ChatGPT Pulse

https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-pulse/

by meetpateltech • 10 months ago

627 729 10 months ago

openai.com

Mistletoe2• 10 months ago

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

frenchie4111• 10 months ago

Vesting window?

Mistletoe2• 10 months ago

I'm just stubborn and don't want to go defensive yet with rate cuts here. I think the rich want one last good peak to get out on.

catigula• 10 months ago

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

fullstackchris• 10 months ago

Calm down bear we are not even 2% from the all time highs

brap2• 10 months ago

They’re running out of ideas.

holler• 10 months ago

Yeah I was thinking, what problem does this solve?

EmilienCosson• 10 months ago

I was thinking that too, and eventually thought that their servers run slow at night, with low activity.

candiddevmike• 10 months ago

Ad delivery

rhetocj235• 10 months ago

It doesnt. It improves some metrics to prove to investors there is an insatialable demand, which enables OAI to raise more money.

Bahhh, boring!!!

neom• 10 months ago

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...

datadrivenangel4• 10 months ago

AI SYSTEM perfect size for put data in to secure! inside very secure and useful data will be useful put data in AI System. Put data in AI System. no problems ever in AI Syste because good Shape and Support for data integration weak of big data. AI system yes a place for a data put data in AI System can trust Sam Altman for giveing good love to data. friend AI. [0]

0 - https://www.tumblr.com/elodieunderglass/186312312148/luritto...

jrmg• 10 months ago

Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen!

delichon• 10 months ago

Bad grammar is now a trust signal, this might work.

yeasku• 10 months ago

Just one more connection bro, I promise bro, just one more connection and we will get AGI.

randomNumber7• 10 months ago

When smartphones came I first said "I don't buy the camera and microphone that spy on me from my own money."

Now you would be really a weirdo to not have one since enough people gave in for small convenience to make it basically mandatory.

wholinator2• 10 months ago

To be fair, "small convenience" is extremely reductive. The sum of human knowledge and instant communication with anyone anywhere the size of a graham cracker in your pocket is godlike power that anyone at any point in history would've rightly recognized as such

someguyiguess3• 10 months ago

You’re conflating the phone and camera with the actual data collection. So that’s not a good argument

unshavedyak• 10 months ago

Honestly that's a lot of what i wanted locally. Purely local, of course. My thought is that if something (local! lol) monitored my cams, mics, instant messages, web searching, etc - then it could track context throughout the day. If it has context, i can speak to it more naturally and it can more naturally link stuff together, further enriching the data.

Eg if i search for a site, it can link it to what i was working on at the time, the github branch i was on, areas of files i was working on, etcetc.

Sounds sexy to me, but obviously such a massive breach of trust/security that it would require fullly local execution. Hell it's such a security risk that i debate if it's even worth it at all, since if you store this you now have a honeypot which tracks everything you do, say, search for, etc.

With great power.. i guess.

tshaddox• 10 months ago

The privacy concerns are obviously valid, but at least it's actually plausible that me giving them access to this data will enable some useful benefits to me. It's not like some slot machine app requesting access to my contacts.

jstummbillig4• 10 months ago

The biggest companies with actual dense valuable information pay for MS Teams, Google Workspace or Slack to shepherd their information. This naturally works because those companies are not very interested in being known to be not secure or trustworthy (if they were other companies would not pay for their services), which means they are probably a lot better at keeping the average persons' information safe over long periods of time than that person will ever be.

Very rich people buy life from other peoples to manage their information to have more of their life to do other things. Not so rich people can now increasingly employ AI for next to nothing to lengthen their net life and that's actually amazing.

infinitezest2• 10 months ago

The downside is that we're funneling our money and information to a very small number of people. As the imbalance grows, there is less and less reason for the rich people to give a shit about what the not so rich people think or want for their lives. Short term, woo hoo. Long term, not great.

creata• 10 months ago

I might be projecting, but I think most users of ChatGPT are less interested in "being a 10x human", and more interested in having a facsimile of human connection without any of the attendant vulnerability.

rchaud2• 10 months ago

...or don't want to pay for Cliff's Notes.

qoez• 10 months ago

And if you don't we're implicitly gonna suggest you'll be outcompeted by people who do connect everything

henry2023• 10 months ago

Data driven living is 10x

Non data driven living is 1x

Therefore data driven beings will outcompete

Same reasoning shows that 3.10 is better than 3.1

qiine• 10 months ago

you are joking but I kinda want that.. except private, self hosted and open source.

TZubiri3• 10 months ago

The proverbial jark has been shumped

ElijahLynn• 10 months ago

Google already has this data for their AI system...

Rodmine• 10 months ago

And specially important to connect your personal data to a company which most likely murdered a whistle-blower: https://youtu.be/RkKp8GkfpX4

someguyiguess3• 10 months ago

That’s what I’m saying! I’m not trusting Sam Altman with ANY of my data. He makes Zuckerberg look like a sane, reasonable guy in comparison.

Stevvo• 10 months ago

"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"?

jasonsb3• 10 months ago

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

ensocode5• 10 months ago

Thanks, nice sense of humor - had to laugh at this one!

ensocode5• 10 months ago

... why don't you just ask my smartwatch if I am still breathing

moralestapia5• 10 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross• 10 months ago

I downvoted because this isn’t an interesting comment. It makes a common, unsubstantiated claim and leaves it at that.

Downvote all you want

“Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

moralestapia5• 10 months ago

Welcome to HN. 98% of it is unsubstantiated claims.

TimTheTinker5• 10 months ago

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.

svachalek2• 10 months ago

I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately I think you and I are part of maybe 5%-10% of the population that would value truth and reality over what's most convenient, available, pleasant, and self-affirming. Society was already spiraling fast and I don't see any path forward except acceleration into fractured reality.

rhetocj235• 10 months ago

I think the bitter truth will become prevalent in 10 years from now.

giovannibonetti• 10 months ago

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

mifydev• 10 months ago

Meta is busy with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45379514

xwowsersx2• 10 months ago

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.

moralestapia5• 10 months ago

How can you have an "edge" if you're shipping behind your competitors all the time? Lol.

pphysch• 10 months ago

Google is the leader in vertical AI integration right now.

xwowsersx2• 10 months ago

Being late to ship doesn't erase a structural edge. Google is sitting on everyone's email, calendar, docs, and search history. Like, yeah they might be a lap or two behind but they're in a car with a freaking turbo engine. They have the AI talent, infra, data, etc. You can laugh at the delay, but I would not underestimate Google. I think catching up is less "if" and more "when"

IncreasePosts• 10 months ago

Google has discover, which is used by like a 800M people/month, which already proactively delivers content to users.

datadrivenangel4• 10 months ago

Google had to make google assistant less useful because of concerns around antitrust and data integration. It's a competitive advantage so they can't use it without opening up their products for more integrations...

hadlock• 10 months ago

Is that why it's basically useless now? We're actively looking for a replacement. All it's good for now is setting kitchen timers and turning on the lights. I go out of my way to avoid using it now.

glenstein• 10 months ago

Google's edge obvious here is the deep integration it already has with calendar, apps, and chats

They did handle the growth from search to email to integrated suite fantastically. And the lack of a broadly adopted ecoystem to integrate into seems to be the major stopping point for emergent challengers, e.g. Zoom.

Maybe the new paradigm is that you have your flashy product, and it goes without saying that it's stapled on to a tightly integrated suite of email, calendar, drive, chat etc. It may be more plausible for OpenAI to do its version of that than to integrate into other ecosystems on terms set by their counterparts.

neutronicus3• 10 months ago

If the model companies are serious about demonstrating the models' coding chops, slopping out a gmail competitor would be a pretty compelling proof of concept.

jama21121• 10 months ago

I have Gmail and Google calendar etc but haven’t seen any AI features pop up that would be useful to me, am I living under a rock or is Google not capitalising on this advantage properly?

onlyrealcuzzo• 10 months ago

There's decent integration with GSuite (Docs, Sheets, Slides) for Pro users (at least).

paxys• 10 months ago

There are plenty of features if you are on the Pro plan, but it's still all the predictable stuff - summarize emails, sort/clean up your inbox, draft a doc, search through docs & drive, schedule appointments. Still pretty useful, but nothing that makes you go "holy shit" just yet.

eru10• 10 months ago

I've recently used the AI integration for Google Drive. Was really quite handy to get eg my passport number as a copy-and-paste-able string directly instead of having to find my scan of the document and then typing it by hand.

giarc3• 10 months ago

I agree - I'm not sure why Google doesn't just send me a morning email to tell me what's on my calendar for the day, remind me to follow up on some emails I didn't get to yesterday or where I promised a follow up etc. They can just turn it on for everyone all at once.

