I temporarily upgraded to ChatGPT Pro so I could try out Pulse. I know, Pro is expensive. While it’s a “business expense”, I don’t plan to keep the subscription. I’m trying to cut expenses and raise revenue, not the opposite!
ChatGPT Pulse takes your AI chat history, optionally your email and calendar, and other tips you give it to provide a morning report on topics you’re probably interested in. It’s essentially a personalized “website” with posts written only for you.
The first version generated for me looked like this:
Other stories included what changed in the latest Hugo release, new web standards, and things to see in Oregon that might make for a good Micro.blog photo challenge. It knows I’m the creator of Micro.blog based on my questions to ChatGPT, and it knows I’m traveling next month because I told it. (I did not connect it to my email or calendar.)
It was all very impressive… and actually useful. A story can also be bookmarked into your ChatGPT history to follow up on later.
There’s something else about how this works that is fundamentally different than current chat-based AI where people are looking for answers. Instead of replacing a Google search, it’s adding opportunities to point to other websites and blogs. Because it’s proactively pushing stories to you that you may never think to look for, it should increase referrers to websites instead of subtracting them. Not enough to offset the lost Google searches, but still notable.
OpenAI is shooting for the moon with their fundraising, investments, and data center scale out. It’s too early to know how that plays out. But one thing has been clear for a while: they are building products, not just models. Pulse is the best example of that yet.
