Sam Altman says there are no current plans for ads within ChatGPT Pulse — but he’s not ruling it out

In a Q&A with reporters Monday at OpenAI’s DevDay event in San Francisco, CEO Sam Altman said the recently-launched ChatGPT Pulse was his “favorite feature we’ve launched in a long time,” and he didn’t rule out including ads in the future.

Pulse is OpenAI’s latest personalization play for ChatGPT. It allows the chatbot to learn about a user via their transcripts and connected apps (such as their calendar and email), then research things on their behalf overnight to present them with a daily “pulse” on those topics every morning. That could take the form of daily personalized workout routines, daily language lessons, news roundups, or suggestions for what to order at the restaurant they’re heading to that evening, but whatever it looks like, it’s OpenAI’s hope that users begin their day, every day, with ChatGPT.

The company is talking about advertising within Pulse, executives said during the Q&A, but Altman said there were “no current plans” in a concrete way to introduce ads within the feature. But he went on to say that he enjoys Instagram ads — and didn’t rule out introducing that type of relevant ad within Pulse in the future. When the team began building Pulse, they originally planned to roll it out to everyone, but its compute-heavy nature meant they could only roll it out to Pro users, according to the Q&A.

“To the degree we can find out cool things to do that actually seem helpful to users … maybe there’s something to do there, but as has been clear, we approach ads with great caution,” Altman said.