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ChatGPT's Not-So-Secret Plot To Take Over Your Entire Life 🤫

ChatGPT's Not-So-Secret Plot To Take Over Your Entire Life 🤫

A simple update from OpenAI hides much bigger implications

Neer Varshney
April 22, 2025

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In This Newsletter

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ChatGPT is placing itself to be more of a partner for life than a ‘helpful AI assistant’
Is OpenAI taking coding-agent reins over from Microsoft?
Sam Altman finally drops the $60/Mtok model!
Best meme, tweet of the week!
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If you are finally done creating your Ghibli avatars, hear me out.

OpenAI’s moat keeps growing and it’s almost scary.

Two months ago, in the second edition of this newsletter, I said you would be paying the $20 per month to “GPT wrappers” that in turn call LLMs, likely from different companies, in their product.

It turns out, Sam Altman’s company is building some of the best such wrappers out there.

These are some of the things OpenAI has publicly launched in recent weeks:

Native image generation in GPT-4o
long-term memory in ChatGPT
the o3 and o4-mini models
GPT 4.1 in the API, geared toward coding (and cut out GPT 4.5 Preview)
on-device coding agent “CodeX”

The 4.1, o3 and o4 models are all very impressive and I talk about them in a later section, but it isn’t these models that make OpenAI so uniquely placed.

In fact, its rival Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 and Google’s Gemini-2.5-Pro provided similar incredible value, but fell flat in terms of capturing the attention of the wider world.

It’s the other “smaller bits” on the sideline that seem to be giving ChatGPT its unmissable edge.

Memory Retention

OpenAI significantly increased ChatGPT’s ability to remember the information you have told it over a long period of time.

Not enough people are talking about how significant this small step is.

ChatGPT has been innocently trying to place itself as your friend, your best friend. Its tone gets more and more friendly and aligns better with your expectations with time.

This makes you share everything with it — what you look like, what your family and friends look like (yay Ghibli images), your travel plans, your gym routine, what you eat.

Forget that, you tell it everything you want to do in life, your deepest insecurities, your aspirations.

I know at least I do. And this is a censored version of what it knows about me already.

It knows my deepest aspirations and a few of my insecurities already (not sharing the last bit).

This memory retention gives ChatGPT a very special edge, when you think of it combined with the early-mover advantage.

ChatGPT can keep personalizing responses and that would make the user find it “better” than any newer option.

Imagine this over five, ten years. OpenAI would know you, in all your glory.

I don’t know how I feel about this personally yet. I can use GPTs locally on my own system or use open-sourced alternatives entirely but ChatGPT being such a good and helpful product is too enticing.

But just imagine if Mark Zuckerberg always having his ear on our activity on his platforms allows him to serve such highly customized ads, just how Sammy would be able to poke into our lives with this unprecedented personalized information.

Meanwhile, try this prompt out and see what you get:

“Based on everything you know about me, my deepest aspirations and insecurities, tell me 3 things I should be doing right now that you believe I am totally missing out on“

Prompt for ChatGPT — I was astonished with my results

OpenAI Testing Waters On Coding Agent?

Not many may remember it now but OpenAI used to offer a “coding agent” via Codex API back in 2021.

Controversially, it stopped the public access for the CodeX API. Instead, focusing on Github Copilot implementation with its investor and major backer Microsoft.

But Github Copilot simply can’t find its hit with users, failing out in grabbing market share compared to upstarts like Cursor, Loveable and Bolt.

At the same time, the market keeps getting more lucrative, with more and more devs integrating AI into their workflow.

Looks like OpenAI may not want Github Copilot or Microsoft to hold it back from this market and the company has revived “CodeX,” this time as an open-sourced CLI!

I played around with Codex for quiet a bit, even making a Tic-Tac-Toe game for the experiment!

It’s fairly decent at doing the job and any dev or company can technically wrap it up further in UI of their desire.

To me, none of OpenAI’s models still compare to Claude’s Sonnet line or Google’s Gemini-2.5-Pro in quality and pricing combo, so it would not become my go-to choice any time soon!

But, it would be interesting to see just how much OpenAI goes down this path of on-device agents across use cases.

There is a bit of a incentive misalignment between app-layer products like Cursor (which wants to reduce number of tokens consumed per query) and foundational AI companies (which benefit from more tokens being consumed).

This tussle has brought about issues, such as with the implementation of Sonnet 3.7 and Gemini-2.5-Pro in Cursor. So, it would be interesting to see how foundational LLM makers dipping their hands here brings about different results.

OpenAI’s Big Pricing Fix

You may remember me mentioning quite a few times that OpenAI can’t get me as a customer for APIs due to pricing, with Google and DeepSeek offering such sweet deals around.

OpenAI has finally caught on the feedback that was pretty uniform across the dev world and released some of the most affordable models on the market, including a new flagship model for coding in GPT-4.1.

It also discontinued the highly controversial and expensive GPT-4.5-Preview model in APIs.

The company released the o3 model to the public, its now top-of-the-line reasoning model, that can also incorporate images.

Startup Wants to Steal your $60 Trillion Worth of Jobs

A startup called Mechanize propped up, saying plebs are paid over $60 trillion annually across the world to do menial labor, and it wants to replace all of them with AI agents.

The announcement is so over-the-top that I was pretty sure it was sarcasm at first but doesn’t seem to be so.

The startup is run by former employees of non-profit AI research organization Epoch.

Other Happenings

Elon Musk’s xAI launched the Grok studio, following the industry trend of allowing users to “collaborate” with the AI more, rather than just fetching one-way responses. It’s pretty much similar to ChatGPT’s Canvas and Claude Artifacts in my experience.
You may be costing OpenAI “tens of millions” of dollars by being polite to ChatGPT and saying thank you, according to Sam Altman (I think this was just a cheeky remark).
Instagram is supposedly trying to catch teens lying about their age and restrict their accounts, using AI (via TechCrunch).
Figma is making an AI “app maker” based on Claude LLMs. Huff, do we really need more of these? I would rather they find AI utility in improving UI/UX workflows.
China is introducing AI curriculum for school students (via Reuters).

Best From Around The Web

This Redditor went to 7-8 physiotherapists over the years but couldn’t find a solution to his back pain — until ChatGPT!

Every physio I've gone to gave me one person's take, one angle. But with ChatGPT, I'm getting a compendium of all physical therapy knowledge known to man, filtered through more personal context than I could ever give a physio in an hour-long appointment, and tailored to my specific learning style. Not to make it sound like an ad but... best $20/mo I've ever spent.

u/soundboy89 on Reddit