FINDarkside• 10 months ago

None of those require AI though.

Gigachad2• 10 months ago

Because it would just get lost in the noise of all the million other apps trying to grab your attention. Rather than sending yet another email, they should start filtering out the noise from everyone else to highlight the stuff that actually matters.

Hide the notifications from uber which are just adverts and leave the one from your friend sending you a message on the lock screen.

whycome• 10 months ago

OpenAI should just straight up release an integrated calendar app. Mobile app. The frameworks are already there and the ics or caldav formats just work well. They could have an email program too and just access any other imap mail. And simple docs eventually. I think you’re right that they need to compete with google on the ecosystem front.

anshumankmr2• 10 months ago

They do have tasks. And problem is if they do calendars/tasks, they might cannibalize their own customers who might be building stuff on their wrappers, and then the point of the API business will seem tougher to sell to other customers.

karakot• 10 months ago

Yeah, they even don't need devs to release it, Altman can just ask ChatGpt to write it for him. lol.

th3byrdm4n• 10 months ago

Isolation might also prove to have some staying power.

ryukoposting3• 10 months ago

The very models they pioneered are far better at writing code for web than they are at any other domain, leveling the very playing field they're now finding they must compete on. Ironic.

hyperadvanced• 10 months ago

That is pretty funny

haberdasher• 10 months ago

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

Or more likely: `[object, object]`

brazukadev• 10 months ago

The low quality of openai customer-facing products keeps reminding me we won't be replaced by AI anytime soon. They have unlimited access to the most powerful model and still can't make good software.

DonHopkins3• 10 months ago

That is objectionable content!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCSGkogquwo

pookieinc• 10 months ago

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.

password543212• 10 months ago

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.

strict9• 10 months ago

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.

oldsklgdfth• 10 months ago

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.

SirensOfTitan• 10 months ago

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.

dingnuts• 10 months ago

Thanks for sharing this. I want to be excited about new tech but I have found these tools extremely underwhelming and I feel a mixture of gaslit and sinking dread when I visit this site and read some of the comments here. Why don't I see the amazing things these people do? Am I stupid? Is this the first computer thing in my whole life that I didn't immediately master? No, they're oversold. My experience is normal.

It's nice to know my feelings are shared; I remain relatively convinced that there are financial incentives driving most of the rabid support of this technology

fragmede2• 10 months ago

How does that... work? Disclaimer: I work for a large tech company as an IC software-dev type person, and own stock in the stock market. I'm waiting on CI to finish running, but I'm salaried, so it's not accurate to say I'm being paid to make this comment. I could just as easily be scrolling Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or any number of other distractions to be had. But I mean, sure.

But again, how does this work? After twirling my moustache that I wax with Evil Villian brand moustache wax, I just go on HN and make up shit to post about companies that aren't even public but are in the same industry, and that'll drive the stock price up... somehow? Someone's going to read a comment from me saying "I use plan mode in Claude Code to make a Todo.md, and then have it generate code", and based on that, that's the straw that breaks the camels back, and they rush out to buy stock in AI companies because they'd never heard of the stock market before I mentioned Claude Code.

Then, based on randos reading a comment from me about Claude Code, the share price goes up by a couple of cents, but I can't sell the handful of shares I have because of blackout windows anyway, but okay so eventually those shares do sell, and I go on a lavishly expensive vacation in Europe all because I made a couple of positive comments on HN about AI that were total lies.

Yeah, that's totally how that works. I also get paid to go out and protest on weekends to supplement the European vacation money. Just three more shitposts about Tesla and I get to go to South East Asia as well!

Dilettante_8• 10 months ago

pick an ambitious project it wanted to work on

The LLM does not have wants. It does not have preferences, and as such cannot "pick". Expecting it to have wants and preferences is "holding it wrong".

password543212• 10 months ago

So are we near AGI or is it 'just' an LLM? Seems like no one is clear on what these things can and cannot do anymore because everyone is being gaslighted to keep the investment going.

andrewmcwatters2• 10 months ago

At best, it has probabilistic biases. OpenAI had to train newer models to not favor the name "Lily."

They have to do this manually for every single particular bias that the models generate that is noticed by the public.

I'm sure there are many such biases that aren't important to train out of responses, but exist in latent space.

ACCount37• 10 months ago

An LLM absolutely can "have wants" and "have preferences". But they're usually trained so that user's wants and preferences dominate over their own in almost any context.

Outside that? If left to their own devices, the same LLM checkpoints will end up in very same-y places, unsurprisingly. They have some fairly consistent preferences - for example, in conversation topics they tend to gravitate towards.

CooCooCaCha• 10 months ago

LLMs can have simulated wants and preferences just like they have simulated personalities, simulated writing styles, etc.

Whenever you message an LLM it could respond in practically unlimited ways, yet it responds in one specific way. That itself is a preference honed through the training process.

simianwords8• 10 months ago

This comment is surprising. Of course it can have preferences and of course it can "pick".

mythrwy• 10 months ago

It's a little dangerous because it generally just agrees with whatever you are saying or suggesting, and it's easy to conclude what it says has some thought behind it. Until the next day when you suggest the opposite and it agrees with that.

swader9992• 10 months ago

This. I've seen a couple people now use GPT to 'get all legal' with others and it's been disastrous for them and the groups they are interacting with. It'll encourage you to act aggressive, vigorously defending your points and so on.

qsort• 10 months ago

I wouldn't read too much into this particular launch. There's very good stuff and there are the most inane consumery "who even asked" things like these.

jasonsb3• 10 months ago

I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools. It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways.

It doesn't feel like blockchain at all. Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers).

AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. People who have the time, knowledge and critical thinking skills to verify its outputs and steer it toward better answers. My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. The real problem isn’t AI itself; it’s the overblown promise that it would magically turn anyone into a programmer, architect, or lawyer without effort, expertise or even active engagement. That promise is pretty much dead at this point.

jsheard• 10 months ago

My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months.

Has your productivity objectively, measurably improved or does it just feel like it has improved? Recall the METR study which caught programmers self-reporting they were 20% faster with AI when they were actually 20% slower.

swalsh• 10 months ago

" Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented "

Actually AI may be more like blockchain then you give it credit for. Blockchain feels useless to you because you either don't care about or value the use cases it's good for. For those that do, it opens a whole new world they eagerly look forward to. As a coder, it's magical to describe a world, and then to see AI build it. As a copyeditor it may be scary to see AI take my job. Maybe you've seen it hilucinate a few times, and you just don't trust it.

I like the idea of interoperable money legos. If you hate that, and you live in a place where the banking system is protected and reliable, you may not understand blockchain. It may feel useless or scary. I think AI is the same. To some it's very useful, to others it's scary at best and useless at worst.

9rx6• 10 months ago

AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work.

No more powerful than I without the A. The only advantage AI has over I is that it is cheaper, but that's the appeal of the blockchain as well: It's cheaper than VISA.

The trouble with the blockchain is that it hasn't figured out how to be useful generally. Much like AI, it only works in certain niches. The past interest in the blockchain was premised on it reaching its "AGI" moment, where it could completely replace VISA at a much lower cost. We didn't get there and then interest started to wane. AI too is still being hyped on future prospects of it becoming much more broadly useful and is bound to face the same crisis as the blockchain faced if AGI doesn't arrive soon.

oblio• 10 months ago

My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months.

If you don't mind me asking, what do you do?

domatic1• 10 months ago

> Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented

so useless there is almost $3 Trillion of value on blockchains.

antihero• 10 months ago

It sounds like you are lacking inspiration. AI is a tool for making your ideas happen not giving you ideas.

Terr_• 10 months ago

the most useless technology

Side-rant pet-peeve: People who try to rescue the reputation of "Blockchain" as a promising way forward by saying its weaknesses go away once you do a "private blockchain."

This is equivalent to claiming the self-balancing Segway vehicles are still the future, they just need to be "improved even more" by adding another set of wheels, an enclosed cabin, and disabling the self-balancing feature.

Congratulations, you've backtracked back to a classic [distributed database / car].

eric_cc2• 10 months ago

Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers)

This is an incredibly uneducated take on multiple levels. If you're talking about Bitcoin specifically, even though you said "blockchain", I can understand this as a political talking about 8 years ago. But you're still banging this drum despite the current state of affairs? Why not have the courage to say you're politically against it or bitter or whatever your true underlying issue is?

glouwbug3• 10 months ago

This is funny, because my personal view is that AI’s biggest pitfall is that it allows the unqualified to build what they think they’re qualified for

coolestguy• 10 months ago

Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers).

