OpenAI has started rolling out GPT-6 in its main ChatGPT app this week, and the headline change is not a smarter answer but a different kind of answer. Alongside the new model the company has switched on a feature it calls Intelligent UI, which lets ChatGPT reply with things you can tap and drag rather than paragraphs you only read. Think buttons, a small calculator built for the exact question you asked, an interactive chart, or an editable graph, dropped straight into the chat.
Paid plans got it first. Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise accounts were first, as TechCrunch reported, with free and Go accounts following about a day later and getting the same tappable interface. For now, by OpenAI's own account, the change is limited to the main Chat tab; the models behind Work and Codex are unchanged.
That last detail is the one worth holding onto in Malaysia, because it is the free version, the one anyone can open without paying, and because of how Malaysians get online in the first place.
A tappable AI lands in a country that already lives on its phone
Malaysians overwhelmingly go online by phone. In the government's own count, 99.4 per cent of Malaysian internet users aged 15 and over went online by mobile phone in the three months before they were surveyed, against 39.5 per cent on a portable computer and 14.4 per cent on other portable devices. The numbers come from the Department of Statistics Malaysia's 2025 ICT Use and Access by Individuals and Households Survey, which we wrote up this morning, and they are the backdrop to anything a company like OpenAI ships here.
A text box full of prose is a reading task, and reading long answers on a phone is work. A button you press, a slider you move, a figure you can open and poke at, is built for a thumb and a small screen. So the shift from reading an answer to using one is not a cosmetic update in a market like this. It meets Malaysia's internet users on the device almost all of them already use to go online, rather than the portable computer only about four in ten of them use.
What it actually does
In OpenAI's own demonstrations the interactive replies included a diagram showing how an aeroplane wing generates lift, a recipe laid out as visual steps, an explainer on how a bicycle works, a map for a multi-day hike, and a personal savings calculator you can type your own numbers into. The stated goal, in the words of product manager Aarush Selvan, is that for everyday jobs "the most helpful answers aren't just text." Users who find the visuals too busy can dial the frequency down, the way the other personality settings already work.
Whether all of that is genuinely useful or occasionally a gimmick is a fair question, and it is too early to say. There is no public evidence yet on which widgets people keep tapping and which they dismiss. An interactive savings calculator sounds like it earns its place; a cartoon of a bicycle may not. It is the same test every AI feature now faces once the launch demo is over. The same interactive, on-screen approach is turning up elsewhere too, such as the AI features arriving on new AI PCs sold in Malaysia.
One practical note for readers here: staged rollouts take time to reach every account, so if your free ChatGPT still looks the same, it may simply not have updated yet. OpenAI says the interface is meant to feel familiar across the web and the mobile apps, but has not spelled out whether it behaves identically in the phone apps, and in a phone-first country that is the detail that matters most. We will update this piece when the behaviour on the Malaysian app version is clear.
Image(s) courtesy of Gilles Lambert and Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.
