ChatGPT is making moves to integrate itself more into people’s lives, and turn into an AI assistant that’ll be a bigger part of their day-to-day activities.
ChatGPT has launched a Tasks feature, which essentially allows users to schedule queries on ChatGPT. “Today we’re rolling out a beta version of tasks—a new way to ask ChatGPT to do things for you at a future time. Whether it’s one-time reminders or recurring actions, tell ChatGPT what you need and when, and it will automatically take care of it,” OpenAI posted on X. “Tasks is rolling out today to Plus, Pro, and Teams users in beta…and eventually to everyone with a ChatGPT account,” it added.
Some tasks that ChatGPT can now do are send you a daily global news briefing, get a daily personalized 15-minute workout, and even receive inspirational messages when you get up. It can also send you the prices of a stock at a specific time, send you a new word every day in a language to help you learn it, and even send puzzles and interview questions to practice at specific times. Users can specify what tasks they’d like done in natural language, and mention how often they’d like them done. ChatGPT automatically sends the results of those tasks as a notification on users’ phones.
“2025 is the year of agents. baby steps in that direction,” wrote OpenAI President Greg Brockman on the new feature.
Technically, this update wouldn’t have been hard to implement — OpenAI is basically running specific queries at times designated by the user, and is sending them the results as a notification. But the update is a step towards what is likely coming later this year — AI agents. These AI agents will likely be able to control your computers and complete specific tasks, such as answering emails, researching specific topics, entering data, or browsing the web to find the cheapest flight tickets. These tasks currently require human time and effort, but not a whole lot of expertise — AI could take over these jobs, and perform them cheaply and efficiently.
Also, it appears that ChatGPT was prompted by Google’s plans to launch this feature. Last month, Google had launched Gemini 2.0, which it said would take it closer to building a “universal assistant”. “Today we’re excited to launch our next era of models built for this new agentic era: introducing Gemini 2.0, our most capable model yet. With new advances in multimodality — like native image and audio output — and native tool use, it will enable us to build new AI agents that bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai had said in a blogpost. It appears that this universal assistant could end up having a lot of value — it could become the ‘Google’ of the AI era. And with Google already taking steps to build one, OpenAI has gone ahead and launched a feature that could be the first steps towards building a similar universal assistant.