ChatGPT: a tour of the screen

Getting there and signing in

ChatGPT lives on a website. Open your web browser and go to chatgpt.com. (You may still see the older address, chat.openai.com, mentioned in places; it simply redirects to the same site.)

You'll be asked to sign in or sign up. You can create a free account with an email address, or sign in with a Google, Microsoft or Apple account you already have. There's no cost to make an account and you don't need to add a card. Signing in is what lets ChatGPT save your chat history, so it's worth doing rather than clicking around as a guest.

There's also a desktop app for Mac and Windows if you prefer one. It was recently rebuilt to bundle three things in one window: ordinary Chat, a work-and-documents surface called ChatGPT Work, and the coding tool Codex. The older, chat-only desktop app now sits alongside it under the name ChatGPT Classic. You don't need any of this on day one; the website covers everything in this level, and ChatGPT Work and its new Sites feature are for later. But if a colleague mentions "Work", "Codex", "Sites" or "Classic", that restructure is what they mean (see Keeping current).

Once you're in, you land on a mostly empty screen with a box in the middle. That's home. There is far less going on here than it first appears.

The screen, in four parts

Almost everything you'll ever touch is one of four things.

• The message box sits along the bottom. You type your prompt, the instruction or question, and press Enter or click the send arrow. Type, send, read the reply, type again: that loop is the whole tool. Everything else just supports it.
• The new-chat button is near the top-left. It starts a fresh, blank conversation. This matters more than it sounds: ChatGPT only remembers what you've said within a single chat, so a conversation about holiday plans and one about a work email are best kept apart. New topic, new chat.
• Your chat history runs down the left. Each conversation is saved automatically and given a short title. Click any one to reopen it exactly where you left off; you can rename or delete them too. If the sidebar is hidden (common on phones and narrow windows) a small menu icon opens it. Nothing is lost when you close the tab.
• Your account and settings sit behind your profile picture, a small circle in a corner. That's where things we cover later live: custom instructions, memory, and managing your subscription. You don't need to touch any of it today.

Your first message

Let's make the loop concrete. Open a new chat and give it a real, low-stakes job, not "hello", but something with enough detail that the reply is actually useful.

I'm new to ChatGPT and want to see what it can do. In about 80 words, plain English, explain to a non-technical colleague what ChatGPT is good for at work. End with one honest sentence about what it's not reliable for.

Press Enter. In a few seconds the answer appears above the box. Since GPT-6 arrived on 7 October 2026 it is not always a tidy paragraph: ChatGPT now picks a format to suit the question, so you may get plain text, a side-by-side comparison, a diagram, or a small working tool such as a calculator. It may also start answering before it has finished thinking and add to the reply as it goes, so give it a moment before you judge it. Now do the thing beginners forget: keep going in the same chat. Type "make it warmer and cut it to 50 words." It rewrites, keeping everything you set up. That back-and-forth, not the first reply, is where the value is, and it's the habit the rest of this level builds on.

The plan map: Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business

ChatGPT has a free version and several paid tiers stacked on top. The exact prices, limits and included features change often, so treat the names below as a durable map and check the official pricing page for today's specifics. Roughly, in plain terms:

• Free. Full access to chatting and a capable model, with caps on how much of the newest, heaviest features you can use in a given window. Useful in its own right, not a crippled demo. The details are in the Free tier FAQ.
• Go. A low-cost step up for people who bump into the free limits but don't need everything. Higher usage than free, at the cheapest paid price.
• Plus. The mainstream personal subscription. Higher limits again, priority access when the service is busy, and earlier access to the latest models and features.
• Pro. The top personal tier, aimed at heavy daily users: the most usage and the most capable modes. Most beginners never need it.
• Business (with Enterprise above it for large organisations) is for teams. It adds admin controls and a workspace where your conversations aren't used to train the models by default. This is the kind of tier an employer approves for real work data; a personal Free or Plus account is not.