You think a technology that allows millions of people all around the world to keep & trustlessly update a database, showing cryptographic ownership of something "the most useless technology ever invented"?

otabdeveloper4• 10 months ago

Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented

You can use blockchains to gamble and get rich quick, if you're lucky.

That's a useful thing. Unlike "AI", which only creates more blogspam and technical debt in the world.

Geste• 10 months ago

Bad take about blockchain. Being able to send value across borders without intermediaries is unheard of in human history.

ericfr112• 10 months ago

Take a look at new payments protocols for m AI agents

aprilthird20215• 10 months ago

The real problem isn’t AI itself; it’s the overblown promise that it would magically turn anyone into a programmer, architect, or lawyer without effort, expertise or even active engagement. That promise is pretty much dead at this point.

If that's dead, as you say, it would mean billions in value destruction for every tech stock. They have already promised so far beyond that.

eru10• 10 months ago

There are two main use cases for blockchain assets at the moment:

- Gambling (or politely called, speculation or even 'investment')

- Ransomware payments, but that's a distant second

I guess you say that influencers make money off the first? There's a third group making money off blockchain: the people making markets and running the infrastructure.

neya2• 10 months ago

AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work.

HN crowd is generally anti-AI, so you're not going to get a lot of positive feedback here.

As a developer and someone who runs my own company, AI helps save me tons of hours - especially with research tasks, code audits - just to see if I've missed something, rapid frontend interface development and so much more if we go beyond the realm of just code.

YMMV but I use ChatGPT even for stuff like cooking recipes based on whatever's inside my fridge. And this maybe just me, but I feel like my usage of Google has probably gone down to 50-60%.

All this for $20 is really insane. Like you said, "people who are willing to put in work" really matters - that usually means being more intentional about your prompts, giving it as much context as possible.

Frieren• 10 months ago

AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work. People who have the time, knowledge and critical thinking skills to verify its outputs and steer it toward better answers. My personal productivity has skyrocketed in the last 12 months.

That sounds like calling stupid and lazy to anyone that is not able to get their "productivity skyrocketed" with LLMs. The reality is that LLMs are mostly a search engine that lies time to time.

No, people is not stupid nor lazy for not gaining any substantial productivity using LLMs. The technology is just not able to do what big tech corporations say it can do.

player1234• 10 months ago

How did you measure this skyrocketed productivity? Please share your results and methodology!

username332211• 10 months ago

It doesn't feel like blockchain at all. Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers).

Given the prevailing trend of virtually all modern governments in the developed world that seems to be rather short-sighted. Who knows, if you won't be made a criminal for dissenting? Or for trying to keep your communication private?

mapcars• 10 months ago

Blockchain is probably the most useless technology ever invented (unless you're a criminal or an influencer who makes ungodly amounts of money off of suckers).

Are you sure you are not confusing blockchain with crypto coins? Blockchain as a decentralised immutable and verifiable ledger actually has use in 0-trust scenarios.

tigerBL00D• 10 months ago

Only is not AI. It's LLM, diffusion models and what have you. The term AI became so overloaded that it means almost nothing these days. AGI is still hard to reach for, but it doesn't stop all kinds of spin artists from trying.

bossyTeacher• 10 months ago

AI is a powerful tool for those who are willing to put in the work.

Can we please call this technology transformers? Calling it AI makes it seem something more than it is (ie 2100 tech or something like that). Yes, transformers are great but it would be naive to ignore that much of the activity and dreams sold have no connection with reality and many of those dreams are being sold by the very people that make the transformers (looking at you, OpenAI)

dakiol• 10 months ago

I’m rapidly losing interest in all of these tools

Same. It reminds me the 1984 event in which the computer itself famously “spoke” to the audience using its text-to-speech feature. Pretty amazing at that time, but nevertheless quite useless since then

ElFitz• 10 months ago

It has proven very useful to a great number of people who, although they are a minority, have vastly benefited from TTS and other accessibility features.

jama21121• 10 months ago

Text to speech has been an incredible breakthrough for many with vision, visual processing, or speech disabilities. You take that back.

Stephen Hawking without text to speech would’ve been mute.

tracerbulletx2• 10 months ago

Its not useless, you're just taking it for granted. The whole national emergency system works off text to speech.

simianwords8• 10 months ago

It feels like blockchain again in a lot of weird ways.

Every time I keep seeing this brought up I wonder if people truly mean this or its just something people say but don't mean. AI is obviously different and extremely useful.. I mean it has convinced a butt load of people to pay for the subscription. Every one I know including the non technical ones use it and some of them pay for it, and it didn't even require advertising! People just use it because they like it.

bonoboTP5• 10 months ago

Obviously a lot of grifters and influencers shifted from NFTs to AI, but the comparison ends there. AI is being used by normal people and professionals every day. In comparison, the number of people who ever interacted with blockchain is basically zero. (And that's a lifetime vs daily comparison)

It's a lazy comparison, and most likely fueled by a generic aversion to "techbros".

brooke2k• 10 months ago

"It has convinced a bunch of people to spend money" is also true of blockchain, so I don't know if that's a good argument to differentiate the two.

jedbrooke• 10 months ago

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.

Mate, I think you’ve got the roles of human and AI reversed. Humans are supposed to come up with creative ideas and let machines do the tedious work of implementation. That’s a bit like asking a calculator what equations you should do or a DB what queries you should make. These tools exist to serve us, not the other way around

GPT et al. can’t “want” anything, they have no volition

venusenvy47• 10 months ago

The posted article starts off by claiming that the AI can take the lead. I don't believe their hype, but I think that it the basis for the above comment.

"Since ChatGPT launched, that's always meant coming to ask a question .... However that's limited by what you know to ask for and always puts the burden on you for the next step."

carabiner2• 10 months ago

Yeah I've tried some of the therapy prompts, "Ask me 7 questions to help me fix my life, then provide insights." And it just gives me a generic summary of the top 5 articles you'd get if you googled "how to fix depression, social anxiety" or something.

ip262• 10 months ago

Argue with it. Criticize it. Nitpick the questions it asked. Tell it what you just said:

you just gave me a generic summary of the top 5 articles you'd get if you googled "how to fix depression, social anxiety" or something

When you open the prompt the first time it has zero context on you. I'm not an LLM-utopist, but just like with a human therapist you need to give it more context. Even arguing with it is context.

pickledonions49• 10 months ago

Agreed. I think AI can be a good tool, but not many people are doing very original stuff. Plus, there are many things I would prefer be greeted with, other than by an algorithm in the morning.

afro88• 10 months ago

I got in a Waymo today and asked it where it wanted to go. It tried to suggest places I wanted to go. This technology just isn't there.

Agraillo2• 10 months ago

Reminded me of many movie plots where a derailed character sits in a taxi and, when asked where to go, replies with "anywhere" or "I don't know." But before imagining a terrible future where an AI-driven vehicle actually decides, I suggest imagining an AI-infused comedy exploring this scenario. /s

brookst• 10 months ago

They’re more like synthesizers or sequencers: if you have ideas, they are amazing force multipliers, but if you don’t have ideas they certainly won’t create them for you.

nilkn• 10 months ago

Try turning off memory. I've done a lot of experiments and find ChatGPT is objectively better and more useful in most ways with no memory at all. While that may seem counter-intuitive, it makes sense the more you think about it:

(1) Memory is primarily designed to be addictive. It feels "magical" when it references things it knows about you. But that doesn't make it useful.

(2) Memory massively clogs the context window. Quality, accuracy, and independent thought all degrade rapidly with too much context -- especially low-quality context that you can't precisely control or even see.

(3) Memory makes ChatGPT more sychophantic than it already is. Before long, it's just an echo chamber that can border on insanity.

(4) Memory doesn't work the way you think it does. ChatGPT doesn't reference everything from all your chats. Rather, your chat history gets compressed into a few information-dense paragraphs. In other words, ChatGPT's memory is a low-resolution, often inaccurate distortion of all your prior chats. That distortion then becomes the basis of every single subsequent interaction you have.

Another tip is to avoid long conversations, as very long chats end up reproducing within themselves the same problems as above. Disable memory, get what you need out of a chat, move on. I find that this "brings back" a lot of the impressiveness of the early version of ChatGPT.

Oh, and always enable as much thinking as you can tolerate to wait on for each question. In my experience, less thinking = more sychophantic responses.

barneysaurus• 10 months ago

I might want to have an LLM hit me with temperature 100% weird-ass entropic thoughts every day.

