Can AI replace your morning newsletter? OpenAI is betting on it

When it’s time to face the day first thing in the morning, everybody needs information—about the weather, their calendar, and what’s going on. Most of us get all this information manually, building habits like listening to the radio, browsing various news and media apps, and checking schedules. But a storied few have personal assistants who will curate all of that, creating a highly personalized set of prioritized information.

That, as far as I can tell, is exactly what ChatGPT Pulse is supposed to be: a digital assistant in the true sense of the word. Pulse is a new feature in ChatGPT that’s available initially only to ChatGPT Pro subscribers (that’s the $200 monthly tier). After you set it up by telling it what topics you’re most interested in (among other things), Pulse will build a highly tailored daily update, just for you. And it’s not just the news of the day: Pulse will look to your chat history, email, and calendar for context, assembling a highly personalized custom summary.

ChatGPT Pulse is arguably an inflection point in our relationship with AI. It’s different from previous AI products because it shifts AI from a passive tool to a proactive one. Intelligence is no longer something you go to with a specific query—it’s now pushed to you when you’re not even engaging with it.

How Pulse is a different kind of aggregator

That’s a pretty big change, one with a lot of opportunity. If Pulse takes off, there’s no doubt media, marketing, and PR companies will compete for its attention. And where there’s attention, advertising soon follows. In fact, Pulse looks like a pretty obvious play to build something that could end up being an ad platform for OpenAI, which, given its ambitions, needs all the cash it can get.

That of course depends on whether people actually want it. It’s not like there’s a shortage of apps and features in apps vying to be everyone’s “start your day” touchstone—even the default home screen in Windows will show you headlines. When you set them up, some get you to pick news sources, and some offer you topics. But OpenAI is betting its intelligence, paired with the right context, will produce something better.

And it may be onto something. I’ve been using Pulse for several days, and I like how it writes summaries of not just the news I’m interested in, but how that news intersects with my work. I often write about how AI search engines and agents are changing how content is discovered, and Pulse surfaced a new report from DataDome on bot security the morning it came out.

Your mileage on this might vary depending on how much you use ChatGPT for work versus personal tasks, but because I’m constantly collaborating with ChatGPT on writing, courses, consulting, and more, Pulse (my version anyway) is heavily skewed toward what I’m working on as opposed to what I relax with. I’d wager that’s probably true for most users. And that’s OK. I’d much rather want an executive assistant than a butler.

Trust: the biggest hurdle

To be an effective assistant, though, Pulse will need to consistently bring users good, actionable information. There are of course many platforms out there built for media monitoring, but Pulse is something different. Not an alert system, but a kind of opportunity assessment, one with a large dash of personal context. That’s valuable, but only if it doesn’t miss things, eliminates redundancies (I don’t want to see the same stuff highlighted day after day), and doesn’t fill my update with junk when there isn’t anything of use.

If it can do that, though, OpenAI might finally crack the notification barrier, earning a place among the apps that send you push alerts you might actually open. One of the primary reasons newsletters took off in the last decade is because your email inbox was a reliable way to get user attention. Is AI in that category? ChatGPT’s 700-million-strong user base suggests it’s built a large degree of trust. Pulse could leverage that to success—as long as the content is good.

In that future, where AI is powering not just our active queries but the information we’re using to start our days, news providers start to look a lot more like information wholesalers, providing the raw data that AI will curate, summarize, and put in context for the user. And that’s an existential threat to a big chunk of what the media does. While morning newsletters, digests, and story roundups are helpful, they won’t be able to compete with Pulse. And that’s because they’ll never have what ChatGPT has: the entire picture of everything you care about.

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