One recent change worth knowing: OpenAI has begun testing ads in the Free and Go tiers (clearly labelled), with personalised ads that draw on your chats switched on by default where they're offered (you can turn personalisation off in Settings, and it isn't offered in the EEA or Switzerland); the paid tiers (Plus, Pro, Business) stay ad-free. If you see ads, check the personalisation setting and treat it like any other feature that reads your chats and keep the Phase 0 privacy rules in mind (see Keeping current for how far this test has rolled out).

Our honest advice: start free. You won't know whether you need more until you've used it a while, so only pay when you can name the specific limit that's getting in your way.

The model picker: fast versus thinking

Behind the chat is a model, the particular version of ChatGPT you're talking to. Model names change every few weeks as OpenAI ships new versions, so don't memorise them. What's durable is the one choice underneath: how hard should ChatGPT think about this? How you make that choice depends on your plan.

• On Free and Go there's no model picker. You get the everyday model by default, and a Think button beside the message box for harder questions.
• On Plus, Pro and Business there's a thinking control near the top of the chat. Instant gives fast answers for everyday work; the higher levels take longer and work step by step. Higher plans unlock more levels. On these plans Instant no longer switches itself up to a thinking level when a question looks hard (OpenAI stopped that on 14 September 2026), so the choice is yours.

Either way, the thinking option is a reasoning model: slower, but better for multi-step problems, careful analysis, or anything numerical or logical where a snap answer often goes wrong. Use the fast default for drafting, rewriting, summarising and simple questions, and choose thinking only when the task really rewards it; you'll wait longer, so don't use it to rewrite an email. The controls keep changing, so trust what's on your screen and check OpenAI's guide to choosing a model for your plan.

Rewrite this so it's friendlier and about half the length: "Please be advised the meeting scheduled for Thursday has been moved to Friday at 10am."

Use the thinking model for this. We have three possible meeting slots and four people, each with different availability and priorities. Work through the trade-offs step by step and recommend the best slot, showing your reasoning. [paste the details]

Try it now

Common mistakes

• Piling every topic into one endless chat. It gets muddled and answers start bleeding between topics. Start a new chat per task.
• Fretting over the model picker. Beginners lose time here. Stay on the fast default; only switch to thinking for multi-step problems.
• Assuming you must pay to try it properly. You don't. Free is a real, working version; pay only when a named limit blocks you.
• Trusting the confident first reply because the screen looks polished. A tidy interface and a fluent answer say nothing about whether the facts are right. The tool sounds equally sure when it's wrong, so read anything load-bearing critically before you rely on it.

Check your judgement

The screen differs from this lesson. What should you record before asking for help?

Keeping current

Plan names, prices and model options all shift; Go and the simplified picker are recent examples. A few current specifics that will date: the desktop app that bundles Chat, ChatGPT Work and Codex (with the old app renamed ChatGPT Classic) rolled out on 9 July 2026, so the exact layout is still settling. In August 2026 Free and Go gained the Think button, and on 14 September 2026 OpenAI stopped Instant switching automatically to Thinking on Plus and Pro, so older screenshots and advice about an "Auto" setting may not match your screen. And the ads test began in February 2026, US first, on Free and Go only; how widely it has expanded, and the exact opt-in controls, will have moved on. October 2026 moved faster still: GPT-6 and its Intelligent UI began rolling out on 7 October, reaching Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise first and then Free and Go, which is why a reply may now arrive as a diagram or a small interactive tool rather than as text (the Pro reasoning option is the exception and still answers in plain text). Locked chats followed on 20 October, so you can hide chosen conversations from your history, pinned chats and search behind a four-digit PIN or your device unlock, though they are not encryption and they leave your retention and model-improvement settings unchanged. When something on your screen doesn't match this tour, check OpenAI's official ChatGPT release notes and the ads in ChatGPT help article. Accurate as of 30 October 2026.