Update: OpenAI has now made the group chat feature in ChatGPT available worldwide for all logged-in users on the Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans.
OpenAI is testing a group chat feature for ChatGPT in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and New Zealand. Users on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans can chat together with other people and ChatGPT in the same conversation. The system won't pull in personal memories from private chats. ChatGPT jumps in based on context or when someone addresses it directly.
The responses run on the GPT-5.1-Auto model. Participants can join through invitation links, manage groups, and customize ChatGPT's settings individually. Users under 18 get automatic content restrictions, and parents can disable the feature entirely.
Deep Cogito positions its latest release as the "best open-weight LLM by a US company." Deep Cogito has released Cogito‑v2.1‑671B, a finetune built on a Deepseek base model from November 2024 (presumably Deepseek R1‑Lite, since Deepseek‑V3‑Base did not ship until December). After retraining the model internally, Deep Cogito says it now competes with top closed and open systems and outperforms other US open models like GPT‑OSS‑120B.
According to Deep Cogito, Cogito v2.1's main advantage is efficiency. The model uses far fewer tokens on standard benchmarks than comparable systems, which can lower API costs. The team also trained it with process monitoring for thought steps, allowing it to reach conclusions with shorter reasoning chains. They report improvements in prompt-following, programming tasks, long-form queries, and creativity. Users can try the model for free through chat.deepcogito.com, where the developer says no chats are stored. The model weights are available on Hugging Face, and smaller editions are planned.
