OpenAI is trying to move ChatGPT beyond the familiar pattern of waiting for a prompt. Its new feature, ChatGPT Pulse, is designed to prepare personalized morning reports before a user asks for anything.
The feature generates five to 10 briefs while users sleep. The goal is simple: make ChatGPT one of the first apps people open in the morning, in the same way they might check social media or a news app.
A more proactive ChatGPT
Pulse fits into a larger change in OpenAI’s consumer products. Instead of only answering direct questions, newer tools such as ChatGPT Agent and Codex are meant to make ChatGPT feel more like an assistant that can work asynchronously.
That shift matters because Pulse is not just another search or chat feature. It tries to anticipate what a person may want to know at the start of the day, then packages that information into short reports.
OpenAI’s new CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, framed the product as part of a broader ambition for AI assistance.
“We’re building AI that lets us take the level of support that only the wealthiest have been able to afford and make it available to everyone over time,” said OpenAI’s new CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, in a blog post. “And ChatGPT Pulse is the first step in that direction — starting with Pro users today, but with the goal of rolling out this intelligence to all.”
For now, that ambition is limited by access. Pulse is beginning with subscribers to ChatGPT’s $200-a-month Pro plan.
Who gets ChatGPT Pulse first
Starting Thursday, OpenAI will begin rolling out Pulse to Pro subscribers. In the ChatGPT app, it will appear as a new tab.
The company says it wants to bring Pulse to all ChatGPT users eventually. Plus subscribers are expected to get access soon, but OpenAI says it first needs to make the product more efficient.
That limitation reflects a practical constraint. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier this week that some new “compute-intensive” ChatGPT products would be limited to the company’s most expensive subscription plan. Pulse is one of those products.
OpenAI has also said it is severely limited by the number of servers available to power ChatGPT. The company is building out AI data centers with partners including Oracle and SoftBank to increase capacity.
What the morning reports can include
Pulse reports can cover general topics or highly personal needs. One example is a roundup of news articles about a specific subject, such as updates on a sports team.
In a demo for TechCrunch, OpenAI product lead Adam Fry showed several reports Pulse had created for him. They included a news roundup about British soccer team Arsenal, group Halloween costume suggestions for his wife and kids, and a toddler-friendly travel itinerary for his family’s upcoming trip to Sedona, Arizona.
Each report appears as a card with AI-generated images and text. Users can open a card to read the full report, then ask ChatGPT follow-up questions about the contents.
Pulse can create some reports on its own. Users can also ask it for new automated reports or give feedback on reports it has already generated.
A notable design choice is that Pulse does not keep going indefinitely. After producing a small set of reports, it shows the message: “Great, that’s it for today.” According to Fry, that limit is intentional and is meant to distinguish the feature from engagement-optimized social media apps.
Personalization through memory and connectors
Pulse becomes more personal when it can use additional context. It works with ChatGPT’s Connectors, which means users can link apps such as Google Calendar and Gmail.
Once connected, Pulse can review email overnight and surface important messages in the morning. It can also use calendar information to generate an agenda for upcoming events.
If ChatGPT’s memory features are turned on, Pulse can also draw from previous chats. OpenAI’s personalization lead, Christina Wadsworth Kaplan, gave an example involving her love of running. Pulse used that context to create an itinerary for her upcoming trip to London that included running routes.
Wadsworth Kaplan described Pulse as a “net-new functionality” for a consumer product. She also said that, as a pescatarian, Pulse can use dinner reservations on her calendar to find menu items that fit her diet.
These examples show the basic promise of the feature: the more relevant context ChatGPT has, the more specific the morning brief can become. But the source also makes clear that this depends on users choosing to connect apps or turn on memory features.
Why Pulse could pressure news and assistant apps
Pulse may overlap with existing news products. The source points to Apple News, paid newsletters, and traditional journalism outlets as products that could face competition from a personalized morning briefing tool.
Fry does not expect Pulse to replace the news apps people already use. The feature cites sources with links in the same way ChatGPT Search does.
The bigger question is whether the product is worth the computing power it requires. Fry says the amount of computing power can “vary tremendously” by task. Some reports may be fairly efficient, while others may require web searches and synthesis across many documents.
OpenAI’s longer-term plan is to make Pulse more agentic. Eventually, the company would like it to handle tasks such as making restaurant reservations for users or drafting emails that users could approve before sending.
Those capabilities are not here yet. The source notes that such features may be far off and would likely require OpenAI’s agentic models to improve before users trust them with those decisions.
For now, ChatGPT Pulse is best understood as a test of a new daily habit. Instead of waiting for a user to ask what matters, ChatGPT will try to prepare the answer before the day begins.