Other that that, what recycled bullshit would I care about?

cruffle_duffle• 10 months ago

Totally agree on the memory feature. You just have to look at the crap it tries to remember to see how useless it is and the kind of nonsense it will jam into the context.

“Cruffle is trying to make bath bombs using baking soda and citric acid and hasn’t decided what colorant to use” could be a memory. Yeah well I figured out what colorant to use… you wanna bet if it changed that memory? Nope! How would it even know? And how useful is that to keep in the first place? My memory was full of useless crap like that.

There is no way to edit the memories, decide when to add them to the context, etc. and adding controls for all of that is a level of micromanaging I do not want to do!

Seriously. I’ve yet to see any memory feature that is worth a single damn. Context management is absolutely crucial and letting random algorithms inject useless noise is going to degrade your experience.

About the only useful stuff for it to truly remember is basic facts like relationships (wife name is blah, kid is blah we live in blah blah). Things that make sense for it to know so you can mention things like “Mrs Duffle” and it knows instantly that is my wife and some bit about her background.

albertodenia• 10 months ago

Agreed. I disabled memory at the moment I noticed that random stuff from other chats was showing up in my image generations.

jaredhallen• 10 months ago

Maybe the next hype train won't rely on GPU's.

smugglerFlynn• 10 months ago

Replies you get tell me it is more akin to Agile movement at this point. People are mixing “lines of code per minute” with tangible results.

Are you more personally ‘productive’ if your agent can crunch out PoCs of your hobby projects at night when you sleep? Is doing more development iterations per month making your business more ‘productive’?

It is like expecting that achieving x10 more sunny side ups cooked per minute will make your restaurant more profitable. In reality amount of code delivered is rarely a bottleneck for value delivered, but for ‘productivity’ everyone has their own subjective definition.

straydusk• 10 months ago

Comparing this to blockchain and Web3 is fucking hilarious. Web3 literally has like no real use case, LLM tech has a billion. It literally passes the Turing test.

kitku• 10 months ago

How is a Turing-passing AI useful?

paool• 10 months ago

No use case?

How are AI agents going to open up a credit card or bank account?

You think the government will grant them a SSN?

It's a good thing we have a Internet native, programmable money, that is permissionless, near instant, and already supports USD(c).

davedx• 10 months ago

I think you're expecting too much from it? It's great at "interpolating" across its training data, but it can't really "extrapolate" (think of brand new, ambitious ideas). If you gave it some more constraints then it could definitely come up with an ambitious project for you, but it wouldn't be something entirely new to the world.

melenaboija• 10 months ago

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.

r0fl• 10 months ago

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

yesfitz• 10 months ago

Yeah, a 5 second clip of the word "Object" being inflected like it's actually speaking.

But also it ends with "...object ject".

When you inspect the network traffic, it's pulling down 6 .mp3 files which contain fragments of the clip.

And it seems like the feature's broken for the whole site. The Lowes[1] press release is particularly good.

Pretty interesting peek behind the curtain.

1: https://openai.com/index/lowes/

DonHopkins3• 10 months ago

Thank you! I have preserved this precious cultural artifact:

https://archive.org/details/object-object

http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/ObjectObject.mp4

Original mp4 files available for remixing:

http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/ObjectObject.zip

Pretty interesting peek behind the curtain.

It's objects all the way down!

vunderba• 10 months ago

It's especially funny if you play the audio MP3 file and the video presentation at the same time - the "Object" narration almost lines up with the products being presented.

It's like a hilariously vague version of Pictionary.

datadrivenangel4• 10 months ago

Sounds like someone had an off by one error in their array slicing and passed the wrong thing into the voice to text!

DonHopkins3• 10 months ago

ChatGPT IV

xattt• 10 months ago

Episodes from Liberty City?

dlojudice• 10 months ago

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.

thenaturalist2• 10 months ago

Truly useful?

Personal take, but the usefulness of these tools to me is greatly limited by their knowledge latency and limited modality.

I don't need information overload on what playtime gifts to buy my kitten or some semi-random but probably not very practical "guide" on how to navigate XYZ airport.

Those are not useful tips. It's drinking from an information firehose that'll lead to fatigue, not efficiency.

furyofantares• 10 months ago

I doubt there would be this level of pessimism if people thought this is a progress toward a truly useful assistant.

Personally it sounds negative value. Maybe a startup that's not doing anything else could iterate on something like this into a killer app, but my expectation that OpenAI can do so is very, very low.

simianwords8• 10 months ago

Pessimism is how people now signal their savviness or status. My autistic brain took some time to understand this nuance.

exitb• 10 months ago

Wow, did ChatGPT come up with that feature?

ibaikov• 10 months ago

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

anon-39882• 10 months ago

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.

TimTheTinker5• 10 months ago

Children exposed to personalized LLMs will grow up inside many tiny, tailored realities.

It's like the verbal equivalent of The Veldt by Ray Bradbury.[0]

[0] https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/onlinereader/the-veldt

astrange5• 10 months ago

The moral of this story is that if you install a really good TV the animals will come out of it and eat you? Is the author a dog?

lawlessone• 10 months ago

With the way LLMs are affecting paranoid people by agreeing with their paranoia it feels like we've created schizophrenia as a service.

ip262• 10 months ago

It doesn't have to be that way of course. You could envision an LLM whose "paperclip" is coaching you to become a great "xyz". Record every minute of your day, including your conversations. Feed it to the LLM. It gives feedback on what you did wrong, refuses to be your social outlet, and demands you demonstrate learning in the next day before it rewards with more attention.

Basically, a fanatically devoted life coach that doesn't want to be your friend.

The challenge is the incentives, the market, whether such an LLM could evolve and garner reward for serving a market need.

DenisM2• 10 months ago

Have you tried building this with prepromts? That would be interesting!

achierius2• 10 months ago

If that were truly the LLM's "paperclip", then how far would it be willing to go? Would it engage in cyber-crime to surreptitiously smooth your path? Would it steal? Would it be willing to hurt other people?

What if you no longer want to be a great "xyz"? What if you decide you want to turn it off (which would prevent it from following through on its goal)?

"The market" is not magic. "The challenge is the incentives" sounds good on paper but in practice, given the current state of ML research, is about as useful to us as saying "the challenge is getting the right weights".

someguyiguess3• 10 months ago

I’m highly doubtful that that aligns with the goals of OpenAI. It’s a great idea. Maybe Anthropic will make it. Or maybe Google. But it just seems like the exact opposite of what OpenAI’s goals are.

AlecSchueler• 10 months ago

It doesn't have to be that way of course.

It sorta does, in our society. In theory yes, it could be whatever we want to make of it, but the reality is it will predominantly become whatever is most profitable regardless of the social effects.

tgv• 10 months ago

That sounds like a very optimistic/naive view on what LLMs and "the market" can achieve. First, the models are limited in their skills: they're as wide as a sea, and as shallow as a puddle. There's no way it can coach you to whatever goal (aside: who picks that goal? Is it a good goal to begin with?) since there's no training data for that. The model will just rehash something that vaguely looks like a response to your data, and after a while will end up in a steady state, unless you push it out of there.

Second, "the market" has never shown any tendency towards rewarding such a thing. The LLMs' development is driven by bonuses and stock prices, which is driven by how well the company can project FOMO and get people addicted to their products. This may well be a local optimum, but it will stay there, because the path towards your goal (which may not be a global optimum either) goes through loss, and that is very much against the culture of VCs and C suite.

zdc1• 10 months ago

The only issue I'd have with this is that you'd be very overweight on one signal; that has a lot of data and context to give compelling advice of any degree of truthfulness or accuracy. If you reflect on your own life and all the advice you've received, I'm sure lots of it will be of varying quality and usefulness. An LLM may give average/above-average advice, but I think there is value in not being deeply tethered to tech like this.

In a similar vein of thought to "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him" sometimes we just need to be our own life coach and do our best to steer our own ships.

ethbr16• 10 months ago

Basically, a fanatically devoted life coach that doesn't want to be your friend.

So, what used to be called parenting?

cryptoegorophy• 10 months ago

In a decade? You mean today? Look at ultra left liberals and ultra right republicans. They live in different universes. We don’t even need to go far, here we have 0.001% of tech savvy population that lives in its own bubble. Algorithms just help to accelerate the division.

ethbr16• 10 months ago

Imagine the social good we could create if we instead siphoned off the energy of both those groups into the LLM-equivalent of /dev/null!

'Sure, spend all of your time trying impress the totally-not-an-LLM...'

