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What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
Every pinnable ChatGPT model has now been switched off in OpenAI's API — what is left costs four times more
OpenAI has always sold two different things under similar names: the models in its API, and the model that actually answers inside ChatGPT. The second kind was reachable through a small family of aliases — chatgpt-4o-latest, then gpt-5-chat-latest and its successors. As of 10 August 2026, every one of them that carried a version number has been switched off. The sequence is short. chatgpt-4o-latest was removed on 17 February 2026. gpt-5-chat-latest and gpt-5.1-chat-latest were shut down together on 23 July 2026, under an announcement made on 22 April. gpt-5.2-chat-latest and gpt-5.3-chat-latest followed on 10 August 2026, deprecated on 8 May. In each case OpenAI named GPT-5.6 Sol — an API model, not a chat one — as the replacement. What remains is a single entry called chat-latest, and the wording on its card is the point: it "points to the latest Instant model currently used in ChatGPT" and "the underlying model snapshot will be regularly updated". There is no version number to pin. A developer who wants the behaviour of the ChatGPT model can still have it, but not frozen, and not with a guarantee that today's answers will resemble next month's. The price moved in the same direction. gpt-5-chat-latest and gpt-5.1-chat-latest cost USD 1.25 per million input tokens and USD 10 per million output. The 5.2 and 5.3 snapshots raised that to USD 1.75 and USD 14. chat-latest is listed at USD 5 and USD 30 — four times the input price of the first two, and precisely the price of the GPT-5.6 Sol flagship. Part of that buys real capability: the window grew from 128,000 tokens to 400,000, and the output ceiling from 16,384 tokens to 128,000, an eightfold increase. But the pinnable versions were the cheap ones, and they are the ones that are gone. There is also a rule behind the timing, and OpenAI publishes it. Its deprecation policy promises generally available models at least six months of notice, and specialised variants at least three — with "chat variants such as gpt-5.1-chat-latest" given as the first example of the latter. The line closest to the consumer product carries the shortest guarantee in the catalogue. One footnote for anyone reading the documentation directly: the card for GPT-5.1 Chat still describes it as the snapshot currently used in ChatGPT and invites developers to test chat improvements on it. The deprecation table has overtaken that sentence. And a distinction worth keeping straight — what ended was the API alias, not the model's presence in ChatGPT itself.
OpenAI Chat Latest →Ads reach European ChatGPT users this month — while European advertisers still cannot buy them
OpenAI notified ChatGPT users in the European Economic Area and Switzerland on 15 August 2026 that advertising will start appearing on the Free and Go plans later this month, alongside an update to its European privacy policy describing how ads are selected, measured and controlled. Six months after the format launched in the United States on 9 February, the region OpenAI had skipped is now in scope. The terms are narrower in Europe than elsewhere. OpenAI's own help centre states that personalised ads are not initially available in the EEA or Switzerland: selection there starts contextual, drawing on the topic of the current conversation plus general location and device type, with past chats and memories excluded. Personalisation is to arrive later and only behind an explicit opt-in. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts carry no ads at all, and neither do accounts identified as belonging to under-18s. Ads appear below the end of a response, labelled as sponsored, and OpenAI states they do not influence the answer itself: the ad system runs separately from the chat model and advertisers cannot rank or alter responses. Advertisers receive aggregate performance figures only — views and clicks — and no access to chats, chat history or memories. One asymmetry is visible in OpenAI's own documentation and has gone largely unremarked. The company's Ads Manager availability table, which lists where advertisers can actually buy inventory, names nine countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Not one member state of the European Economic Area appears on it, and neither does Switzerland. European users are therefore about to start seeing ads that European businesses cannot yet place; buyers outside the region can. OpenAI says availability may evolve as testing expands and points advertisers elsewhere to an interest form. For readers of this catalogue the practical point is narrow but real: the free default model in ChatGPT — GPT-5.6 Luna since its price cut — is now also the ad-supported tier in Europe. Ad controls sit in Settings under Ad Controls, where personalisation can be switched off; doing so does not remove advertising, it narrows selection back to the current thread. Deleted ads data is retained for up to 30 days.
GPT-5.6 Luna →OpenAI's first gadget takes shape: a palm-sized speaker with moving parts, over $300, in 2027
Bloomberg reported on 6 August 2026 the most concrete description so far of the hardware OpenAI has been building with Jony Ive's LoveFrom studio: a doughnut-shaped smart speaker about the size of a hockey puck, priced between roughly $300 and $400, and due to go on sale in 2027. According to the report, the device is battery-powered and meant to be carried from room to room with one hand, built from a premium metal, and fitted with speaker grilles and microphones for spoken conversation with ChatGPT. Two details set it apart from the smart speakers that came before it. First, a camera system and additional sensors are said to feed the assistant information about the room it is standing in, so that it responds to what is happening around it rather than only to spoken commands. Second, the product reportedly has moving parts whose stated purpose is to give it a personality — a design decision that puts it closer to a small domestic robot than to a static speaker. OpenAI is said to still plan an unveiling later this year, ahead of the 2027 launch. All of this comes from people described as familiar with the project rather than from OpenAI itself: the company has not published specifications, a launch date or a price, and the details may change before the product is shown. wujec.ai does not maintain a profile of the device and will not open one until OpenAI describes it officially.