ChatGPT

Last updated: February 2026 | Reading time: 8 minutes You’ve just gotten blood test results back from your doctor. There’s a column of numbers, some with little arrows pointing up or down, a lot of abbreviations you don’t recognize, and a follow-up appointment that’s two weeks away. So you paste it into ChatGPT. Millions of people are doing exactly this — and it’s actually useful, as long as you understand what you’re getting and what you’re not. ...

Last updated: February 2026 | Reading time: 7 minutes Twenty dollars a month doesn’t sound like much — until you’re being asked to pay it for software you’re not sure you actually need. ChatGPT’s free tier is genuinely capable. So what exactly does Plus give you? And more importantly, is it worth it for you? Here’s the honest breakdown, no fluff. What You Get With ChatGPT Free The free tier gives you access to GPT-4o, OpenAI’s flagship model — but with limits: ...

Last updated: February 2026 | Reading time: 9 minutes If you’ve spent more than five minutes researching AI tools, you’ve probably hit a wall of vague comparisons that say things like “both are great for different use cases!” without actually telling you which one to use. This isn’t that article. We ran both ChatGPT (GPT-4o) and Claude (Claude 3.5 Sonnet) through a set of real tasks — the kind of things normal people actually need AI for. Here’s the honest breakdown. ...

ChatGPT is useful enough that people share things with it they’d never say out loud in public. Confidential work documents. Medical symptoms. Financial details. Legal situations. Personal struggles. That raises a fair question: is that safe? What actually happens to what you type? The answer is nuanced, and the right response isn’t “never use it” or “it’s totally fine.” It’s knowing what the actual risks are so you can make a smart call. ...

You’ve got a 40-page PDF. Could be a contract, a research paper, a report your boss sent, or a manual for something you bought three years ago. You need the key points. You don’t have time to read the whole thing. Good news: ChatGPT can help. Bad news: it’s not as simple as “upload and summarize.” Let me walk you through what actually works, free-first. Why PDF Summarization Is Trickier Than It Sounds ChatGPT reads text. PDFs are sometimes text, sometimes images of text, sometimes a nightmare combination of both. If your PDF was scanned rather than digitally created, ChatGPT can’t read it directly — it just sees an image. So the method you use depends on what kind of PDF you have. ...

Most people use ChatGPT for emails exactly wrong. They type “write me an email” and get something generic that sounds like it was written by a committee. Then they give up and write it themselves. The problem isn’t ChatGPT — it’s the prompt. Give it better instructions and you get back something you’d actually send. Here are 15 prompts built for real situations, including the ones most people avoid because they’re awkward or high-stakes. ...

You’ve heard about ChatGPT everywhere — at work, on the news, from your kids. Maybe you’ve tried it and gotten something useful back. Maybe you’ve tried it and gotten nonsense. Either way, you probably still have a nagging question: what actually is this thing? Here’s the honest answer, no computer science degree required. It’s a Text Prediction Machine (a Very Good One) At its core, ChatGPT is a language model. That sounds fancy, but it just means: a system trained to predict what word (or phrase) should come next, given everything that came before it. ...

Research used to mean hours in browser tabs, bookmarking sources, stitching together information from a dozen different pages. AI changed that. But now there are two distinct philosophies competing for your workflow: Perplexity AI’s real-time, source-cited search model versus ChatGPT’s deep reasoning and conversational depth. Both are excellent. They’re not the same tool. Here’s how to think about which one belongs in your research stack. What Perplexity AI Actually Does Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine. That’s the clearest way to describe it. You type a question, it queries the web in real time, reads the top sources, synthesizes an answer, and cites every claim with a numbered footnote you can click. ...

How to Use ChatGPT Memory: Make It Remember Your Preferences Every time you start a new ChatGPT conversation, you used to start from zero. No context about who you are, how you like things written, what you do for work, or what you’ve already discussed. ChatGPT Memory changes that. It lets ChatGPT retain information between conversations — so you stop re-explaining yourself every time. This guide covers how it works, how to set it up, what gets stored (and what doesn’t), and how to control it. ...

Claude 3.5 vs ChatGPT-4o: Side-by-Side Comparison for Real Tasks Both Claude 3.5 Sonnet and ChatGPT-4o are excellent AI assistants. But “excellent” doesn’t tell you which one to use. When you’re paying for a subscription or building a workflow around an AI, you want specifics. So we ran both through the same real-world tasks — writing, coding, research, summarization, and reasoning — and tracked where each one actually shines. Here’s what we found. ...