No models, no benchmarks, no launch video. On July 14 and 15, OpenAI put two changes into the release notes that together make an afternoon of work less annoying.
1. One search for everything
Chats, projects, images and documents are now searchable from one place — on web, iOS and Android. You start from the sidebar. Filters narrow by content type, and clicking a result opens the chat, project or file directly.
Available on all ChatGPT plans, globally.
2. Custom instructions: 1,500 → 5,000 characters
Plus, Pro, Enterprise, Business and Education users can now stretch their custom instructions to 5,000 characters, up from 1,500.
That’s more than a number. 1,500 characters is roughly half a screen — enough for “keep it short” and “I’m a developer,” but nowhere near enough for real context, preferences and anti-patterns. 5,000 characters is a briefing.
My take
I think these two are more interesting than they look, because of where they show the competition has moved. Not just “whose model is smarter” anymore, but “whose tool still feels good after three months of use.”
Being able to find something you asked six weeks ago is exactly that kind of problem. And the custom-instructions bump is a quiet admission that people actually want to configure their assistants — not with a sentence, but with a rulebook. Anthropic approaches this through memory and skills; OpenAI does it here with the humble text field. Two roads, same need.
One thing nags at me about 5,000 characters: it rides along in every prompt. Fill the space completely and you pay for it in tokens on every single request. More room doesn’t mean you have to use it.
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