OpenAI’s latest personalization play for ChatGPT: You can now allow the chatbot to learn about you via your transcripts and phone activity (think: connected apps like your calendar, email, and Google Contacts), and based on that data, it’ll research things it thinks you’ll like and present you with a daily “pulse” on them.
The new mobile feature, called ChatGPT Pulse, is only available to Pro users for now, ahead of a broader rollout. The personalized research comes your way in the form of “topical visual cards you can scan quickly or open for more detail, so each day starts with a new, focused set of updates,” per the company. That can look like Formula One race updates, daily vocabulary lessons for a language you’re learning, menu advice for a dinner you’re attending that evening, and more.
It’s part of OpenAI’s big push toward AI agents, an area in which the company — and virtually all of its competitors, including Anthropic and Google — are investing a lot of time and resources. For years, executives at Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and a whole host of other companies have talked on earnings calls about their desire to build successful AI agents for consumers, espousing that one day, such tools could do things like create business presentations, book travel, find a restaurant reservation, buy gifts, and more.
Related: https://www..com/the-stepback-newsletter/767376/ai-agents-jarvis-what-can-they-do
“The next frontier is agents: AI assistants that can take action on your behalf and work like a team alongside you,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, wrote in a Thursday blog post about ChatGPT Pulse. “Earlier this year we launched ChatGPT Agent … But most agents still need to be told what to do. The real breakthrough will come when AI assistants understand your goals and help you reach them without waiting for you to prompt them.”
So far, ChatGPT has been “reactive,” according to Christina Kaplan, who leads personalization and productivity for ChatGPT — the chatbot answers questions that users submit, putting the onus on the users to figure out what to ask and what they need. Now, she told The Verge during a Wednesday demo, ChatGPT can “keep a pulse proactively on things important to you” and offer “information, ideas, and tactical next steps.”
The personalized Pulse that Kaplan shared during the demo featured prompts based on her calendar, past requests, and chat history, such as what she had on tap for that day, her dietary restrictions, and what she had expressed interest in learning more about.
“You’ve got a busy evening—here’s how to flow smoothly from your run into dinner,” Pulse prompted her based on her plan to run before a work team dinner, adding that it had “mapped [a] 45-50 min route ending near KAIYO Rooftop, with buffer and backup if timing is tight.” It also offered a “KAIYO Rooftop Dinner Strategy” to help prepare a potential order for her dairy-free diet. It also prompted her to share adjustments for the future, with “What’s on your mind lately? I’ll remember it for tomorrow’s update” and potential answers like, “I’m curious about…,” “My upcoming plans include…,” and “I’d like to stay on top of…”
Other prompts from Pulse included a daily core or pilates routine Kaplan had asked for, a fuel-stop plan for an upcoming birthday hike, and a recovery exercise since she had traveled the day before.
But what about the “training data” of it all? In order to most effectively personalize this personalization feature, users will be prompted to share more of their data with ChatGPT. Specifically, if you already have “reference past history” turned on within ChatGPT, it’ll look at your past chat transcripts to inform what it researches on your behalf. And if you’ve already connected your calendar and email in ChatGPT, you’ll be prompted to reconfirm that you want the chatbot to be able to look at those apps in order to help you prepare for your day — and you’ll have to click “Accept” in order to allow it, according to Kaplan. When asked whether a user’s own feedback about their Pulse would help improve the feature for others, Kaplan said a user’s feedback would only help improve their own Pulse the next day.
“Your Pulse is between you and ChatGPT,” she said, adding, “The training data implications are the exact same as regular ChatGPT conversations.”
As for whether a user’s personalized Pulse research could push them into an echo chamber and reinforce concerning thought patterns — an increasingly relevant issue when it comes to AI and mental health struggles — Kaplan said the team does “have a number of safety filtrations and restrictions” and that OpenAI’s policy and safety teams are “looking into” it. The company did not follow up with specifics by publication time.
One key point: ChatGPT Pulse does not offer an endless scroll. “This experience ends,” Samir Ahmed, technical lead on the ChatGPT team, told The Verge during the briefing, adding that it’s designed “to work for you and not to keep you scrolling.”
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