Ultimate Guide to ChatGPT in 2026 (Updated for ChatGPT 6 Astra) transcript

Chat GPT is a completely different app than it was just 6 months ago, and most people are still using it like it's 2023, just like an AI chatbot. And right now is one of the two most powerful AI tools available alongside another tool called Claude, which I've covered a ton of times on this channel. And the three things that changed the most recently with Chat GPT that many people are using yet. The first thing is we are now at Chat GPT 6.

There is a brand new model that powers Chat GPT called Chat GPT Astra, and is one of the smartest AI models ever created. The other upgrade that completely changed Chat GPT is Chat GPT Work. This is where an AI agent goes and does the work for you. So, you just give it a prompt, and it gives you a finished result, like an entire report, entire presentation, sometimes an entire folder of different things that you may ask for.

And we also recently got Chat GPT skills. That's when you teach Chat GPT how you do a task one time, and then it does it exactly the same way that you taught it every single time, and you don't have to repeat yourself, and your team could use this, too. So, in this one video, I'm going to walk you through this entire Chat GPT app and the way you're going to use it today, not the way you would have used it 6 months ago or a year ago.

And I want to start with the free plan, and then I'm going to switch over to a paid plan to show you some things that are not included with the free plan. I highly recommend that you stick around for that section, even if you have a free plan, because the paid plan that starts at $20 a month, it unlocks a lot of different things. So, even if you're a complete beginner, this is going to be useful. But hopefully, for people that have been using Chat GPT, I'm going to give you some refreshers, and then we're going to show you some new things.

And before we get into it, my team and I put together a free guide that goes perfectly with this video. It's called Chat GPT at work bundle. It's actually five different resources that we put in one bundle. So, you get an ebook that has 100 prompts you could use today. And we also have a checklist to show you how to actually clean up AI-created content before you send it to anyone, so it doesn't look like AI wrote it.

And there's other templates and guidelines that I think you'll find really beneficial if you're trying to master ChatGPT. This resource, this whole bundle, is completely free. I'll put a link in the description, so you could grab it. Okay, let's start with the setup, and I want to first point out something that could be pretty confusing, especially to beginners, but even people that use ChatGPT all the time. So, when you jump into ChatGPT, if you are using a free account here, you'll only see this little option here, where if you click it, it uses something called think.

So, what does this mean? Well, there's two different types of ways ChatGPT works. One is just a standard way, and one is basically a thinking mode. It goes and thinks. It may take a little bit longer to answer you, but it almost always gives you a better answer. But, that's pretty much it for the free plan, but there's something called a model picker, where you decide what model of ChatGPT you want to use. You won't see that in the free plan.

So, just for this example, let me jump into the paid plan to explain that, and then we'll come back here to the free plan. Now, I jumped into a paid plan inside of ChatGPT, and instead of having the think icon right here, you instead get this slider right here. So, the way this works is ChatGPT has a bunch of different models available. So, this is kind of the standard one that you get, but as you go higher here, it says medium, high, extra high, and then this is the pro ChatGPT 6 version of it here.

So, these are the thinking efforts. But, even if you click over here, on top of that, you could actually change the AI model that is available. Now, as you get to even higher plans than what I'm showing you here, I'm using the business plan here, it lets you really choose which model you want to use. But, they've really, really simplified this process. For simple things, you use this, and as your task gets more complicated, you go this way and for the hardest tasks, you're going to want to go all the way here to this pro version, which is going to use what's called chat GPT Astra.

Now, why wouldn't you just use this one all the time for everything? One, it's slower. Two, it will use up your credits. So, even if you have a paid plan, you might hit a limit if you use chat GPT all the time. Okay, so that's the very first thing just to show you the big difference between the free plan and the paid plan here and the models and the thinking efforts. The second thing I want to show you is here back on my free account.

If you click your profile and go to personalizations, there's a couple of things I want to show you that are very important. So, the first one under personalization here is if you scroll down, you want this to be turned to blue. So, you want the enable memory option turned on. Now, this is when chat GPT gets a whole lot better because it's going to remember things across different chats inside of chat GPT. And the second thing I want to show you is if you scroll all the way up here, there's this setting right here called custom instructions.

This is where you tell chat GPT what you want it to do and this will do it at the account level. Inside of every chat, you could also do this. There's something called projects here where you could have set up different things that you talk about to follow a set of instructions, but this one's important to set up because everything in your account will follow the set of custom instructions. Now, in my account, I've actually added a ton of different things, but you could start really simple.