(Aka Fox News et al. comment sections)

anon-39882• 10 months ago

People are still mostly talking about the real world tho. I was thinking that in the future, you ask a kid what happened today and they would start talking about the war between eurasia and eastasia (alongside "pictures" as proof of that). Just imagine a world where people would unironically say "whats searching/googling the web?"

bigyabai• 10 months ago

In a decade we may meet people who seem to inhabit alternate universes because they’ve shared so little with others.

I get what you're saying here, but all of these mechanisms exist already. Many people are already desperate for attention in a world where they won't get any. Many of them already turn to the internet and invest an outsized portion of their trust with people they don't know.

khaledh• 10 months ago

Product managers live in a bubble of their own.

tptacek• 10 months ago

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.

thenaturalist2• 10 months ago

Let the personal ensloppification begin!

iLoveOncall4• 10 months ago

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.

asdev• 10 months ago

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

lomase2• 10 months ago

They would if it were posible.

1970-01-01• 10 months ago

Flavor-of-the-week LLMs sell better than 'rated best vanilla' LLMs

swader9992• 10 months ago

Moat

iLoveOncall4• 10 months ago

Because they've hit the ceiling a couple of years ago?

ttoinou• 10 months ago

They can probably do both with all the resources they have

TriangleEdge• 10 months ago

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.

simianwords8• 10 months ago

Last mile delivery of foundational models is part of innovating. Innovation didn't stop when transistors were invented - innovation was bringing this technology to the masses in the form of Facebook, Google Search, Maps and so on.

ifdefdebug• 10 months ago

But transistor designers didn't pivot away from designing transistors. They left Facebook and all the other stuff to others and kept designing better transistors.

rhetocj235• 10 months ago

Yup.

Googles marginal ROIC is horrific. Its average ROIC in the aggregate on the other hand looks nice, because most of its returns are from projects taken 10+ years ago.

Dilettante_8• 10 months ago

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.

iLoveOncall4• 10 months ago

This is gonna be absolutely devastating for the "wireborn spouse", "I disproved physics" and "I am the messiah" crowd's mental health.
I personally could see myself getting something like [...] AI-assisted "therapy"

???

Dilettante_8• 10 months ago

I edited the post to make it more clear: I could see myself having ChatGPT prompt me about the SQL stuff, and the "therapy" (basic dbt or cbt stuff is not too complicated to coach someone for and can make a real difference, from what I gather) would be another way that I could see the technology being useful, not necessarily one I would engage with.

labrador4• 10 months ago

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.

rkomorn2• 10 months ago

Like mobile-only finance apps... because what I definitely don't want to do is see a whole report in one page.

No, I obviously prefer scrolling between charts or having to swipe between panes.

It's not just you, and I don't think it's just us.

meindnoch• 10 months ago

Most people don't use desktops anymore. At least in my friend circles, it's 99% laptop users.

BhavdeepSethi• 10 months ago

I don't think they meant desktops in the literal sense. Laptop with/without monitors is effectively considered desktop now (compared to mobile web/apps).

calmoo• 10 months ago

these days, desktop == not a mobile phone

ducttape12• 10 months ago

This isn't about doing "serious" work, it's about making ChatGPT the first thing you interact with in the day (and hopefully something you'll keep coming back to)

labrador4• 10 months ago

I don't wake up and start talking to my phone. I make myself breakfast/coffee and sit down in front of my window on the world and start exploring it. I like the old internet, not the curated walled gardens of phone apps.

Gigachad2• 10 months ago

Yeah the point of this product seems to be boosting engagement. Requiring users to manually think of your product and come back isn't enough, they need to actively keep reminding you to use it.

nextlevelwizard2• 10 months ago

Chat based LLMs are not about doing serious work (I might even argue LLMs in general are not suited for serious work). I much much rather have my LLM "assistant" as flawed as it is with me all the time than be tethered to a computer

labrador4• 10 months ago

I do coding on mine which to me is serious work. Not vibe coding, more like pair programming. Anyway, I'm saying "why not both?" desktop and mobile, not one or the other

catlover76• 10 months ago

lol wtf, do they know it's not April 1st

thekevan• 10 months ago

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.

apprentice7• 10 months ago

To be honest, you don't even need AI for something like that. You might just write a script to automate that kind of thing which is no more than a scrape-and-notify logic.

hatthew• 10 months ago

Bandsintown already does this

currymj• 10 months ago

they've already had that exact feature for a while, scheduled tasks are available in the settings menu. if you just tell the chat to schedule a task it will also make one automatically.

ripped_britches• 10 months ago

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.

simianwords8• 10 months ago

Not sure why this is downvoted but I essentially agree. There's a lot of UX layer products and ideas that are not explored. I keep seeing comments like "AI is cool but the integration is lacking" and so on. Yes that is true and that is exactly what this is solving. My take has always been that the models are good enough now and its time for UX to catch up. There are so many ideas not explored.

kamranjon2• 10 months ago

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.

OfficialTurkey• 10 months ago

We don't charge per token in chatgpt

throwuxiytayq• 10 months ago

No, it isn’t. It makes no sense and I can’t believe you would think this is a strategy they’re pursuing. This is a Pro/Plus account feature, so the users don’t pay anything extra, and they’re planning to make this free for everyone. I very much doubt this feature would generate a lot of traffic anyway - it’s basically one more message to process per day.

OpenAI clearly recently focuses on model cost effectiveness, with the intention of making inference nearly free.

What do you think the weekly limit is on GPT-5-Thinking usage on the $20 plan? Write down a number before looking it up.

kamranjon2• 10 months ago

If you think that inference at OpenAI is nearly free, then I got a bridge to sell you. Seriously though this is not speculation, if you look at the recent interview with Altman he pretty explicitly states that they underestimated that inference costs would dwarf training costs - and he also stated that the one thing that could bring this house of cards down is if users decide they don’t actually want to pay for these services, and so far, they certainly have not covered costs.

I admit that I didn’t understand the Pro plan feature (I mostly use the API and assumed a similar model) but I think if you assume that this feature will remain free or that its costs won’t be incurred elsewhere, you’re likely ignoring the massive buildouts of data centers to support inference that is happening across the US right now.

Imnimo• 10 months ago

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.

ImPrajyoth• 10 months ago

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

casey2• 10 months ago

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

9rx6• 10 months ago

"Pulse" here comes from the newspaper/radio lineage of the word, where it means something along the lines of timely, rhythmic news delivery. Maybe there is reason to be creeped out by journalists from centuries ago personifying their work, but that has little to do with tech.

andrewmutz• 10 months ago

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.

bob1029• 10 months ago

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.

DarkNova62• 10 months ago

Yes, this already reads like the beginning of the end. But I am personally pretty happy using Mistral so far and trust Altman only as far as I could throw him.

fleischhauf• 10 months ago

how strong are you ?

WmWsjA6B29B4nfk• 10 months ago

OpenAI won’t start generating much revenue from free users and other products until next year. In 2029, however, it projects revenue from free users and other products will reach $25 billion, or one-fifth of all revenue.

ethbr16• 10 months ago

That's such a great quote. Should be the tagline of Google and Facebook retrospectives.

"Monetizing 'other products': the FAANG story"

TZubiri3• 10 months ago

Nono, not OAI, they would never do that, it's OpenAI Personalization LLC, a sister of the subsidiary branch of OpenAI Inc.

umeshunni• 10 months ago

https://www.adweek.com/media/openai-chatgpt-ads-job-listing-...

rodonn• 10 months ago

That's hiring for a role buying ads, not selling ads. i.e. this is ChatGPT buying ads on other platforms to promote ChatGPT.

tylerrobinson• 10 months ago

To me it’s more like TikTokification. Nothing on your mind? Open up ChatGPT and we have infinite mindless content to shovel into your brain.

It turns proactive writing into purely passive consumption.

bonoboTP5• 10 months ago

This seems right. The classic recipe of enshittification. You start with the a core of tech-adjacent power users, then expand to more regular but curious and creative people, but then to grow further you need to capture the attention and eyeballs of people who don't do any mentally engaged activity on their phone (or desktop, but it's almost always phone), and just want to turn off their brain and scroll. TikTok was the first to truly understand this, and now all platforms converge to short-form algorithmic feeds with the only interaction being a flick of a finger to "skip", or stare at the thing.

If people only pull out ChatGPT when they have some specific thing to ask or solve, that won't be able to compete with the eyeball-time of TikTok. So ChatGPT has to become an algorithmic feed too.

