ChatGPT Pulse (openai.com)

My pulse today is just a mediocre rehash of prior conversations I’ve had on the platform.

I tried to ask GPT-5 pro the other day to just pick an ambitious project it wanted to work on, and I’d carry out whatever physical world tasks it needed me to, and all it did was just come up with project plans which were rehashes of my prior projects framed as its own.

I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools. It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways. Both will stick around, but fall well short of the tulip mania VCs and tech leaders have pushed.

I’ve long contended that tech has lost any soulful vision of the future, it’s just tactical money making all the way down.

Just connect everything folks, we'll proactively read everything, all the time, and you'll be a 10x human, trust us friends, just connect everything...

LLMs are increasingly part of intimate conversations. That proximity lets them learn how to manipulate minds.

We must stop treating humans as uniquely mysterious. An unfettered market for attention and persuasion will encourage people to willingly harm their own mental lives. Think social medias are bad now? Children exposed to personalized LLMs will grow up inside many tiny, tailored realities.

In a decade we may meet people who seem to inhabit alternate universes because they’ve shared so little with others. They are only tethered to reality when it is practical for them (to get on busses, the distance to a place, etc). Everything else? I have no idea how to have a conversation with someone else anymore. They can ask LLMs to generate a convincing argument for them all day, and the LLMs would be fine tuned for that.

If users routinely start conversations with LLMs, the negative feedback loop of personalization and isolation will be complete.

LLMs in intimate use risk creating isolated, personalized realities where shared conversation and common ground collapse.

Google's edge obvious here is the deep integration it already has with calendar, apps, and chats and what not that lets them surface context-rich updates naturally. OpenAI doesn't have that same ecosystem lock-in yet, so to really compete they'll need to get more into those integrations. I think what it comes down to ultimately is that being "just a model" company isn't going to work. Intelligence itself will go to zero and it's a race to the bottom. OpenAI seemingly has no choice but to try to create higher-level experiences on top of their platform. TBD whether they'll succeed.

> Pulse introduces this future in its simplest form: personalized research and timely updates that appear regularly to keep you informed. Soon, Pulse will be able to connect with more of the apps you use so updates capture a more complete picture of your context. We’re also exploring ways for Pulse to deliver relevant work at the right moments throughout the day, whether it’s a quick check before a meeting, a reminder to revisit a draft, or a resource that appears right when you need it.

This reads to me like OAI is seeking to build an advertising channel into their product stack.

ChatGPT has given me wings to tackle projects I would've never had the impetus to tackle, finally I know how to use my oscilloscope and I am repairing vintage amps; fun times.

No desktop version. I know I'm old, but do people really do serious work on small mobile phone screens? I love my glorious 43" 4K monitor, I hate small phone screens but I guess that's just me.

Yesterday was a full one — you powered through a lot and kept yourself moving at a fast pace.

Might I recommend starting your day with a smooth and creamy Starbucks(tm) Iced Matcha Latte? I can place the order and have it delivered to your doorstep.

Cracks are emerging. Having to remind users of your relevancy with daily meditations is the first sign that you need your engagement numbers up desperately.

Hey Tony, are you still breathing? We'd like to monetize you somehow.

I'm thinking OpenAI's strategy is to get users hooked on these new features to push ads on them.

Hey, for that recipe you want to try, have you considered getting new knives or cooking ware? Found some good deals.

For your travel trip, found a promo on a good hotel located here -- perfect walking distance for hiking and good restaraunts that have Thai food.

Your running progress is great and you are hitting strides? Consider using this app to track calories and record your workouts -- special promo for 14 day trial .

Hard to imagine this is anything useful beyond "give us all your data" in exchange for some awkward unprompted advice?

They're really trying everything. They need the Google/Apple ecosystem to compete against them. Fb is adding LLMs to all its products, too. Personally, I stopped using ChatGPT months ago in favor of other services, depending on what I'm trying to accomplish.

Luckily for them, they have a big chunk of the "pie", so they need to iterate and see if they can form a partnership with Dell, HP, Canonical, etc, and take the fight to all of their competitors (Google, Microsoft, etc.)

If you press the button to read the article to you all you hear is “object, object, object…”

The one modern thing that didn't have a feed, and (in the best case) just did what you asked.

Next week: ChatGPT Reels.

“ This is the first step toward a more useful ChatGPT that proactively brings you…”

Ads.

They’re running out of ideas.

Here's the announcement from Atlman: https://x.com/sama/status/1971297661748953263

Quoted from that tweet:

> 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.