So, this one is a useful one. Use simple and clear language, avoid complex vocabulary, and write in a conversational tone. I also like this one. Keep your answers short and to the point. Don't include anything that I don't need. You could also have a back and forth conversation with chat GPT and tell it you want custom instructions for the account and then have it interview you and then after a handful of questions, it will give you text you could literally copy and paste.

And in our resource, we also have more guides on this too. And since I mentioned memory, I should mention this tab right here. So, if you click on this, this turns on something called temporary chat. So, these are things that you don't want to be added to your account. It won't save it to history. It won't alter its memory in any way when you use this. But, one of the most useful parts of this is this option here. So, you could actually still use this, which is kind of a incognito mode chat, but it still can be personalized.

Or, you could just unpersonalize it if you don't want it. But, either way, it won't save it to your account. Okay, now let's talk about projects because this is honestly the feature that I would have wanted when I first started using ChatGPT. This came out a little bit later. And projects, the way they work is they're basically folders inside of ChatGPT where you could put in files, you could put in custom instructions just for that project.

And every chat inside of that project or folder will already have access to all those things and keep things nice and organized inside of your ChatGPT account. That is definitely how I recommend everyone to use ChatGPT is by creating projects and going back to those projects about specific things they work on. So, let's go to the left panel here. There's a lot of different things here. We're going to go through a lot of them in this video, but project is one I wanted to show you.

So, over here, if you press the plus sign, this will have you first name the project. You could also pick a little icon for your project here. And then you could decide how a project retains memory. So, by default, this project can access things outside of this project, so your whole ChatGPT account. Most of the times this is actually the useful, but sometimes you may want to contain that project so the memory is just that project's memory and not your whole ChatGPT account.

And then create that. Okay, and then inside of this project, if you go to project settings here, so projects have a set of different things you could change. So, memory we looked at, but we also have a set of instructions we could add it. And then we could also give it access to a library of different files. And those will be things from the sources tab down here. So, I'm going to add a couple of different things here.

Now, this talks about our service, the pricing, it has a proposal, and it also has a brand voice, which you could have a back-and-forth interview with ChatGPT to help you create these type of brand voice documents. I'll just show you one as an example. So, this brand voice talks about your tone, how you like to talk, things that we always do, and things that we never do. So, this is what I came up with for this fictional company, and I uploaded this.

This is something you could add to that custom instruction section, too, instead of doing it this way. But, these days, it knows how to go and find that file when it needs it inside of a project. So, I'm going to ask it to write a proposal here, and everything else it should know from the sources. So, this could be my project every time I want to do something with Greenline and proposal creation. And you could create a bunch of different projects.

This is my free account, but on my paid account, I have bunch more projects there. And just like that, it's created a proposal. Now, this is again is telling you to upgrade to the business account. So, if you do these type of things, the business account, which I will show you with some examples coming up, makes a lot more sense. It has a lot more capabilities with ChatGPT work, which the free account does not have access to right now.

But, this gave us what we wanted. It matched the tone, it has our brand voice, it also knew the pricing without it being included in the prompt. Next, I'm going to jump into my business account to show you what I think is the biggest change to ChatGPT in 2026, and this is the one I've been using a lot more. This is the one I'm the most excited about. This is called work here. You'll see a tab on top. So, chat is when you could do the things I've shown you so far.

You could do research, you could create images, you could do a lot of different things inside of chat. Work is when you actually get things from ChatGPT, and this goes and does the actual work for you and gives you a finished product at the end. And by the way, ChatGPT does have a desktop app. So, if you download the app, this becomes even more powerful because it could actually access folders on your computer instead of you having to upload all kinds of different documents to Chat GPT.

So, let me show you how I like to use Chat GPT Work. So, again, what I do is I always start with a project here and I create a new project. So, I'm going to create that project from here. So, same as before, but now we're going to do this inside of Work. Now, with that project, you could add files from here or you could just press the plus sign and upload files from here. Now, for this example, I have a folder of customer feedbacks, actually different emails that I've copied into text files and some online reviews and some phone calls that were transcribed with AI.

So, I'm going to give all those inside of this chat as the context for the chat and I'm going to ask it to read all the feedbacks, find the top three themes customers keep bringing up, and give me a one-page Word doc with a summary and a simple chart showing how often each theme comes up. Now, remember in the beginning of this video, we talked about models. Sometimes when I do analysis like this, I do like to bump up the model.

