TWP: No Country for Old Models

Hi friend,

Two of this week's three updates are removals. (These companies ship loudly and delete politely).

Your custom GPTs have an end date. OpenAI is retiring custom GPTs across every ChatGPT plan and moving them into plugins instead (OpenAI). The published timeline covers Enterprise workspaces first: no new GPTs after 25 September, and the existing ones stop running on 11 December. Other plans follow on their own schedule, announced inside the product.

Migration carries your instructions across as a plugin skill and brings connected apps with it. Custom actions do not survive the trip. You rebuild those yourself.

If a GPT you built is doing real work for you, spend five minutes this week opening it and copying the instructions into a document you own. The migration will probably be fine. The instructions are the bit you actually spent time on, and right now they sit inside something with a December end date.

ChatGPT stopped deciding when to think. Since 14 September, Plus and Pro accounts no longer switch from Instant to a reasoning model on their own when a question turns hard (OpenAI). The Higher intelligence setting has gone from the web version as well. Safety switching stays.

Your answer quality now rides on a dropdown most people never touch. If replies felt thinner this week and you assumed the model had degraded, check the picker before you blame the model. Anything with a consequence attached, a contract summary or a price you are about to quote, deserves the thinking option selected by hand.

A prompt for the moments you catch yourself accepting a fast answer:

"Before answering, tell me what you would need to know to answer this properly, and which parts of my question you are currently guessing at."

Gemini turned up on Windows. Google released a desktop Gemini app for Windows 10 and later on 10 September, free to everyone, worldwide (Google). Alt and Space opens it over whatever you have in front of you, and it reads Gmail and Drive without a browser tab. Test one thing before you trust it: ask it to change something rather than summarise something. Reading your files and acting on them are separate problems.

Worth a look if you run something small: Anthropic expanded its small business plugin for Claude to 43 workflows and 27 new integrations, and the list now runs to Xero, MYOB, Shopify, Stripe and Zapier (Anthropic). It works on every paid Claude plan. The free workshops attached to the launch stay in US cities, so skip that part and go straight to connecting your accounting software to see whether month-end gets any shorter.

Elsewhere, ChatGPT's image tools gained templates and sketch-to-image on mobile across every plan with existing limits unchanged, Box, Dropbox and SharePoint joined Google Drive in the ChatGPT Library on web, and voice limits got simpler at three hours a day on Plus and fifteen on Pro (OpenAI).

See you next week,

Shantanu

P.S. If this was forwarded to you, subscribing takes one click at auracle.co.nz. (No migration required.)