OpenAI’s agentic era begins with ChatGPT Tasks

ChatGPT is taking a significant step toward becoming a full-blown personal assistant with the release of a new feature called Tasks. This could signal that OpenAI will release more agents in the future.

Currently in beta, Tasks lets ChatGPT Plus, Team and Pro users schedule actions ahead of time.

For example, if someone wants to receive project reminders or daily weather updates, they can prompt ChatGPT, which will notify them of the chosen date and time. Tasks can be recurring or one-time reminders. 

To set up a task, users should toggle to “4o with scheduled tasks” on the model picker and write a reminder prompt. ChatGPT can also suggest tasks from previous conversations.

Tasks work with all versions of ChatGPT and send notifications through desktop, web and mobile. However, users can access the task manager only on the web version of ChatGPT. 

OpenAI said the beta period will help its researchers “understand how people use Tasks and refine the feature before making it available to all ChatGPT users.”

Tasks join other assistant-like features for ChatGPT. During its “12 Days of OpenAI” event in December, OpenAI launched screen sharing, letting users open ChatGPT while reading a text message and asking it to help them respond.

OpenAI’s first agent?

Rumors around OpenAI releasing an AI agent swirled when some users caught ChatGPT providing access to scheduled tasks as far back as December. The agent, called Operator, would be the company’s first agent. 

People believed Tasks could be the precursor to Operator. X user @kimmonismus, aka “Chubby,” said, “The Information seems to be right and everything is being prepared for the release of ‘Operator,’ i.e. OpenAI’s agent. The ‘Tasks’ function found by Tibor seems to be the first significant step in the preparation of Operator. It is questionable whether we will get a release this month or just a preview.”

Testing Catalog News on X theorized Tasks could eventually enable ChatGPT to search for specific information, summarize data, open websites, access documents and think through problems.

VentureBeat reached out to OpenAI about Tasks and Operator. The company declined to answer the question and only said Tasks “will be an important step toward making ChatGPT a more helpful AI companion.”

OpenAI has already made its first foray into the agentic space with Swarm, a framework it released to help orchestrate AI agents. 

Making ChatGPT a better assistant 

If you’re like me, you probably use the Reminders app and Google Calendar too much to remind yourself to text a relative Happy Birthday or of your brunch plans, or to alert you to news embargoes and planned interviews. 

There are many reminder, calendar and productivity apps available for both consumers and enterprises. These include Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Asana, Trello and Notion. The productivity assistant space is not short of applications that remind individuals and teams of tasks they must accomplish.

OpenAI’s​​ big play in such a crowded space is interesting, especially since most people don’t think of chatbots as scheduling assistants. But ChatGPT already streamlines the process for users to migrate their coding or writing tasks to the platform or search the web without leaving the chat interface. ChatGPT even opens up developers’ IDE nearly automatically for them. 

As ChatGPT adds more actions to its platform, setting up scheduled tasks and reminders is not so far-fetched. This makes ChatGPT a viable competitor to many productivity and scheduling apps. 

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