OpenAI Group PBC says ChatGPT is moving away from its traditional wall-of-text responses and giving users a more interactive user interface to play with. In a media briefing today, the company said its GPT-6 models will now be able to access an “Intelligent UI” that will allow the chatbot to generate more visual outputs when it deems necessary, replacing words with graphics, tappable buttons, forms and charts” that will provide a much more interactive experience.
ChatGPT will determine for itself when an answer needs a more visually appealing response and interactive elements for the user to explore a topic more deeply. In such instances, the model will integrate these directly with its response.
In an example, OpenAI showed someone asking ChatGPT how to piece together a 7-speed bicycle, and rather than just churning out endless text that explains everything, it instead generated a complete design breakdown, complete with visualizations of each of the main parts and a clickable button that allows readers to learn more about each of them. In a second example, a user asked ChatGPT to create a plan for a lamb roast with pictures of each dish, plus a recipe that allowed the user to alter the number of guests in order to recalculate the amount of ingredients required.
OpenAI explained that ChatGPT will generate these visualizations from a library of components that the GPT-6 models were pre-trained on. For more basic prompts and questions, the chatbot will stick with the old text-only format, but users will have the option to request a more interactive response at any time, and it will reformat the response accordingly.
The goal with this update is to make “learning complex topics easier,” said OpenAI Product Manager Aarush Selvan in the briefing. The intelligence UI may also help to make ChatGPT more accessible and increase its appeal, though Selvan didn’t say this directly.
ChatGPT has predominantly been a text-based interface,” Selvan said. But the company wants to help people get things done, and it believes that “from the everyday things like planning a recipe or a trip or even trying to learn something, the most helpful answers aren’t just text.”
ChatGPT’s Intelligent UI isn’t entirely original. In fact, it’s somewhat reminiscent of Google LLC’s “Generative Interface,” which was introduced with the launch of Gemini 3 last year, although it seems to be a bit more colorful and more graphics-heavy. When Google introduced that feature, there was a lot of excitement around it, but it doesn’t really appear to have differentiated Gemini as a chatbot all that much.
It’s worth nothing that OpenAI didn’t say if the Intelligent UI would mean higher token consumption, but that does appear to be the case with all of those extra elements being generated, so that’s something users might want to watch out for. It’s also not clear how susceptible these visual elements may be to the cures of every AI chatbot, namely hallucinations.
OpenAI, however, seems to be pushing for AI to become more visually appealing. Earlier this week, the company revealed it would soon introduce the first image-based ads in ChatGPT’s responses. More cynical users might think that the Intelligent UI may make it more difficult to see which responses are ads and which are the chatbots own, but regardless, ads are almost certainly going to become a part of every AI chatbot at some point.
OpenAI said the Intelligent UI is being made available from today for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise subscribers, though in the latter case, the workplace administrator will need to enable it. Free users and Go subscribers will get access to it tomorrow.