At this point in time, I'd say: bye privacy, see you!

> 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.

“Don’t burden yourself with the little details that constitute your life, like deciding how to interact with people. Let us do that. Get back to what you like best: e.g. video games.”

At what point do you give up thinking and just let LLMs make all your decisions of where to eat, what gifts to buy and where to go on holiday? all of which are going to be biased.

"AI" is a $100B business, which idiot tech leaders who convinced themselves they were visionaries when interest rates were historically low have convinced themselves will save them from their stagnating growth.

It's really cool. The coding tools are neat, they can somewhat reliably write pain in the ass boilerplate and only slightly fuck it up. I don't think they have a place beyond that in a professional setting (nor do I think junior engineers should be allowed to use them--my productivity has been destroyed by having to review their 2000 line opuses of trash code) but it's so cool to be able to spin up a hobby project in some language I don't know like Swift or React and get to a point where I can learn the ins and outs of the ecosystem. ChatGPT can explain stuff to me that I can't find experts to talk to about.

That's the sum total of the product though, it's already complete and it does not need trillions of dollars of datacenter investment. But since NVIDIA is effectively taking all the fake hype money and taking it out of one pocket and putting it in another, maybe the whole Ponzi scheme will stay afloat for a while.

The handful of other commenters that brough it up are right: This is gonna be absolutely devastating for the "wireborn spouse", "I disproved physics" and "I am the messiah" crowd's mental health. But:

I personally could see myself getting something like "Hey, you were studying up on SQL the other day, would you like to do a review, or perhaps move on to a lesson about Django?"

Or take AI-assisted "therapy"/skills training, not that I'd particularly endorse that at this time, as another example: Having the 'bot "follow up" on its own initiative would certainly aid people who struggle with consistency.

I don't know if this is a saying in english as well: "Television makes the dumb dumber and the smart smarter." LLMs are shaping up to be yet another obvious case of that same principle.

Jamie Zawinksi said that every program expands until it can read email. Similarly, every tech company seems to expand until it has recapitulated the Facebook TL.

I just thought that almost all existing LLMs are already able to do this with the following setup: using an alias "@you may speak now," it should create a prompt like this: "Given the following questions {randomly sampled or all questions the user asked before are inserted here}, start a dialog as a friend/coach who knows something about these interests and may encourage them toward something new or enlightening."

Anyone try listening and just hear "Object object...object object..."

Or more likely: `[object, object]`

I see OpenAI is entering the phase of building peripheral products no one asked for. Another widget here and there. In my experience, when a company stops innovating, this usually happens. Time for OpenAI to spend 30 years being a trillon dollar company and delivering 0 innovations akin to Google.

Human to robot servant: Do not speak unless spoken to machine!

sounds nice I guess, but reactiveness over proactiveness wasn't the pain point I've had with these LLM tools.

In the past, rich people had horses, while ordinary people walked. Today many ordinary people can afford a car. Can afford a tasty food every day. Can afford a sizeable living place. Can afford to wash two times a day with hot water. That's incredible life by medieval standards. Even kings didn't have everything we take for granted now.

However some things are not available to us.

One of those things is personal assistant. Today, rich people can offload their daily burdens to the personal assistants. That's a luxury service. I think, AI will bring us a future, where everyone will have access to the personal assistant, significantly reducing time spent on trivial not fun tasks. I think, this is great and I'm eager to live in that future. The direction of ChatGPT Pulse looks like that.

Another things we don't have cheap access to are human servants. Obviously it'll not happen in the observable future, but humanoid robots might prove even better replacements.

I'm immediately thinking of all the ways this could potentially affect people in negative ways.

- People who treat ChatGPT as a romantic interest will be far more hooked as it "initiates" conversations instead of just responding. It's not healthy to relate personally to a thing that has no real feelings or thoughts of its own. Mental health directly correlates to living in truth - that's the base axiom behind cognitive behavioral therapy.

- ChatGPT in general is addicting enough when it does nothing until you prompt it. But adding "ChatGPT found something interesting!" to phone notifications will make it unnecessarily consume far more attention.

- When it initiates conversations or brings things up without being prompted, people will all the more be tempted to falsely infer a person-like entity on the other end. Plausible-sounding conversations are already deceptive enough and prompt people to trust what it says far too much.

For most people, it's hard to remember that LLMs carry no personal responsibility or accountability for what they say, not even an emotional desire to appear a certain way to anyone. It's far too easy to infer all these traits to something that says stuff and grant it at least some trust accordingly. Humans are wired to relate through words, so LLMs are a significant vector to cause humans to respond relationally to a machine.