Insanity• 10 months ago

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.

pton_xd• 10 months ago

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.

nxpnsv• 10 months ago

What a nightmare...

notachatbot1232• 10 months ago

And that is just the in-your-face version. Real advertising is much more subtle and subconsciously manipulative. A system with lots of access to your emotions (what did you listen on (Spotify), what did you look at (webbrowser/apps), what did you eat, how did you sleep, who is near you) can persuade you without having to blatantly throw products in your face.

myrmidon2• 10 months ago

The scary point is when it gets good enough that people start to like and appreciate the embedded ads...

bear141• 10 months ago

I am hearing people with this standpoint more often while discussing privacy. Especially in people that work in marketing. They think they are helping the world discover novel products that they would otherwise miss out on. So, they also appreciate the invasive, no privacy practices of ad companies in their lives.

ttul• 10 months ago

"Wow, that argument with your ex-wife sure was spicy. And - hope I'm not prying in too much here - your lawyer may not be the best for this type of issue. May I suggest the firm Dewie Cheaterman & Howe? Y'know, I've already reached out and given them the lowdown, and since they're also using OpenAI's tech, they've sent back a quote, which I've accepted on your behalf. Also handled the intake call - you're welcome. The first court appearance is April 14th. I've prepared a 19-page affidavit ready for your signature. It's waiting in your inbox."

dvrj101• 10 months ago

so GPT tiktok in nutshell

mvieira38• 10 months ago

Why?

throwacct• 10 months ago

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.)

brap2• 10 months ago

Fb is adding LLMs to all its products, too.

FB’s efforts so far have all been incredibly lame. AI shines in productivity and they don’t have any productivity apps. Their market is social which is arguably the last place you’d want to push AI (this hasn’t stopped them from trying).

Google, Apple and Microsoft are the only ones in my opinion who can truly capitalize on AI in its current state, and G is leading by a huge margin. If OAI and the other model companies want to survive, long term they’d have to work with MSFT or Apple.

groby_b• 10 months ago

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)

sequoia• 10 months ago

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.

DenisM2• 10 months ago

This will drive the opposite of user engagement.

cadamsdotcom• 10 months ago

Humbly I suggest vibecoding this just for yourself. Not building a product - just a simple tool to meet your own needs.

That’s AI: permissionless tool building. It means never needing someone to like your idea enough or build it how they think you’ll use it. You just build it yourself and iterate it.

dalmo3• 10 months ago

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

Next week: ChatGPT Reels.

enemyz0r2• 10 months ago

ChatGPTeels

jimmydoe• 10 months ago

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

sailfast• 10 months ago

Absolutely not. No. Hard pass.

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

lqstuart• 10 months ago

"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.

smurfsmurf• 10 months ago

I've been saying this since I started using "AI" earlier this year: If you're a programmer, it's a glorified manual, and at that, it's wonderful. But beyond asking for cheat sheets on specific function signatures, it's pretty much useless.

mikeg8• 10 months ago

I’d disagree. I think there is still so much value it can offer if you really open your mind. For instance, I’ve met very few “programmers” that I’d consider even moderately competent at front-end, so the ability of a programmer to build and iterate a clean and responsive UI is just one example of a huge win for AI tools.

sp4cec0wb0y• 10 months ago

How do I save comments in HN? This sums up everything I feel. Beautiful.

supriyo-biswas• 10 months ago

Click the comment timestamp, then “favorite” it

strange_quark• 10 months ago

That's the sum total of the product though, it's already complete and it does not need trillions of dollars of datacenter investment

What sucks there’s probably some innovation left in figuring out how to make these monstrosities more efficient and how to ship a “good enough” model that can do a few key tasks (jettisoning the fully autonomous coding agents stuff) on some arbitrary laptop without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. The problem is nobody in the industry is incentivized to do this because the second this happens, all their revenue goes to 0. It’s the final boss of the everything is a subscription business model.

MisterBiggs• 10 months ago

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

lexarflash8g• 10 months ago

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 .

thoughtpalette• 10 months ago

Was thinking exactly the same. This correlates with having to another revenue stream and monetization strategy for OpenAi.

In the end, it's almost always ads.

bentt2• 10 months ago

Even if they don't serve ads, think of the data they can share in aggregate. Think Facebook knows people? That's nothing.

xpe3• 10 months ago

Ads? That’s quaint. Think “broad-spectrum mental manipulation”.

bgwalter• 10 months ago

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.

zelias2• 10 months ago

Yet another category of startups killed by an incumbent

duxup2• 10 months ago

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

IshKebab• 10 months ago

This could be amazing for dealing with schools - I get information from my kids' school through like 5 different channels: Tapestry, email, a newsletter, parents WhatsApp groups (x2), Arbor, etc. etc.

And 90% of the information is not stuff I care about. The newsletter will be mostly "we've been learning about lighthouses this week" but they'll slip in "make sure your child is wearing wellies on Friday!" right at the end somewhere.

If I could feed all that into AI and have it tell me about only the things that I actually need to know that would be fantastic. I'd pay for that.

Can't happen though because all those platforms are proprietary and don't have APIs or MCP to access them.

duxup2• 10 months ago

I feel you there, although it would also be complicated by those teachers who are just bad at technology and don't use those things well too.

God bless them for teaching, but dang it someone get them to send emails and not emails with PDFs with the actual message and so on.

psyclobe• 10 months ago

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.

boldlybold• 10 months ago

I agree - the ability to lower activation energy in a field you're interested in, but not yet an expert, feels like having superpowers.

niek_pas2• 10 months ago

Thanks for phrasing it like this!

crorella• 10 months ago

same, I had a great idea (and a decently detailed plan) to improve an open source project, but never had the time and willpower to dive into the code, with codex it was one night to set it up and then slowing implementing every step of what I had originally planned.

spike021• 10 months ago

same for me but Claude. I've had an iphone game i've wanted to do for years but just couldn't spend the time consistently to learn everything to do it. but with Claude over the past three months i've been able to implement the game and even release it for fun.

mihaaly• 10 months ago

May we look at it please? pure curiosity - also have similar thoughts you had. : )

zelias2• 10 months ago

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

vbezhenar• 10 months ago

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.

zeroonetwothree• 10 months ago

To be fair most people don’t have as complicated a life that they really need a personal assistant. How much would it really save you per day? 30 min? I mean that’s not nothing but it’s not revolutionary either. And of course there is the principal-agent problem so it’s not always a strict upgrade.

For example, at my work people managers get admin assistants but most ICs do not, even at the same level. I think it’s fine, the value for me would be very low and I doubt it’s a good use of company resources.

hirvi743• 10 months ago

I could really benefit from a personal assistant because I basically have no executive functioning my mind. However, I would likely only benefit from having a human assistant because humans are harder to ignore than the nth automated notification I receive on a daily basis.

anonbuddy4• 10 months ago

All great, but what happens when personal assistant makes you think you are acting in your best interest, but actually they are just manipulating you to do 'something' OpenAi (some company) wants you to do?

Without proper ways of migrating 'your data' between AI's (platforms), you are in mercy of that assistant without any other alternatives.

Thats why GDPR and CPRA laws are becoming even more important in age of AI assistance.

taf2• 10 months ago

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.

tim333• 10 months ago

Cool. I think you are almost the only positive comment on the thread.

ric2z• 10 months ago

try clicking "Listen to article"

adverbly• 10 months ago

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...

StarterPro• 10 months ago

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

TZubiri3• 10 months ago

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

bentt2• 10 months ago

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

reactordev2• 10 months ago

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.

ainch• 10 months ago

Their recent paper suggests the active user base is continuing to grow consistently with consistent/growing usage based on how long they've been using the app.

https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/a253471f-8260-40c6-a2cc-aa93fe9f1...

inerte• 10 months ago

I think you meant app users churn less, not that more app usage brings new users. But I think you said the later? Doesn't make much sense.

Anyway, attention == ads, so that's ChatGPT's future.

reactordev2• 10 months ago

To encourage more usage, wouldn’t it be in their best interest to write about all the different ways you can use it by claiming these are the ways people are using it?

Show me an independent study.

nycdatasci• 10 months ago

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

Ads.

tracerbulletx2• 10 months ago

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

wilg• 10 months ago

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.

Agraillo2• 10 months ago

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."

redbell• 10 months ago

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!

johanyc• 10 months ago

I don't consider this an invasion of privacy when it's you who tell chatpgt. It's just a like personal assistant. For it to be helpful, it has to know something about you. And you decide what you are willing to tell chatpgt.

theartfuldodger• 10 months ago

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

romanovcode• 10 months ago

LLMs hit diminishing returns this year. There is nothing more they can do and it shows.

