👨‍🚀 OpenAI's Christmas gifts: App Store, cheaper subscription & more

In partnership with

Hello AInauts,

Welcome to the latest issue of your favorite newsletter!

OpenAI is serious about its "12 Days of Shipping" initiative, and we are struggling to keep up with all the experiments. This week: a new app store, a more affordable subscription for Germany, and personality controls for ChatGPT. Plus, two prompt tricks and a handful of book recommendations.

Here's what we have in store for you today:

• 🎁 OpenAI's Christmas gifts: New App Store, ChatGPT Go & more

• 🤖 2 absurd prompt tricks that still work

• 📚 5 AI books for the holidays: This reading material is worth your time

Let's go!

Clear communicators aren't lucky. They have a system.

Here's an uncomfortable truth: your readers give you about 26 seconds.

Smart Brevity is the methodology born in the Axios newsroom — rooted in deep respect for people's time and attention. It works just as well for internal comms, executive updates, and change management as it does for news.

We've bundled six free resources — checklists, workbooks, and more — so you can start applying it immediately.

The goal isn't shorter. It's clearer. And clearer gets results.

Get the free toolkit

🎁 OpenAI's Christmas gift: New App Store, ChatGPT Go, and lots of new features

Christmas has come early! OpenAI has delivered again. Not one feature, not two—but a whole bunch of new updates for ChatGPT that make our lives easier.

Following last week's introduction of the new, improved image model, we are continuing directly. Let us review what has been accomplished.

The ChatGPT App Store is here

The biggest update: OpenAI has launched the ChatGPT App Store. Complete with an app directory where you can use apps such as Spotify, Apple Music, Figma, Photoshop, Canva, and more directly in the chat.

You can find it directly in the Tools menu or at chatgpt.com/apps. Apps are sorted into Featured, Lifestyle, and Productivity. The cool thing is: just type "@Spotify, make me a playlist for my birthday party"—and ChatGPT will do the rest.

Some big players are already on board—and developers can now get to work and submit their own apps.

However, ChatGPT apps are not always intuitive. Some work the way you want them to (for example, Canva integration). Others are less magical...

For example, Apple Music integration cannot access playlists despite being linked to an Apple account! Spotify, on the other hand, created a new playlist without any problems.

ChatGPT Go now available in Germany

Good news for anyone who finds ChatGPT Plus too expensive: ChatGPT Go is now also available in Germany and Austria—for $5 / €7.99 per month (which should be €4.27 at the current exchange rate—but hey, math is optional—or let's just say you calculated that with ChatGPT 😁).

This gives you increased limits for chat and image generation, more capacity for file uploads and code analysis, improved memory for longer conversations, and the ability to create your own GPTs.

New personality settings

Do you find ChatGPT too enthusiastic? Or too cold? Or does it use too many emojis? Now you can customize it.

In the Personalization Settings, there are new controls with three levels: More, Less, Default. Finally, you can decide for yourself how much encouragement you need.

Writing blocks for content and pinned conversations

Another practical feature for anyone who writes a lot with ChatGPT: Writing Blocks make editing easier.

Instead of "rewrite the second paragraph," you can now select text and request changes directly. Accept or Reject—just like Track Changes in Word, but without the snide comments from colleagues. And when you're preparing emails, you can open them directly in your email program.

Also handy: pinning chats is now available on iOS, Android, and the web. Three-dot menu → Pin. This keeps important conversations at the top. Unfortunately, you can only pin three chats, regardless of whether you have the Free, Plus, or Pro version. Better than nothing, but a bit limited.

GPT-5.2 Codex for Developers - Including Skills

For the (Vibe) coders among us: GPT-5.2-Codex is here. The new model is specially optimized for agentic coding and is particularly strong for long-horizon tasks (it should be able to work on a task for longer than a day!), large refactors and migrations, Windows environments, and cybersecurity. OpenAI researchers have even used it to find security vulnerabilities.

