OpenAI Quietly Removes ChatGPT Group Chats—Workarounds Emerge

The story of the day

OpenAI removed the ability to create group chats in ChatGPT. The change, first flagged by users on Reddit, leaves teams and collaborative workflows in the lurch—no official announcement, no migration path. For developers building multi-user agent systems, this isn’t just a UX tweak; it’s a forced pivot. Workarounds are circulating (older app versions, third-party wrappers), but they’re brittle. The move underscores a pattern: OpenAI’s API stability has long been a sore point, but now front-end features are fair game too. Builders relying on group interactions—whether for agent coordination or shared contexts—need to audit dependencies immediately.

New tools & launches

Harbor — Apple’s Claris tests a local AI app for Mac, enabling on-device inference without cloud calls. [MacRumors]

BotPsy — Sub-billion-parameter agentic LLM for on-device personal assistants, open-source. [Hugging Face]

Currents News API + TypeSafe Jev — Pre-filtering tool to cut LLM token costs by reducing noise in API inputs. [Currents API]

Models & research

Domain-Routed Delta Optimization (DRD-MOPD) — A new on-policy distillation method assigning domain-specific parameter updates to student models. Claims 97.02% retention of expert geometry in tests, addressing a key gap in multi-teacher distillation where shared parameters dilute domain expertise. Open-weight. [arXiv:2611.13249]

Industry pulse

Apple’s push into on-device AI with Harbor signals a shift toward privacy-first inference, but the lack of details on model compatibility or performance leaves developers guessing. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s silent removal of group chats—without so much as a changelog—highlights the friction between rapid iteration and stability, a tension builders know all too well.

Stat of the day

Over 20,000 veterans and servicemembers have claimed a free year of ChatGPT Plus, per OpenAI. A rare data point on adoption in a non-traditional user segment. [OpenAI Blog]

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