The more I use these tools, the more I think we should consciously value the output on its own merits (context-free), and no further. Data returned may be useful at times, but it carries zero authority (not even "a person said this", which normally is at least non-zero), until a person has personally verified it, including verifying sources, if needed (machine-driven validation also can count -- running a test suite, etc., depending on how good it is). That can be hard when our brains naturally value stuff more or less based on context (what or who created it, etc.), and when it's presented to us by what sounds like a person, and with their comments. "Build an HTML invoice for this list of services provided" is peak usefulness. But while queries like "I need some advice for this relationship" might surface some helpful starting points for further research, trusting what it says enough to do what it suggests can be incredibly harmful. Other people can understand your problems, and challenge you helpfully, in ways LLMs never will be able to.

Maybe we should lobby legislators to require AI vendors to say something like "Output carries zero authority and should not be trusted at all or acted upon without verification by qualified professionals or automated tests. You assume the full risk for any actions you take based on the output. [LLM name] is not a person and has no thoughts or feelings. Do not relate to it." The little "may make mistakes" disclaimer doesn't communicate the full gravity of the issue.

There's the monitization angle!

A new channel to push recommendations. Pay to have your content pushed straight to people as a personalized recommendation from a trusted source.

Will be interesting if this works out...

This is the path forward.

AI will, in general, give recommendations to humans. Sometimes it will be in response to a direct prompt. Sometimes it will be in response to stimuli it receives about the user's environment (glasses, microphones, gps). Sometimes it will be from scouring the internet given the preferences it has learnt of the user.

There will be more of this, much more. And it is a good thing.

I wish it had the option to make a pulse weekly or even monthly. I generally don't want my AI to be proactive at a personal level despite it being useful at a business level.

My wants are pretty low level. For example, I give it a list of bands and performers and it checks once a week to tell me if any of them have announced tour dates within an hour or two of me.

Why they're working on all the application layer stuff is beyond me, they should just be heads down on making the best models

I am pleading with you all. Don't give away your entire identity to this or any other company.

I was wondering how they'd casually veer into social media and leverage their intelligence in a way that connects with the user. Like everyone else ITT, it seems like an incredibly sticky idea that leaves me feeling highly unsettled about individuals building any sense of deep emotions around ChatGPT.

I’m a pro user.. but this just seems like a way to make sure users engage more with the platform. Like how social media apps try to get you addicted and have them always fight for your attention.

Definitely not interested in this.

Was quite unimpressive. In general ChatGPT has been degrading in default quality for months

This has been surprisingly helpful for me. I've been using this for a little while and enjoyed the morning updates. It has actually for many days for me been a better hacker news, in that I was able to get insights into technical topics i've been focused on ranging from salesforce, npm, elasticsearch and ruby... it's even helped me remember to fix a few bugs.

Wasn't this already implemented via google and apple separately?

Wow so much hate in this thread

For me I’m looking for an AI tool that can give me morning news curated to my exact interests, but with all garbage filtered out.

It seems like this is the right direction for such a tool.

Everyone saying “they’re out of ideas” clearly doesn’t understand that they have many pans on the fire simultaneously with different teams shipping different things.

This feature is a consumer UX layer thing. It in no way slows down the underlying innovation layer. These teams probably don’t even interface much.

ChatGPT app is merely one of the clients of the underlying intelligence effort.

You also have API customers and enterprise customers who also have their own downstream needs which are unique and unrelated to R&D.

Necessary step before making a move into hardware. An object you have to remember to use quickly gets forgotten in favor of your phone.

But a device that reaches out to you reminds you to hook back in.

Man, my startup does this but exclusively for enterprises, where it actually makes sense

It's very hard for me to envision something I would use this for. None of the examples in the post seem like something a real person would do.

Watch out, Meta. OpenAI is going to eat your lunch.

Wow, did ChatGPT come up with that feature?

Funny, I pitched a much more useful version of this like two years ago with clear use-cases and value proposition

Holy guacamole. It is amazing all the BS these people are able to create to keep the hype of the language models' super powers.

But well I guess they have committed 100s of billions of future usage so they better come up with more stuff to keep the wheels spinning.

Someone at open ai definitely said: Let's connect everything to gpt. That's it. AGI

Great way to sell some of those empty GPU cycles to consumers

I see some pessimism in the comments here but honestly, this kind of product is something that would make me pay for ChatGPT again (I already pay for Claude, Gemini, Cursor, Perplexity, etc.). At the risk of lock-in, a truly useful assistant is something I welcome, and I even find it strange that it didn't appear sooner.