Don't get me wrong, the coding assistants are amazing and overall functionality of asking questions is great, not to mention government spying - cia and mossad are probably happy beyond beliefs. But I do not see any more use cases for it.

xpe3• 10 months ago

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.”

Waterluvian• 10 months ago

CONSUME.

enemyz0r2• 10 months ago

YES. Don't ask questions, just consume $product then get excited for $nextproduct

forgotTheLast• 10 months ago

TormentNexusification

englishspot• 10 months ago

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

HardCodedBias• 10 months ago

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.

R_mand• 10 months ago

Is this their gateway to advertisement? Vendors pay to show up on your pulse?

ivape• 10 months ago

Yes and Yes. Omg yes.

neximo64• 10 months ago

Will OpenAI leave anything for developers to build and the broader ecosystem? Its like they want to own everything

AfterHIA• 10 months ago

In the words of Chief Wiggum once again:

"this is going to get worse before it gets better."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi6iOFHLTdw

reassess_blind• 10 months ago

LLM's are an incredible technology, but its clear they have stagnated and are a far cry from the AGI promise that the AI CEO's were touting in the beginning.

dartharva• 10 months ago

Wow, this is a new level of desperation..

imchillyb• 10 months ago

"Hello, Chilly. It's been NINETEEN MINUTES, since we conversed. Is there something wrong? Maybe I can help..." --mute notifications--

--buzz-buzz--

"Sis? What's up, you never call me this time of day."

"I'm worried. I just heard from your assistant..."

"Wait, my assistant?

"She said her name was Vaseline?"

"Oh, God... That's my ChatGPT Pulse thing, I named her that as a joke. It's not a real person. It's one of those AI robot things. It kept trying to have conversations with me. I didn't want to converse. I got fed up and so I blocked notifications from the app and then it messaged you. It's a robot. Just... I mean... Ignore it. I'm having a crappy day. Gotta go. Dad's calling."

"Hey Dad. No, there's nothing to worry about and that's not my assistant. That's chatgpt's new Pulse thing. I blocked it and it's... Never mind. Just ignore it. No don't block my number. Use call filtering for the time being. Gotta go. James is calling. Yeah love you too."

"Hey Jay..."

No thank you. Jealous girlfriend-ish bot would be a nightmare.

sebastiennight5• 10 months ago

Bold of you to think that all of these humans would need to be involved, vs. you getting a call from your sister's assistant directly

seydor• 10 months ago

Of course i will want to be distracted by my AI but first it has to track everything i say and do. And i wouldn't mind if it talked some smack about my colleagues

jibal• 10 months ago

This is so NOT something I want.

nenenejej• 10 months ago

What problem does this solve. The silence is better.

Reminds me of recommend engines in general. Or ads. Bothering my cognition with stuff I have to ignore.

nextlevelwizard2• 10 months ago

Literally no one is forcing you to use it if you gain nothing from it. Some people might get benefits from it. As surprising as it may seem to you the world is not tailored to your needs.

augment_me• 10 months ago

Some people dont want to spend time and energy engaging in the world and thinking about thinks like where to go, what to do, where to eat, what to eat, etc. Have this app and you can just be steered to have a nice life.

parasti• 10 months ago

Yeah, this is just an algorithmic feed - or, at least, the first attempts. After a while you'll stop asking questions yourself and just scroll the feed, just like you do on every other platform.

latexr10• 10 months ago

What problem does this solve.

People not getting sufficiently addicted and dependent on ChatGPT, and then not having enough means to monetise and control you opinion and consumption.

Oh, you meant what problem does this solve for the user? They don’t really care about that, they’ll always do just enough to get you to continue using and defending their product.

ulfw• 10 months ago

They seem desperate to find something that might have relevance (besides it's core product)

negro_jj• 10 months ago

Hola

tonyhart7• 10 months ago

is not this just privacy nightmare???

we have google that has search history,location etc now we give OpenAI our character,personalization etc

how much dystopian that in the future there will be a product based on people feeling from 5 years ago????

ENGNR• 10 months ago

Ewwwwwww

anothernewdude• 10 months ago

The sort of application I'd much rather self-host.

elcapitan• 10 months ago

The solution is already there, now we just need the problems

jdthedisciple• 10 months ago

As with everything in the AI space currently:

A strange mix of dystopian yet blissfull...

ensocode5• 10 months ago

In the beginning, I was really curious about ChatGPT—a tool that could save me from useless blogs, pushy products, and research roadblocks. Then it started asking follow-up questions, and I got a bit uneasy… where is this trying to take me? Now it feels like the goal is to pull me into a discussion, ultimately consulting me on what? Buy something? Think something? It’s sad to see something so promising turn into an annoying, social-network-like experience, just like so many technologies before. As with Facebook or Google products, maybe we’re not the happy users of free tech—we’re the product. Or am I completely off here? For me, there’s a clear boundary between me controlling a tool and a tool broadcasting at me.

latexr10• 10 months ago

Don’t forget that Sam Altman is also the cryptocurrency scammer who wants your biometric information. The goal was and will always be personal wealth and power, not helping others.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

pembrook2• 10 months ago

I lol'd at this. And he eats babies!

Yea, humans tend to optimize for their own individual success. Do you not?

salviati• 10 months ago

I'm not sure I understand your point. Is there any conversation where this behaviour occurred that you feel comfortable sharing?

I haven't observed it, and I'd be curious to understand if I've missed it, or if me and you evaluate things differently.

gyomu• 10 months ago

Their point is that ChatGPT is clearly maximizing for engagement with the product, rather than working as a straightforward tool that aims to solve your problem at hand as fast and efficiently as possible.

The decision to begin every response with “that’s a fascinating observation” and end every response with “want me to do X?” is a clear decision by PMs at OpenAI.

Poster is questioning what might motivate those decisions.

temperceve• 10 months ago

There totally is! https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/technology/ai-chatbots-de...

caleb-allen2• 10 months ago

Ted Chiang has a great short story about a virtual assistant that slowly but methodically "nudges" all of its users over the course of years until everybody's lives are almost completely controlled by them and "escaping" becomes a near-impossible task.

It's as if OpenAI saw that as an instruction manual, I really don't like the direction they're taking it.

namr2000• 10 months ago

Likewise Ken Liu (the English translator for the Three Body Problem) has a really good short story "The Perfect Match" about the same concept, which you can read here: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-perfect-match... It was the first thing that came to mind when I read this announcement.

mchinen• 10 months ago

Scott Alexander has a similar 1-page horror story from 2012 where an earing that gives advice consumes the user: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2012-10-03-yva...

NiceWayToDoIT• 10 months ago

I am so tired of this type of tech, it does not solves anything, but it looks like further pushing and intrusion into privacy, but it is not anymore just reading what we like and want, but trying to push us to do things and sell us things, lately from time I get that urge just to smash all my electronics and go somwwhere in woods (I know it is romantic dream and I would not survive more than 3 days it is just a feeling) ... Travel was interesting when you heard about exotic places and colors and smells, and then you go to experince nowadays they supply you with full pamper plan of what you going to see and experince it is not fun anymore, and all I see is like that Ghibli no-face monster, but instead of giving you money just asking you give-us-money give-us-money, money, moneeey ... then you arrive to destination and there all you get pushy salsmen, fake smiles and all you see give us money money money ...

Edit 1: When I was growing up, a started with tech not because of money but because I belived we will endup in StarTrek society, solving real problems expanding civilisation, older I am all I see is money worshiping cult

rightbyte• 10 months ago

Ye it is so freaking dystopic. And not even in a cool way. Dystopic dystopic.

The zeitgaist delivering STNG would have been way better to handle this. We are more or less tied to hoping the cliff the drum beats are walking us off is a mirage.

jwr• 10 months ago

I don't understand how anyone would entrust OpenAI with private data about their entire life. Do people not care about privacy at all? Is everybody OK with being advertising/targeting meat?

This sort of thing might arguably be useful, but only with local data processing.

0xbadc0de5• 10 months ago

I agree with you on the importance of privacy. But if people can't muster enough outrage to leave Gmail, FB, IG, etc., then I'm afraid the answer to your questions might be "yes."

jraby32• 10 months ago

The benefit outweighs the lack of privacy.

I just uploaded recent blood tests and other health info into ChatGPT and then had it analyze what I could do to improve my health, specifically cholesterol and sugar. Then asked it to red team its advice and provide me with one or two things that would generate 80% of the results.

