ChatGPT develops a Pulse
OpenAI’s latest experiment marks the arrival of a more proactive AI — and a new feed to scroll. Sound familiar?
This is a column about AI. My boyfriend works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here.
Today let’s talk about a new experiment inside ChatGPT that could mark the beginning of a new age of more proactive and more personalized assistants. It seems obvious that the final form of large language models will not be a box that you type in whenever you need something. At the same time, how often do you want that same LLM to tap you on the shoulder and try to anticipate your needs?
Here’s how the company described Pulse in a blog post:
Pulse is a new experience where ChatGPT proactively does research to deliver personalized updates based on your chats, feedback, and connected apps like your calendar. You can curate what ChatGPT researches by letting it know what’s useful and what isn’t. The research appears in Pulse as topical visual cards you can scan quickly or open for more detail, so each day starts with a new, focused set of updates.
This is the first step toward a more useful ChatGPT that proactively brings you what you need, helping you make more progress so you can get back to your life. We’ll learn and improve from early use before rolling it out to Plus, with the goal of making it available to everyone.
On Wednesday, I attended a briefing with members of the OpenAI product team, and on Thursday I received my first briefing in the ChatGPT app. While the product is still at its earliest stages, I think it represents a notable step toward what ChatGPT and other assistants are working to become: personalized tools that work for you continuously in the background.
“What we built Pulse to do is think proactively, [...] do work asynchronously for you, and then curate that into a set of insights and updates for you each day,” Adam Fry, the product lead for proactive experiences in ChatGPT, told me in an interview.
Over the next half hour, Fry and the team showed off many examples of what ChatGPT put together for their Pulse feeds: researching Halloween costumes; suggesting sightseeing opportunities for an upcoming trip to Arizona; recommending pescatarian dishes that are available at a restaurant for an upcoming dinner; and delivering a personalized news briefing based on their personal interests.
