OpenAI's ChatGPT Introduces 'Pulse,' A Morning Alternative To Social Media, Email, And Search

People start their day differently.

Upon waking up, some linger in bed for a bit longer, while some head straight to the shower and breakfast. There are lots of things to do to make the whole day meaningful, even when its Monday. But it's safe to say that a lot of people can’t resist checking their phones, scrolling through social media, catching up on the news, or diving into emails.

OpenAI believes there’s now another way to begin the morning: with 'Pulse.'

The feature embedded into ChatGPT is literally an AI-powered routine tool designed to replace that first scroll.

In other words, OpenAI wants users to have a choice other than the things they're used to.

OpenAI wants them to begin with Pulse, a ChatGPT-powered morning experience.

When OpenAI first released ChatGPT to the public, it set off nothing less than an arms race in AI. Overnight, chatbots stopped being a futuristic novelty and became an everyday tool that millions began to rely on for learning, creating, and problem-solving.

The excitement pushed rivals into high gear, from tech giants racing to launch their own conversational agents, to startups building entire products around the newfound appetite for AI.

The idea of simply asking a machine a question and receiving a humanlike answer felt like magic, but it was also just the beginning.

Until now, ChatGPT has always waited for the user to make the first move.

Users would arrive with a question, a task, or an idea, and have the AI respond to that request. ChatGPT, thanks to the underlying AI models that kept getting better, is powerful. But it's limited.

It depends on what user already know to ask. It leaves the burden of discovery, of knowing what’s worth paying attention to, squarely on the user.

With Pulse, OpenAI is taking the first step toward flipping that relationship around.

Pulse is designed to make ChatGPT proactive rather than reactive.

Instead of waiting for users to type, Pulse quietly works in the background "overnight," doing research and pulling together updates it thinks users will want to see when they wake up.

By morning, users will be greeted with a set of five to ten personalized briefs, curated to start the day.

In spirit, it’s positioned as an alternative to that first scroll through social media or a news app, but one that’s meant to be focused, efficient, and tuned to the user only.

The idea is to create a morning routine that doesn’t hinge on the infinite scroll.

Pulse presents information in the form of visual cards, each one summarizing a topic.

Users can scan them quickly, dive deeper into the details, or ignore the ones that don’t interest them. Unlike social platforms that never stop feeding content, Pulse is designed to stop after a few updates with a clear message: "That’s it for today."

It’s a deliberate choice to break from the engagement-driven model of endless feeds and help users focus on what matters most.

The personalization runs deep, since users can customize Pulse to their preferences.

Users can give it feedback, tell it what's useful, and ask it to prioritize certain topics, for example.

And if users connect apps like Gmail and Google Calendar, it enhance productivity up a notch. Being able to get more info, it can get more insight and data. In this case, Pulse can, for example, highlight the most important messages in users' inbox, draft a meeting agenda, or surface reminders about upcoming events.

And ChatGPT's memory feature is turned on, it can refer to past conversation, understand habits and goals, in order to personalize the experience even further.

Examples of what Pulse can generate range from the practical to the playful.

It might serve up quick and healthy dinner ideas, suggest next steps for a personal project like training for a triathlon, or even propose group Halloween costumes for the whole family. In a demo, Pulse created a toddler-friendly travel itinerary for Arizona and a roundup of soccer news for an Arsenal fan. The scope is broad, but the promise is the same: information made timely and relevant without requiring users to go search for it.

At this time, Pulse is introduced to paying subscribers only, with plan to expand it to free tier in the near future.

To use it, users can access Pulse in a dedicated tab in the ChatGPT app.

The idea of introducign Pulse marks OpenAI's broader vision of what AI products should be.

ChatGPT, in its original form, was a reactive tool. It's brilliant a responding, but can never take initiative. With features like Pulse, and Codex, OpenAI is experimenting with making its AI more like a personal assistant. The shift is toward systems that don’t just wait for questions, but anticipate needs, research in advance, and surface timely information.

Over time, that might mean helping with concrete actions: making restaurant reservations, drafting emails on users' behalf, or pulling together resources before users even realize they'll need them.

"By combining conversation, memory, and connected apps, ChatGPT is moving from answering questions to a proactive assistant that works on your behalf. Over time, we envision AI systems that can research, plan, and take helpful actions for you—based on your direction—so that progress happens even when you are not asking," explained OpenAI in the announcement.

The long-term vision is clear: Pulse isn’t about keeping users glued to ChatGPT. Instead, it’s about building an assistant that grows smarter over time. Not one that simply waits for commands, but one that stands ready, anticipating needs, preparing answers, and surfacing opportunities before users even think to ask.

This signals a future where an AI doesn’t just answer questions but also learns what to ask.