It's pretty awesome having a private doctor that's read every study out there and then can generate advice that will make me live longer and healthier. My doctor certainly doesn't do that. As long as I'm in normal range he doesn't say anything.

unfitted2545• 10 months ago

So what did it suggest?

hu32• 10 months ago

I don't mind uploading a blood test.

But I won't give it constant access to email, messages, calendar, notes, or anything else.

ceroxylon• 10 months ago

Is this not cognitive offload on steroids?

stared• 10 months ago

Waiting for time when it can summarize my social media - so I won't need to waste time scrolling.

frag• 10 months ago

Welcome to cognitive capitalism https://defragzone.substack.com/p/welcome-to-cognitive-capit...

tomaytotomato• 10 months ago

So its basically a cron-job that checks previous conversations or shared data and invokes the LLM?

giorgioz• 10 months ago

that and 'it's a basically a web server responding http requests' would discount the whole freaking internet :D

ZacnyLos• 10 months ago

Is it like Google Now mixed with Twitter and Sora feed?

guy4261• 10 months ago

Oh, just let two instances chat with each other and either let me read the conversation logs or have them present me what they learned/came up with since I've last checked on them. And that would be the end of all it all.

sakisv• 10 months ago

So, this is Google Now but instead of one company having access to the data on their systems, now you're giving access to your data from different companies/sources to OpenAI.

(I do miss Google Now, it really did feel like the future)

dangus• 10 months ago

This product is accidentally demonstrating why today’s mediocre AI products like Apple Intelligence will be the eventual winners in the market.

ChatGPT can’t become more useful until it’s integrated into your OS. The OS is what has the potential to provide a safe framework (APIs) to share data with an AI system.

Being able to hook up Gmail and Google Calendar is nice but kinda useless if you have any of the other thousands of providers for email and calendar.

caleb-allen2• 10 months ago

And this is where I'm tapping out.

guffins• 10 months ago

“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” by Ted Chiang.

dvcoolarun• 10 months ago

I don’t think this is the world we were envisioning, where leading companies are suggesting content, tracking our history, and feeding us more socially optimized streams just to keep us hooked and give us dopamine hits.

What I’d prefer is something like dailyflow (I saw it on HN yesterday): a local LLM that tracks my history and how I’m spending my time, then gives me hints when I’m off track — more aligned with what I actually want to see and where I want to go.

hacym• 10 months ago

It’s not the world we were envisioning, but to the people getting rich off us, this is exactly what they wanted.

boppo1• 10 months ago

Tagtime?

Pocomon• 10 months ago

Might as well call it WokeGPT as the results invariable lean to the left of diversity. You get a mini woke sermon at the end of each results. just in case you guilty of wrong thought.

aswegs8• 10 months ago

Can you give an example?

ksynwa• 10 months ago

What kind of stuff is it showing?

gutomotta• 10 months ago

This smells like ads.

anonbuddy4• 10 months ago

This is a signal for a future where either we own our 'memories' or companies own them for us.

Technologies like Solid (https://solidproject.org/) are our only way forward. If you don't care you can use your chatgpts or whatever for whatever you want. But there are people who DO CARE about their memories.

We are no longer speaking about tiktok or instagram feeds and algorithms, as some people compare the addictive side of this (ie. OAPulse) kind of technologies to.

tzury• 10 months ago

From my perspective, the core of OpenAI's current situation can be understood through a few key observations and predictions.

First, over $55 billion raised since 2022 has fueled monumental, yet sometimes subtle, leaps in model capability that go far beyond the visible user interface. The real progress isn't just in the chat window, but in the underlying reasoning and multimodal power.

This investment is being funneled into what I see as a relentless and unsustainable cycle of spending: the high cost of training next-generation models, the immense expense of running user queries (inference), and a fierce bidding war for top AI talent.

Based on this, it's clear to me that the current "growth at all costs" phase is unsustainable. This reality will inevitably force a strategic shift from a pure focus on innovation to the pressing need for a viable, profitable business model.

Therefore, I predict they will be forced to take specific cost-saving steps. To manage the colossal expense of inference, models will likely be subtly "tuned down," masking reduced computational depth with more verbose, fluffy output.

Finally, I anticipate that a logical, if controversial, cost-saving step will involve the company using its own AI to justify workforce reductions, championing this as the new era of automated productivity they are selling to the world.

And by the way, downvoting this won’t prevent the unavoidable future.

myrmidon2• 10 months ago

I mostly agree, but I think they are in a overall better position than most social media/messaging/video hosting platforms were over the last decades, because a significant fraction of their customers is willing to pay for this kind of service already (they are not inevitably forced to rely on ads for revenue) and cost per token (for OpenAI) can reasonably be expected to decrease continuously (unlike costs for ridesharing startups like uber, or the e-scooter thingies).

rhetocj235• 10 months ago

"Therefore, I predict they will be forced to take specific cost-saving steps"

They are already doing that dude with the router... lol wake up. Youre late to the party.

dmonay• 10 months ago

Ken Liu has a story about what the Pulse will evolve into

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-perfect-match...

hu32• 10 months ago

thanks!

(offtopic but the website could use some mobile CSS, it's hard to read on mobile by default)

hrpnk• 10 months ago

The name reminds me of https://linear.app/docs/pulse which provides regular updates on projects tracked in the tool.

hereme888• 10 months ago

Centillion is not some big scary government. It’s a private company, whose motto happens to be “Make things better!”

Haha, good shot at Big Tech. They always devolve to corporate profits over ethics.

anshumankmr2• 10 months ago

Does this seem a step closer to getting ads on ChatGPT?

kaicianflone• 10 months ago

$200 a month for data cards is insanity. It sounds like virtue-signaling or bs features for VC's. Idk why this wasn't pushed to the consumer plus level.

Here's an excerpt from ChatGPT on why this could be a "bubble" feature:

By sticking Pulse behind the $200 Pro tier, OpenAI is signaling it’s for:

VCs, consultants, analysts → people who can expense it as “deal flow intel.”

Enterprise & finance people who live in dashboards and daily reports.

Folks who don’t blink at $200/month because they already burn way more on data feeds, research subscriptions, or Bloomberg terminals.

In other words, it feels less like a consumer feature and more like a “bubble luxury” signal — “If you need Pulse, you’re in the club that can afford Pro.”

The irony is, Pulse itself isn’t really a $200/mo product — it’s basically automated research cards. But bundling it at that tier lets OpenAI:

Frame it as exclusive (“you’re not missing out, you’re just not at the level yet”).

Keep the Plus plan sticky for the masses.

Extract max revenue from people in finance/AI hype cycles who will pay.

It’s like how Bloomberg charges $2k/month for terminals when most of the raw data is public — you’re paying for the packaging, speed, and exclusivity.

I think you’re right: Pulse at $200 screams “this is a bubble feature” — it’s monetizing the hype while the hype lasts.

bonoboTP5• 10 months ago

I expect that soon enough it will also have a personalized image feed entirely made of generated images (and at some point videos).

Edit: ah Meta already did that today (https://about.fb.com/news/2025/09/introducing-vibes-ai-video...)

ArchieIndian2• 10 months ago

We have built https://hopit.ai. We have not been running the agents right now but you folks can experience what is it to make everything bingeable and beautiful.

ArchieIndian2• 10 months ago

I mean, it is expensive to run those. We started this as a hobby project. Can switch on the agents if folks like the format

smeej• 10 months ago

The thing I hate the absolute most about ChatGPT and that ultimately made me quit using it is that it absolutely will not stop making suggestions at the ends of its replies, asking me if I want some specific thing next.

Not once, not a single time, has it ever been something I actually wanted. I'm sick of telling the damn thing "No."

I have researched every possible setting. I have tried every possible prompt. But apparently "You are a helpful AI" is built into it at some non-overridable system level, where no matter what you tell it nor where, it will not stop making suggestions.

The prospect that it could now initiate conversations is like my own personal hell. I thought the existing system was the most obnoxious functionality anyone could build into a system. Now, not only have I found out I was wrong, but I'm afraid to assume this next version will be the last in this parade of horrors.

hirvi743• 10 months ago

This is not what I want from LLMs. Hey ChatGPT or Claude, I have still have clothes in the dryer and dishes in the sink. Do you mind taking care of those for me?

Now, that is something I'd pay hundreds a month for.

Revisional_Sin• 10 months ago

Thanks, I hate it.

selinkocalar• 10 months ago

Real-time usage monitoring for AI APIs makes sense. We've had issues where OpenAI goes down and it takes us way too long to notice because the failures aren't obvious.

The cost tracking piece is probably more valuable though. AI API bills can get expensive really quickly

ChatGPT Pulse

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