"Now ChatGPT can start the conversation"

By their own definition, its a feature nobody asked for.

Also, this needs a cute/mocking name. How about "vibe living"?

Big tech companies today are fighting over your attention and consumers are the losers.

I hate this feature and I'm sure it will soon be serving up content that is as engaging as the stuff the comes out of the big tech feed algorithms: politically divisive issues, violent and titillating news stories and misinformation.

Contrary to all the other posters, apparently, I think it's probably a good idea for OpenAI to iterate on various different ways to interact with AI to see what people like. Obviously in theory having an AI that knows a lot about what you're up to give you a morning briefing is potentially useful, it's in like every sci-fi movie: a voice starts talking to you in the morning about what's going on that day.

try clicking "Listen to article"

Breaking the request response loop and entering into async territory?

Great!

The examples used?

Stupid. Why would I want AI generated buzzfeed tips style articles. I guess they want to turn chatgpt into yet another infinite scroller

Desperation for new data harvesting methodology is a massive bear signal FYI

Since every "AI" company frantically releases new applications, may I suggest OpenAI+ to copy the resounding success of Google+?

Google+ is incidentally a great example of a gigantic money sink driven by optimistic hype.

I'm feeling obliged to rehash a quote from the early days of the Internet, when midi support was added: "If I wanted your web site to make sounds, I'd rub my finger on the screen"

Behind that flippant response lies a core principle. A computer is a tool. It should act on the request of the human using it, not by itself.

Scheduled prompts: Awesome. Daily nag screens to hook up more data sources: Not awesome.

(Also, from a practical POV: So they plan on creating a recommender engine to sell ads and media, I guess. Weehee. More garbage)

so GPT tiktok in nutshell

It seems not useful for 95% of users today, but later can be baked into the hardware Ive designed. so, good luck, I guess?

Let the personal ensloppification begin!

Why?

ChatGPT IV

Technology service technology, rather than technology as a tool with a purpose. What is the purpose of this feature?

This reads like the first step to "infinite scroll" AI echo chambers and next level surveillance capitalism.

On one hand this can be exciting. Following up with information from my recent deep dive would be cool.

On the other hand, I don't want to it to keep engaging with my most recent conspiracy theory/fringe deep dives.

Product managers live in a bubble of their own.

Absolutely not. No. Hard pass.

Why would I want yet another thing to tell me what I should be paying attention to?

AI doesn't have a pulse. Am I the only one creeped out by personification of tech?

This is a joke. How are people actually excited or praising a feature that is literally just collecting data for the obvious purpose of building a profile and ultimately showing ads?

How tone deaf does OpenAI have to be to show "Mind if I ask completely randomly about your travel preferences?" in the main announcement of a new feature?

This is idiocracy to the ultimate level. I simply cannot fathom that any commenter that does not have an immediate extremely negative reaction about that "feature" here is anything other than an astroturfer paid by OpenAI.

This feature is literal insanity. If you think this is a good feature, you ARE mentally ill.

I need this bubble to last until 2026 and this is scaring me.

Yet another category of startups killed by an incumbent

Oh wow this is revolutionary!!

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OpenAI is a trillion dollar company. No doubt.

Edit: Downvote all you want, as usual. Then wait 6 months to be proven wrong. Every. Single. Time.

Can this be interpreted as anything other than a scheme to charge you for hidden token fees? It sounds like they're asking users to just hand over a blank check to OpenAI to let it use as many tokens as it sees fit?

"ChatGPT can now do asynchronous research on your behalf. Each night, it synthesizes information from your memory, chat history, and direct feedback to learn what’s most relevant to you, then delivers personalized, focused updates the next day."

In what world is this not a huge cry for help from OpenAI? It sounds like they haven't found a monetization strategy that actually covers their costs and now they're just basically asking for the keys to your bank account.

Here's a free product enhancement for OpenAI if they're not already doing this:

A todo app that reminds you of stuff. say "here's the stuff I need to do, dishes, clean cat litter fold laundry and put it away, move stuff to dryer then fold that when it's done etc." then it asks about how long these things take or gives you estimates. Then (here's the feature) it checks in with you at intervals: "hey it's been 30 minutes, how's it going with the dishes?"

This is basically "executive function coach." Or you could call it NagBot. Either way this would be extremely useful, and it's mostly just timers & push notifications.