Hayden Field, reporting for The Verge Thursday:

OpenAI’s latest personalization play for ChatGPT: You can now allow the chatbot to learn about you via your transcripts and phone activity (think: connected apps like your calendar, email, and Google Contacts), and based on that data, it’ll research things it thinks you’ll like and present you with a daily “pulse” on them.

The new mobile feature, called ChatGPT Pulse, is only available to Pro users for now, ahead of a broader rollout. The personalized research comes your way in the form of “topical visual cards you can scan quickly or open for more detail, so each day starts with a new, focused set of updates,” per the company. That can look like Formula One race updates, daily vocabulary lessons for a language you’re learning, menu advice for a dinner you’re attending that evening, and more.

The Pulse feature really doesn’t seem all that interesting to me because I don’t think ChatGPT knows that much about my interests. I ask ChatGPT for help with things I need help with, not to explain concepts I was already reading about or am researching on my own. Perhaps the usefulness of Pulse changes as you use ChatGPT for different tasks, but I also think OpenAI isn’t the right company to make a product like this. I think I’d appreciate a Gemini-powered version of this trained on my Google Search history a lot more. Maybe Meta AI — instead of funneling slop artificial intelligence-generated short videos down people’s throats — could put together a personalized list of Threads topics pertaining to what I like to read. Even Grok would do a better job.

ChatGPT, at least compared to these three companies, knows very little about what I like to consume. This might be wrongheaded, but I think most people’s ChatGPT chats aren’t necessarily about their hobbies, interests, or work, and email and calendar are one-dimensional. Which Formula 1 fan asks ChatGPT about it, or has anything relating to their favorite sport in their email or Google Contacts? Maybe they watch YouTube videos about it, talk about it on social media, or read F1-related articles online through Google. How is ChatGPT supposed to intuit that I like Formula 1 without me explicitly defining that ahead of time?

All of this makes me feel like OpenAI is searching for a purpose. While Anthropic is plastering billboards titled “Keep Thinking” all over San Francisco and New York, and Gemini is increasingly becoming a hit product amongst normal people, ChatGPT ends up in the news for leading a teenager to suicide or making a ruckus about artificial general intelligence. When I listen to Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, say anything about AGI, I’m just reminded of this piece by George Hotz, titled “Get Out of Technology”:

You heard there was money in tech. You heard there was status in tech. You showed up.

You never cared about technology. You cared about enriching yourself.

You are an entryist piece of shit. And it’s time for you to leave.

Altman is a grifter, and I’m increasingly feeling glum about the state of Silicon Valley. Please, for the love of all that is holy, ChatGPT Pulse is not an “agent.” It’s Google Now, but made with large language models. The “Friend” pendant I wrote about over a year ago is not a replacement for human interaction — it’s a grift profiting off loneliness. Increasingly, these words have become meaningless, and what’s left is a trashy market of “AI” versions of tools that have existed for decades. These people never cared about technology, and the fact that we — including readers of this blog who presumably care for the future of this industry — have let them control it is, in hindsight, a mistake.

I still think AI is important, and I still remain a believer in Silicon Valley. But man, it’s bleak. Was ChatGPT Pulse a reason to go on a tangent about the future of technology? No, but I feel like it’s just another example of the truly mindless wandering that San Francisco businessmen have found their pastime in.