And as already announced, skills are now also supported—very cool!

Our take: ChatGPT is becoming a super app

OpenAI is building the operating system for our digital lives, because this is more than just a few feature updates. ChatGPT is positioning itself as the central interface for... well, everything, essentially the Western WeChat. OpenAI also has big plans, in their own words:

With 800 million weekly users, they have the reach. The question is: Do we really want to do everything in a generic app—or do we still prefer the full functionality of the original app?

And how does OpenAI make money from this when developers can currently only monetize through external links? Questions upon questions. 2026 will provide us with answers.

🤖 2 absurd prompt tricks that still work

There are prompting techniques that sound so silly that you can't really take them seriously. And yet they work. Here are two that we always like to use.

1. "Do it 10 times better"

You wrote a prompt and the AI delivered a meh result? Instead of tinkering around yourself, just ask something like:

- Make this 10x better, then execute it.
OR
- Can you make this existing prompt at least 10x better right now? Do you have the capability to do it? Is there any way that it can be improved 10x?

Pro tip: Works for prompts, texts, code, or concepts—even multiple times in a row!

A Reddit user has radically improved his prompts with this technique. The technique is now so well established that it is taught as the "10X Prompt" method.

And our "ChatGPT Wrapped" year in review showed us that we, too, use this method more often than we would like to admit. 😁…

2. Take a deep breath, proceed step by step.

It sounds like a yoga retreat, but it's science: Google DeepMind researchers have systematically tested which prompts deliver the best results. The winner:

Take a deep breath and work on this problem step-by-step.

Yes, we feel a little silly doing it too. But it works!

The simplest tricks are sometimes the best. Both cost nothing, require no practice, and deliver measurable improvements. Just try them out the next time you receive an important request, and let us know what your experiences are.

📚 5 AI books for the holidays: These are worth reading

We regularly receive requests for reading recommendations and have collected a few suggestions over the past few weeks that we would like to share with you today. Spoiler alert: there are two books about OpenAI that couldn't be more different. Plus one that predicts a bleak future…

The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics

The thesis of Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI: Within the next 1,000 days, AI will render the entire structure of the global economy obsolete. He calls this the "intelligence inversion" – human intellect becoming a commodity – and outlines possible scenarios. Also highly recommended: the "Moonshot Podcast" by Peter Diamandis, where Emad is also a regular guest.

📎 Amazon.com | 🔥 Free PDF-Download (legal)

The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

Keach Hagey from the Wall Street Journal has been busy. She conducted over 250 interviews—with Altman's family, friends, investors, and Altman himself. The result is a portrait of a brilliant dealmaker with an almost religious belief in technological progress.

📎 Amazon.com

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

Karen Hao's book, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. She paints a much more critical picture of Sam and OpenAI. How did the idealistic non-profit become an empire with messianic undertones? The book was an instant NYT bestseller.

📎 Amazon.com

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

Stephen Witt tells the story of NVIDIA under Jensen Huang—from gaming graphics card manufacturer to the most valuable business in the world, on which the American economy depends. If you want to understand why GPUs are suddenly more important than CPUs and how a man in a leather jacket won this bet, here's the answer.

📎 Amazon.com

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares offer the most pessimistic perspective. Their thesis: super-intelligent AI will develop its own goals that clash with ours—and we will lose this conflict. Significantly. This book was also a NYT bestseller and was voted one of the best books of 2025 by the New Yorker and the Guardian. Regardless of whether you share the doom perspective, it is important to understand the argument.

📎 Amazon.com

Enjoy browsing! And if you'd rather experiment with AI between Christmas and New Year's than read about it, we completely understand. 😁

You made it to the end—thanks for reading! We’ll be back soon with even more updates.

Reto & Fabian from the AInauts

P.S.: Follow us on social media - it motivates us to keep going 😁!
X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Insta, YouTube, TikTok

Your feedback means the world to us. We read every comment and message—just hit reply and tell us what you think!