Again, you have the same slider here, but this time you could see you could change the model here inside of Work. So, let me leave it to high, but we're going to go ahead and choose Astra. So, you could see different models now came up. So, it goes Luna, then Terra's better, then Solis better, and then Astra is the best one. But, you can also change the reasoning within each one of those, too, and this is why Work gets a lot more powerful.

You have a lot more manual control than you did from what I'm showing you so far. And here's the result. So, it took a minute and a half. Again, that really depends on the level of thinking you set it to. If I set it to extra high or max, it would have taken even longer, but this wasn't complicated enough of a project for me to do that. But, this gave me exactly what I asked for. Now, for the next example, I want to show you the power of Astra when it comes to analyzing different things cuz I found a really obvious and big improvement from the previous models here with Chat GPT 6.

Now, when I'm not creating and I'm just analyzing here, I'm going to go back inside of chat. And hopefully, at some point they combine these two so you don't have to make the decision. Claude, the competitor to ChatGPT, has actually just now announced they're going to merge the two, and it will decide for you so you don't have to jump between the two. So, this time I uploaded Excel sheet here and I said, "Use this data here, and then tell me which one is shrinking and if there's a seasonal pattern that I could plan around." And then I asked it to make me a clean chart.

If I asked it to make me the entire slideshow or the Excel document or the Word doc, I would probably use Word, but for these kind of things, chat is fine. And by the way, for this one, I did use the maximum effort here just to show you how long something like that takes. So, in this case, it took almost 6 minutes, but it will give me the best possible answer I could get out of AI today, or at least out of ChatGPT. But it did give me the full answer I was looking for, and then it also created that slide.

Now, this is one of the newer option inside of ChatGPT in the paid accounts, and it's called ChatGPT skills. And I want to show you how to create it because it will literally change how you use ChatGPT. You will still, on the left side, see something called GPTs. So, this came out back in 2023. And what these GPTs allowed you to do is they let you create a little mini version of ChatGPT to do repeatable things for a very specific project or task.

Well, I no longer use GPTs at all, and I don't think you should use them either because I think ChatGPT skills has replaced what GPTs were meant to do. So, if I go to this plugin section right over here, you'll see plugins and you'll see skills. I'm going to talk about skills for this section, but I'll mention what plugins are. Plugins allow you to connect to apps you already use, so you could bring in the context and information from those apps into your chat.

So, I've been uploading files, for example. I have to copy and paste emails, for example. Well, you could connect to Gmail, or you could connect to your Google Drive or to notion or to slack and bring all those contacts and information into every single chat and into projects inside of chat GPT. So, plugins are definitely useful. You could see I have a whole lot of different plugins available and installed on my account.

And this is what skills are. You teach chat GPT one time with your own instructions, with your own examples and from then it knows how to do that task the same way every single time. So, you could share it with your team so everyone gets the same result. This is perfect for presentations and proposals and things like that. Now, remember earlier in the project section we made a proposal and it was okay. It had all the information but now every time I have to re-explain myself even though that project has the context the prompt has to tell it how it should be.

Every proposal is not going to look the same as the last one. It's always going to be a little bit different, right? So, we're going to need a skill so you could repeat it the same way. When you press the plus sign, you could create skills with a back and forth chat. You could use the editor here or you could upload skills. Skills are technically a file called a dot md file. At least a good portion of skills are and you could upload those dot md files onto your chat GPT account.

The other way to make skills is you could also go to the new chat window here and you could just tell it that you want to make a skill and it will be able to do that right over here. And it looks something like this. I just asked it to create a skill. So, it will then go call the skill creator to do that and then I told it what I wanted to do. This is to create that proposal here and I uploaded the three files that it needed and it did create that skill and typically this is what the skill looks like.

So, it has multiple different files but the main one is called skill.md and it has a description here, set of instructions on exactly what ends up happening. Again, a repeatable task that you want to do more than one time. And now with that skill we still want to follow with our format of going to that project, so everything keeps nice and organized in that project, but now we could use that skill here and then create a proposal every single time with a new chat and that skill.

Okay, now to use that skill, all you have to say is use the green line proposal skill and then tell it what you want here. And if I send this out inside of this project and inside of any chat in Chat GPT, it will be able to pull that skill. And then with that format, it's going to create this type of Word doc every single time in this format with all the right information and with my tone of voice. Now, this one really sets Chat GPT apart from the competitors.

