By Rounak Khare
ChatGPT Pulse was introduced by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, on Friday, through a post on X. This new feature is designed to send daily updates to users on topics related to their interests, their past chats online and other connected apps. It will appear as a new tab in the ChatGPT App for those who subscribe to it. It is currently only available to the pro subscribers.
Each morning, Pulse will deliver personalized updates to the user in the form of visual cards, which can either be quickly scanned through or can be expanded to learn more details. These updates will be generated after curating information ,which will be researched overnight by Pulse, through each user’s connected applications like Google Calendar or Gmail, the user’s interests and feedback, and any past chats. They could be pointers from news articles on a specific topic, or updates on sports pages that the user may follow, based on the user’s context.
OpenAI has showcased a shift in its consumer products, with features such as ChatGPT Agent and Codex, which aim to reduce ChatGPT’s role as a mere chatbot and make it more personalized, like a personal virtual assistant. Pulse is part of this broader shift, where products are being designed to be used by users asynchronously, wherein operations are not conducted simultaneously but rather over a course of a given time period.
These new “compute-intensive” products remain limited to OpenAI’s most expensive subscription plan, or the pro-subscribers and plus-subscribers. According to a report by TechCrunch, the number of servers required to power ChatGPT is currently very limited, and OpenAI is partnering with Oracle and SoftBank to increase its capacity. They are also set to rapidly build out more AI Data centres.
The post by Sam Altman on X states that ChatGPT should be treated like a super-competent personal assistant. Rather than merely responding to questions, Pulse has been designed to be more proactive, instead of reactive. He claims in the post that this is an early look and that they are working hard to improve the quality of this feature so that it can be made available to Plus subscribers eventually. He also thanked Christina Hart and Samir in his post on X, who are the designers of this new feature.