China Eastern Airlines will inaugurate, on December 4, 2025, an ultra-long direct route from Shanghai Pudong to Buenos Aires via Auckland, using a Boeing 777-300ER aircraft.

Though there is a layover in Auckland, passengers will remain onboard under a single flight number, making it a direct service despite the stop.

The westbound leg is expected to take about 29 hours, covering approximately 12,229 miles (about 19,700 kilometers), while the return flight benefits from favorable winds and should take about 25.5 hours.

The route will operate twice weekly in each direction.

Economy class seats are 258 of the 316 total; the configuration includes First and Business cabins as well.

China Eastern officials say the service will restore a long-lost Asia–South America connection and stimulate trade, tourism, and passenger traffic between the regions.

It becomes the longest scheduled one-stop direct flight in the world by both distance and duration, surpassing prior record holders.

OpenAI has released a major internal study, in collaboration with the National Bureau of Economic Research and Harvard, showing that ChatGPT now exceeds seven hundred million weekly users, and that the majority of user activity is decidedly personal rather than work-related.

Data from more than 1.5 million messages between May 2024 and June/July 2025 reveal that about seventy-three percent of conversations are non-work related.

The research also shows that daily message volumes have surged from roughly four hundred fifty-one million in June 2024 to around 2.63 billion in June 2025.

Young adults aged 18–25 account for almost forty-six percent of use, and the gender balance has shifted from a strong male majority toward a slight female majority (about fifty-two percent).

Among message types, “asking” — advice or seeking information — is the largest category at nearly half of all messages, followed by “doing” (such as writing, planning or simple productivity tasks) at forty percent, and “expressing” (reflection, creativity, emotional content) at eleven percent.

Use of ChatGPT for coding or programming remains small, at about four percent, and task-types related to work have declined over the period, with work-use messages falling from about forty-seven percent to twenty-seven percent of all messages.

The report suggests that while growth in user base remains strong and international, usage among existing users is stabilizing, particularly those who began before mid-2025, indicating a maturing stage of adoption rather than explosive rise.