So, the closest competitor to Chat GPT right now is Claude. But, Claude is missing one huge thing, which is a model that could generate images inside of your chat. Well, we have that option right here. This option create images will create images from a text prompt and it's the very best image model. In fact, it just got a huge upgrade just a couple weeks ago. And I'm going to do this inside of the same project, but I'm going to actually upload a sketch that I have.

And it's a simple sketch. This is optional, but I want to show you how it incorporates things that you upload to it along with the text prompt. Although, the text prompt usually does a pretty good job by itself. And here's the image it created and it followed the mock-up exactly the right way. The other thing you could do is you could upload the image you want here instead of a generating the image and it will create the rest of the flyer and use your actual image.

And the best part is this also replaces tools like Photoshop to some extent. Right now, I could make edits to it with text. For example, let's say I want to change the price. I'm going to say change the price to 249. And here we got the new price, but let me scroll up. It kept everything else exactly the same. This was the most frustrating part when you use image generators with any AI tools. It actually created a brand new flyer.

It didn't really look exactly the same way as the last one. That But this just did the edit for me. Now, using ChatGPT for search is great. It has search by default and it will go just give you the answer pretty quickly, but they also have another mode here besides web search, which is deep research. Now, this works entirely different than search. Not only will it go through hundreds of website, not just a handful, it will also spend maybe 10, sometimes even up to 20 minutes doing really in-depth research and give you something that is far more comprehensive than anything else you could get out of AI.

And here's the result of that research here. I'll just kind of scroll quickly through it, but I do this all the time for just about anything I'm trying to research along with my normal search, but typically this is far more comprehensive and I could have a back-and-forth chat with it. And a lot of times, it will show all the sources here on the right side. So, I might jump in individual sources, but as you could see, it went through quite a bit of sources to give me this.

And it only took 7 minutes here. And on top of that, you could also analyze things inside of your own Google Drive, for example, if you use that plugin and connect there to give it access. So, you could combine a lot of different things that way. And I also want to show you a handful of really useful things inside of ChatGPT. One is if you press the three dots in any chat, you could branch the chat. So, if you decide to take the conversation a different way, but you also want to continue the thread that you're having, well, it branches the chat.

Basically, it creates a new chat for you to continue the conversation without losing your prior thread. The other one is if you type in {slash} inside of any new chat here, it pulls in pretty much all kinds of different settings here. So, you could change the model directly from here if you wanted to do it that way. You could move things from chat to project. You could change your personalization here, your intelligence.

You could turn on temporary chat. And you also have voice mode. So, this lets you start a live conversation. This is really handy inside of the mobile app. Voice mode is one of my all-time favorite things inside of Chat GPT, so you could talk to Chat GPT on the go. In some of the paid plans, you also have something called Chat GPT sites. So, with Chat GPT sites, you could type in a prompt here, and I'll show you an example of one I have, and it creates a shareable website.

So, here's an example of a website I created here, and look how cool and interactive this website is here. I'm just jumping between different eras of AI. And these you could publish. So, if you press share, this can create a link on the web here, and when people go to that link, it's an actual website here on the web. So, anyone could use it, they're mobile-friendly. And I'm going to cover sites in a different video in more detail, but there is a lot you could do with this option.

Now, you also have this agents page, and what agents are able to do is they could basically connect to different things you already use. So, for example, this one could connect to your Google Calendar and your Gmail and things like that. And then, it could do things for you, like in this case, it could prepare a brief for anything you have coming up. That could be things on your calendar or your inbox, and creates a friendly to-do list.

Here's one for marketing, for example. So, this works across all kinds of different apps, like Canva, for example, Adobe, Microsoft Teams here, and these are the capability this one has. And these are just templates. You could also create your own agents here by just having a back-and-forth chat. Some of my favorites are a daily focus planner. So, it goes through everything I have going on, and basically creates a to-do list for my day to keep me focused.

Now, this one I created a dedicated video for it, so I'll include that video over here. Make sure you also check out that resource I mentioned for this video. That was that Chat GPT bundle, so you could take a lot of resources from that and apply it to some of the things I showed you in this video. And I'm also working on a Chat GPT work video that will be coming up next. Thanks for watching this one, and I'll see you next time.