What is ChatGPT Pulse, and how do you shape it?

Most of the time, ChatGPT waits for you to type. Pulse reverses that. Once a day, while you sleep, ChatGPT looks at what it knows about your interests, does some research on its own, and prepares a handful of updates. In the morning they appear as visual cards in a Pulse tab. You can skim a card, open it for the full report, or ask a follow-up question about it.

OpenAI released Pulse on September 25 as a preview for Pro subscribers using the ChatGPT mobile app. The company says Plus is next, with the long-term aim of offering it to everyone, but first it wants to make the feature cheaper to run. TechCrunch reports that a typical morning brings between five and ten cards, and that Pulse deliberately stops there with an end-of-the-day message rather than an endless feed.

What a morning in Pulse looks like

A card might be a news roundup on a topic you follow, a suggestion linked to something you discussed recently, or a step toward a longer goal. OpenAI's own examples include quick dinner ideas, follow-ups on subjects you chat about often, and progress tips for someone training for a triathlon. Reports that draw on the web include links to their sources, the same way ChatGPT search does.

Cards are short-lived by design. Each one is available for that day only. To keep one, save it as a chat or ask ChatGPT a follow-up about it; either step moves it into your normal conversation history.

The three controls that shape it

1. Curate. A "curate" button lets you say, in plain words, what you want in future editions. Requests can be broad ("a Friday roundup of local events") or narrow ("focus on professional tennis updates tomorrow").

2. Feedback. Every card takes a thumbs up or thumbs down. Pulse remembers this guidance, and you can open your feedback history to review or delete it. OpenAI found in early testing with students that the feature became useful once people started telling it what they wanted, which is why feedback is so prominent.

3. Sources of context. Pulse uses your ChatGPT memory and chat history. Gmail and Google Calendar can be linked as well, but those connections are off by default and can be switched on or off at any time in settings.

A worked example: a first week with Pulse

Imagine a small-business owner who runs a bakery and is learning Spanish. Here is one way to set up the first week. The cards described are illustrative, not real output.

Day	What you do	Why
Monday	Read the first cards without changing anything	See what ChatGPT already guesses about you
Monday	Tap curate and send the requests below	Replace guesses with clear instructions
Tuesday	Thumbs-down anything off topic; thumbs-up what helped	Teach it your standards
Wednesday	Decide whether to connect Google Calendar	Only if agenda-style cards would help
Friday	Check your feedback history and delete stale items	Keep its picture of you current

The curate requests could look like this:

Prompt

Each weekday, give me one short card on food-safety or labeling rules
that affect small bakeries in Ontario, with a link to the official source.

On Mondays, suggest one 10-minute Spanish practice idea using bakery
vocabulary.

Please skip celebrity news and stock market updates.

Notice what makes these work: a topic, a frequency, a format ("one short card"), a wish for sources, and something to leave out. That is the same advice that improves any prompt.

Try it: If you have Pulse, write one curate request that names a topic, a day and a format, then rate every card for three mornings. On day four, compare the cards with those from day one.

Privacy choices worth making early

Pulse is only as personal as the context you give it. Before connecting email or calendar, ask whether the benefit is worth the access. A calendar connection can produce a draft meeting agenda or a reminder to buy a birthday gift; an email connection lets Pulse look through messages overnight to surface the important ones. Those can be helpful, but they also mean an automated system reads that material every night.

A cautious setup is to start with memory and chat history only, add one connection at a time, and remove it if the cards it produces are not worth it. If you have memory turned off, Pulse has less to work with, so your curate requests matter more.

Pulse is also a preview. OpenAI says it will sometimes miss, for example by offering tips for a project you already finished. Treat cards as suggestions to check, especially anything involving rules, health or money.

What does it use to choose topics?

Pulse combines several signals. The first is what you have told ChatGPT before: saved memories and, where enabled, your past conversations. The second is your direct feedback, both curate requests and thumbs up or down. The third, only if you turn them on, is your connected apps, such as upcoming calendar events.

Each night it weighs those signals to guess what will be most relevant the next day, then does the research and writes the cards. OpenAI says topics also pass through safety checks intended to keep out content that breaks its policies.

That means the quickest way to change what you see is not to wait for it to learn, but to tell it directly. A clear curate request outweighs a pile of old chats, and deleting outdated feedback stops Pulse from chasing an interest you no longer have.