On the heels of announcing a $6.6 billion funding round, OpenAI is getting busy with new products including the launch of the latest iteration of ChatGPT. The chatbot will now extend beyond simple questions and answers with Canvas, a new interface that opens in a separate window, allowing collaborative engagement with ChatGPT on writing and coding projects. Launching in beta, Canvas was built with GPT-4o and can be manually selected in the model picker. Canvas is being made available first to global ChatGPT Plus and Team users with Enterprise and Edu users next. The company says it will be available to all free ChatGPT users when it’s out of beta.

“With Canvas, ChatGPT can better understand the context of what you’re trying to accomplish,” OpenAI explains in an announcement. “You can highlight specific sections to indicate exactly what you want ChatGPT to focus on. Like a copy editor or code reviewer, it can give inline feedback and suggestions with the entire project in mind.”

“By allowing ChatGPT to make edits as well as suggestions, OpenAI is blurring the line between authorship and word curation,” writes Wired, expressing skepticism that Canvas will match the “incisive notes and careful guidance” of human editors, but concluding that “for people who don’t have easy access to human writing partners” synthetic notes on a composition and structure could be beneficial.

VentureBeat calls it “a direct challenge to rival AI startup Anthropic’s Artifacts feature for its chatbot Claude, which launched in June 2024” and says Canvas “also offers a side panel view to display and run simple Python programs that update based on the user’s prompts.”

But Canvas goes further than Artifacts, according to Tom’s Guide, which calls it “the most important AI tool of the year.” Canvas implements “editing functionality within the window, adding AI-generated comments and some of the AI writing tools we’ve come to expect from any modern word processor, including Docs and Word,” tasks also performed for code.

Led by Thrive Capital, OpenAI’s $6.6 billion funding round, disclosed last week is “the largest venture capital deal of all time,” according to Axios, which says it gives the company a market valuation of $157 billion. The round “was joined by Microsoft, Nvidia, SoftBank, Khosla Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Fidelity, Tiger Global and MGX.”.