Altman says no current plans for ads in ChatGPT Pulse – but not ruling it out (www.theverge.com)

At OpenAI’s DevDay Q&A, CEO Sam Altman called ChatGPT Pulse his “favorite feature” but said there are no concrete plans to put ads in it today — though he didn’t rule out the idea long‑term. Pulse is a personalization layer for ChatGPT that ingests a user’s transcripts and connected apps (calendar, email, etc.), runs overnight research, and surfaces a curated daily “pulse” each morning (e.g., tailored workouts, language lessons, news roundups, or dinner suggestions). Because this continuous background processing is compute‑heavy, OpenAI limited the initial rollout to Pro subscribers. The announcement matters because it highlights tensions between richer, always‑on personalization and monetization, privacy, and infrastructure costs that the AI/ML community is wrestling with. Technically, Pulse implies persistent state, cross‑app connectors, scheduled background inference, and heavier orchestration — all of which raise operational cost and data‑governance challenges. Altman’s openness to “relevant” ad formats signals a potential future for contextually targeted content inside model-driven experiences, which would require careful design for relevance, user consent, and model/data isolation. For researchers and engineers, Pulse is an early example of tradeoffs in scalable personalization: improved utility versus compute footprint, privacy surface area, and how monetization choices could shape model behavior.