPT will actually decide on its own whether a visual or interactive experience is needed or if just a text response works best. OpenAI also explained that answers will come faster. Sometimes answers will start appearing even while ChatGPT is still thinking or searching the web. Intelligent UI is currently available on every plan and you don’t need to turn anything on to start using it. 

Five things to try

The best way to understand this update is to try it for yourself. Let’s look at five use cases where interactive tools are helpful. If an answer comes back as plain text, you just need to ask ChatGPT to turn it into an interactive tool. 

Recipe Builder: “I have chicken, rice, spinach, and a lemon. What can I make tonight?” This is a great example for busy weeknights and can be expanded to help plan your meals for the week. 

Road Trip Planner: "Plan a 3-day road trip from San Francisco to LA with stops worth a detour." OpenAI showed off a similar example in their announcement and we got the same results here. ChatGPT creates a full itinerary and can display a map with all the stops marked. 

Learn Something New: “Explain the Monty Hall problem." In this case, ChatGPT won’t give you a long-winded explanation. Instead it creates a tool that lets you break down and experience the problem. 

Play a Game: "Make me a retro game I can play right here." ChatGPT is capable of building simple games inside the conversation. 

Show Me How Something Works: Intelligent UI makes it much easier to understand how things work. In this example, I asked “Show me how gravitational forces work between the Earth and the Moon” and got a simple, interactive diagram with animations and sliders. 

Gemini and Claude are heading the same way 

ChatGPT isn’t the only tool moving away from plain text answers. Over the past year, Gemini started including interactive visuals, short overview videos, and mini apps directly within its answers. Meanwhile, Claude has been building its interactive artifacts for years now. Those artifacts can turn into things like interactive pages, slides, and documents, and they're available on every Claude plan, including Free. The main difference between ChatGPT and its competitors is that ChatGPT will decide on its own when an answer should include a tool. 

My Thoughts

These types of updates are my favorite because they’re basically a direct upgrade to the core functionality of ChatGPT. This isn’t a separate tool you need to download and it's not even locked behind a paywall. I think that matters a lot because the most useful AI features are the ones people use by default. One odd thing I noticed is that these interactive UIs don’t appear as often as you’d expect. While I’ve only had access for a short time, I found that the tools didn’t consistently show up and I often had to specifically ask about them. I’d keep that in mind while you try out this new feature.