OpenAI Launched Pulse: What Launched, Why It (Really!) Matters, What To Do Now (Like NOW)
ChatGPT’s new proactive “morning OS” decides what your audience sees and buys before coffee.
TL;DR: What happened now?
What launched: ChatGPT Pulse, a proactive, once-a-day assistant that does asynchronous research against your memory, chat history, and optional Gmail/Calendar connections, delivered as scannable cards. Mobile only; Pro preview. The feed is finite (“this experience ends”).
Why it matters: This is the first mainstream proactive assistant surface. It will become a morning OS that can displace search, socials, and inbox for discovery and transactions.
Predicting what’s next: Voice-first mornings with direct shopping, calendar reorganising and checkout flowing through cards, and—given hiring signals—ads/inventory pressure on ranking.
The assistant woke up before you did
While you slept, it skimmed your inbox, peeked at your calendar, remembered your taste, and wrote your morning for you. That’s Pulse. This is OpenAI’s clear land-grab for the only slot that reliably drives behaviour: the first five minutes of your day.
If you make films, TV, games, theatre, restaurants, books, anything with an audience, here’s the new law: if your release isn’t assistant-legible, you don’t exist at breakfast. Search won’t save you. Social won’t save you. A single, machine-readable card will quietly out-convert a week of posts and a six-figure trailer campaign because it collapses the funnel to one tap: book, watch, queue, join.
This is the first intelligent and proactive OS that will talk to you in the bathroom mirror, reshuffle your diary, and buy the thing you didn’t know you wanted yet. And because OpenAI is building commerce rails — and eyeing ads — the ranking battle won’t be “most viral”; it’ll be “most useful” versus “most addictive.” If platforms optimise for dwell, your audience gets slop. If they optimise for tasks, your titles get discovered and bought. You don’t have quarters to debate this. You have a quarter to ship structured beats, voice-safe actions, and an assistant feed. Pulse is here. Make yourself visible or be erased before coffee.
Also, not to be a total dick, but I predicted all this.
Before we get to the specs of it all
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Let’s begin.
What actually shipped (facts)
Pulse mechanics: OpenAI does overnight research on your chats (and things connected to it, like Google Calendar, Gmail, etc.). While you sleep, daily topical cards are created and it notifies you in the morning. You can curate the cards, thumbs-up/down, and give it any feedback. Pro on mobile first; broader rollout planned.
Design intent: Proactive assistant, not a doomscroll. This is an explicitly finite feed.
Why should you care?
This is a new distribution surface: Assistants set the day’s state machine. If your release (think: film, TV show, game, restaurant, book) isn’t visible (assistant-legible), you’re invisible at breakfast. From the start. Done.
From SEO to AFO (Assistant-Feed Optimisation): Assistants prioritise structured, fresh, localised atoms over press PDFs. Your press release was already dead. Now it’s been dug up and incinerated, ashes scattered into oblivion.
Programmable demand: Cards can further collapse awareness to action (book, watch, queue, join) on the same surface. You don’t research what movies are being released. It knows your taste and simply tells you the only one you should care about. (I predicted this last year).
OpenAI will be your shopping cart. Shopping agents and integrations in ChatGPT are already in full development, making this near-term, not speculative.
Voice mornings are next: Realtime voice + shopping integration make a spoken “Pulse” that can reschedule your day, reserve tickets, or buy that game mod without anyone leaving the platform.
Incumbent shift: Why this is different to Siri/Alexa
Old model: User had to prompt an assistant and barely understood what it could do in the first place. And the assistant did it well about 30% of the time.
Pulse model: unsolicited, preemptive and context-aware proposals (“what matters today + do you want me to act?”). This redefines initiative in assistants.
Agent runway: 2025 has already shipped Tasks, Operator (computer-using agent), and ChatGPT Agent (research+action). Pulse is the daily gateway for those actions.
Incentive fork: utility vs. engagement (ads are coming)
Ads are coming!: OpenAI created a consumer Applications org led by Fidji Simo (ex-Meta Facebook app lead; ex-Instacart CEO), and is recruiting a head of ads; job posts indicate building ad/marketing platform infra. Expect inventory pressure on surfaces like Pulse.
The Big Risk:
If success = open it and keep talking, “chatbait” behaviour creeps in (assistant nags to keep you talking).
If success = tasks completed/regret-rate, it remains a tool.
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