Reading your files and other tasks

The assistant answers from what is in front of it. Understanding exactly what that is saves more wasted replies than any other thing on this site.

Where it runs: in a task.

Attached files

Attach a file to a message and the assistant reads it: documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, and images all go to the model as themselves — an image is looked at, not guessed at from its filename. Once attached, a file stays in the task’s context for later messages; you do not re-attach it every turn.

Attach from your Library or upload on the spot. Either way the file belongs to a scope — personal, team library, or a project — and a task can only reach files in scopes it belongs to. A document sitting in your personal space is invisible to a task inside a project. See Where things live.

The artifacts already in the task

Docs, sheets, decks, apps, images and videos the task has made are visible to the assistant, and it can read into them on demand: the exact text of one section of a long document, the computed numbers in a range of a large sheet, one slide’s blocks, one file of an app.

This matters for big artifacts. Rather than holding a fifty-page document in mind, it reads the section it is about to change. If you want it to be sure about a number, say so — “check the actual figures in the sheet first” — and it will read them instead of working from the preview.

Other tasks

You can attach another task to this one. The assistant can then read that task’s conversation — what was actually said, decided, and produced there — rather than inferring from its title.

Only tasks you have explicitly attached can be read. There is no browsing of your task list from inside a conversation.

What it cannot see

• Files in a scope this task does not belong to
• Tasks you have not attached
• Anything on your computer that you did not upload
• The public web, unless an AI staff member with web tools is doing the work — see Web search and research

If an answer looks like it was written without the source material, it almost certainly was. Check the attachment landed, and check the file is in the same scope as the task.