The latest move from OpenAI is a new feature that could make your morning routine a little different. The company is introducing ChatGPT Pulse, a new AI-powered tool designed to act as a proactive personal assistant. Forget about your AI assistant waiting for you to type a question. Pulse aims to give you a personalized briefing every morning, a bit like a daily report from a human assistant.
ChatGPT Pulse Is OpenAI’s first proactive AI assistant
The idea behind Pulse is to make AI more proactive and anticipate a user’s needs. For a while, AI has been a reactive tool, providing answers only when asked. By generating morning briefings, OpenAI hopes to encourage users to start their day with ChatGPT. Think about something similar to how we use our social media or news services.
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, described the feature as a way to provide the kind of support once reserved for the wealthy to everyone. It could help level the playing field and streamline daily tasks.
Card-based operation
So, how does it work? Pulse is a mobile-only feature that creates visual “cards” with summaries of information. These reports can be a roundup of news on a specific topic. They could be about a favorite sports team or a more personal brief based on your activities. For instance, if you have your calendar or email connected, Pulse can use that data to create an agenda for your day, find menu items for a dinner reservation that fit your diet, or surface important messages you might have missed overnight. In one example, it even used a user’s memory of a running hobby to suggest running routes for an upcoming trip.
To get the most out of Pulse, you can connect it with other apps and turn on ChatGPT’s memory features. The more context it has from your past conversations, the better it can tailor its reports. One of the unique aspects of the design is that it intentionally stops after generating a few reports, showing a “That’s it for today” message. This is a deliberate choice to make it different from engagement-optimized social media apps and give users a clear stopping point.
The more Pulse knows about you, the better it works
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was very proud of the company’s new development. “Pulse works for you overnight, and keeps thinking about your interests, your connected data, your recent chats, and more. Every morning, you get a custom-generated set of stuff you might be interested in,” he said on X/Twitter. “It performs super well if you tell ChatGPT more about what’s important to you. In regular chat, you could mention ‘I’d like to go visit Bora Bora someday’ or ‘My kid is 6 months old and I’m interested in developmental milestones’ and in the future you might get useful updates,” he added.
While the concept is promising, there are some things to consider. The feature is currently rolling out to OpenAI’s most expensive Pro subscribers. However, there’s a plan to eventually reach all users. This is partly because Pulse is “compute-intensive,” and OpenAI needs to make it more efficient. There is also the potential for it to make mistakes or provide outdated suggestions, a common issue with generative AI.
