OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pulse: Personalized Daily Briefs Transforming AI Assistant into Proactive Morning Companion

OpenAI’s latest innovation within ChatGPT, titled Pulse, generates customized reports for users during their sleep hours. Designed as a morning essential, similar to checking social media or news apps, Pulse delivers five to ten briefings that keep users informed and prepared for the day ahead.

Pulse represents a strategic shift in OpenAI’s consumer-focused products, with an emphasis on asynchronous functionality rather than question-based responses. Features like ChatGPT Agent and Codex are geared towards transforming ChatGPT into a more versatile assistant rather than a simple chatbot. With Pulse, OpenAI aims to make the platform more proactive in nature.

In a recent blog post, the new CEO of Applications at OpenAI, Fidji Simo, stated, “We are developing AI that will bring the level of support previously accessible only to the affluent, to a broader audience over time. ChatGPT Pulse is our initial step in this direction, initially available to Pro users today but with the goal of extending this intelligence to all.”

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman revealed earlier this week that some compute-intensive products from ChatGPT would be limited to the company’s premium subscription plan, which applies to Pulse as well. OpenAI has admitted to being constrained by server capacity for powering ChatGPT and is rapidly expanding its AI data centers in partnership with companies like Oracle and SoftBank to enhance its capabilities.

Starting on a specified date, OpenAI will introduce Pulse for subscribers of the $200-a-month Pro plan, who will find it as a new tab within the ChatGPT app. The company aims to make Pulse accessible to all ChatGPT users in the future, with Plus subscribers gaining access soon, but first, they need to optimize the product’s efficiency.

Pulse-generated reports can encompass roundups of news articles on specific topics or more personalized briefs tailored to a user’s context. In a demonstration for a media outlet, OpenAI’s product lead Adam Fry showcased several reports created by Pulse for him: news updates about the British soccer team Arsenal, suggestions for family Halloween costumes, and a toddler-friendly travel itinerary for an upcoming trip to Sedona, Arizona.

Each report appears as an “AI card” featuring text and images generated by the system. Users can click on each one to access the full report, allowing them to query ChatGPT about its contents. Pulse will automatically generate some reports, but users can also request new automated reports or offer feedback on existing ones.

Pulse stops after generating a few reports and displays a message: “That’s it for today.” This design choice aims to differentiate the service from engagement-optimized social media apps.

Pulse is compatible with ChatGPT’s Connectors, enabling users to integrate apps like Google Calendar and Gmail. Once set up, Pulse scans emails overnight to surface essential messages in the morning or generates agendas for upcoming events based on calendar access. If a user has ChatGPT’s memory features enabled, Pulse will incorporate context from previous chats to enhance reports.

OpenAI’s personalization lead, Christina Wadsworth Kaplan, highlighted how Pulse offers “net-new functionality” for consumer products. As a pescatarian, she explained how Pulse takes dinner reservations into account on her calendar and finds menu items compatible with her dietary restrictions.

However, it is worth noting that Pulse may potentially compete with existing news products such as Apple News, paid newsletters, or traditional journalism outlets. Adam Fry does not anticipate Pulse replacing the various news apps people use, and the feature cites its sources with links, similar to ChatGPT Search.

It remains to be seen if Pulse requires sufficient computational power to function effectively. According to Fry, the service can consume varying amounts of computing power for different tasks, with some projects being relatively efficient while others may demand extensive web searching and document synthesis.

In the future, OpenAI aims to make Pulse more autonomous, potentially enabling it to book restaurant reservations on behalf of users or draft emails that users can approve to send. However, such features might be some distance away, and would likely necessitate significant improvements in OpenAI’s agentic models before users trust the platform with such decisions.