[HN Gopher] Scheduled tasks in ChatGPT
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Scheduled tasks in ChatGPT
Author : isaacdl
Score : 60 points
Date : 2025-01-15 20:20 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (help.openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (help.openai.com)
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| They're really trying to juice the usage numbers
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| As long as it's generating hype and funding, it brings us
| closer to their own definition of AGI. It's the perfect plan.
| UmYeahNo wrote:
| I tried this yesterday, asking it to create a simple daily
| reminder task, which it happily did. Then when the time came and
| went I simply got a chat that the task failed, with no
| explanation of _why_ or _how_ it failed. When I asked it why, it
| hallucinated that I had too many tasks. (I only had the one) So,
| now I don 't know why it failed or how to fix it. Which leads to
| two related observations:
|
| 1) I find it interesting that the LLM rarely seems trained to
| understand it's own features, or about your account, or how the
| LLM works. Seems strange that it has no idea about it's own
| support.
|
| 2) Which leads me to the Open AI support docs[0]. It seems pretty
| telling to me that they use old-school search and not an LLM for
| its own help docs, right?
|
| [0] https://help.openai.com/
| Terretta wrote:
| Same experience except mine insisted I had no tasks.
|
| It does say it's a beta on the label, but the thing inside
| doesn't seem to know that, nor what it's supposed to know. Your
| point 1, for sure.
|
| Point 2 is a SaaS from before the LLMs+RAG beat normal things.
| Status page, a SaaS. API membership, metrics, and billing, a
| SaaS. These are all undifferentiated, but arguably they
| selected quite well for when the selections were made, and
| unless the help is going to sell more users, they shouldn't
| spend time on undifferentiated heavy lifting, arguably.
| neom wrote:
| I've thought about this a lot too and my guess is that because
| foundational modals take a lot to train, I don't think they are
| trained fairly often, and from my experiences you can't train
| in new data easily, so I think you'd have to have some little
| up to date side system, and I suspect they're very thoughtful
| about these "side systems" they place, from trying to build
| some agent orchestration stuff myself nothing ends up being as
| simple as as I expect with "side systems" and stuff easily goes
| off the rails. So my thought was probably, given the scale
| they're dealing with, this is probably a low priority not
| actually particularly easy feature.
| yosito wrote:
| I regularly use Perplexity and Cursor which can search the
| internet and documentation to answer questions that aren't in
| their training data. It doesn't seem that hard for ChatGPT to
| search and summarize their own docs when people ask about it.
| neom wrote:
| You would want a feature like "self aware" to be pretty
| canonical, not based on a web search, and even if they had
| a discreet internal side system it could query that you
| controlled, if the training data was a year old, how would
| you keep it matched from a systems point of view over time?
| Also it's unclear how the model would interoperate the data
| each time it ran on the new context. It seems like a pretty
| complicated system to build tbh, esp when maintaining human
| created help and docs and FAQs etc is A LOT simpler and
| more reliable source of truth. That said, my understanding
| is behind the scenes they are working towards the product
| we experience just built around the foundational model, not
| THE foundational model is it pretty much is today. Once
| they have a bunch of smaller llms that do discreet standard
| tasks set up, I would guess they will become considerably
| more "aware".
| miltonlost wrote:
| > So my thought was probably, given the scale they're dealing
| with, this is probably a low priority not actually
| particularly easy feature.
|
| "working like OpenAI said it should" is a weird thing to put
| low priority. Why do they continuously put out features that
| break and bug? I'm tired of stochastic outputs and being told
| that we should accept sub-90% success rates.
|
| At their scale, being less than 99.99% right results in
| thousands of problems. So their scale and the outsized impact
| of their statistical bugs is part of the issue.
| neom wrote:
| Why are you setting your bar this way? Is it because of how
| they do their feature releases (no warning of it being an
| alpha or beta feature)? Their product, ChatGPT was released
| 2 years ago, and is a fairly complicated product. My
| understanding was the whole thing is still a pretty early
| product generally. It doesn't seem unusual that any startup
| doing something as big as they are to release features that
| don't have all the kinks ironed out. I've released some
| kinda janky features to 100,000s of users before not
| totally knowing how it's going to preform with all of them
| at that scale, I don't think that is very controversial in
| product development.
|
| Also, I was specifically talking about it being able to
| understand the features it has in my earlier comment, I
| don't think that is the same problem as the remind me
| feature not working consistently.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Yeah, I saw the 4o with Tasks today, tried it and asked "what
| is 4o with Tasks", it had no idea. I had to set it to web
| search mode to figure it out.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Buggy af right now, 95% tasks failed and I get a ton of emails
| about it
| baxtr wrote:
| Now imagine giving this "agent" a task like booking a table at
| a restaurant or similar.
|
| _" Yeah sure I got you a table at a nice restaurant. Don't
| worry."_
| retskrad wrote:
| OpenAI resembles the old Apple: ship the best experience. The
| ChatGPT app on every platform is the best in business and they
| are shipping polished features relatively quickly. It's quite the
| contrast to Apple of today, the world's largest company who is so
| inept that they are releasing Apple Intelligence, which is quite
| literally using ChatGPT 3.5 tech in 2025. It just shows how
| valuable CEO's like Altman, Musk and Jobs are to a corporation.
| arghwhat wrote:
| The "old" Apple certainly didn't ship anything quick or on the
| bleeding edge, nor did they ship the "best" experience. They
| did, however, have somewhat different priorities than their
| competitors. They still do to some extent.
| TylerE wrote:
| Apple Intelligence is running on device instead of racks and
| racks of cloud hardware. Of course it's less sophisticated.
| amelius wrote:
| Yeah, but knowing that doesn't make it much better; it's the
| wrong design choice.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Indeed which makes me excited for..
|
| Open AI creating an AI phone with Microsoft ... release H.E.R.
| (the movie) in your pocket.
|
| Your AI assistant / Agent is seen on the Lock Screen (like a
| FaceTime call UI/UX) waiting at your beckon to do everything
| for you /be there for via via text, voice, gestures,
| expressions, etc.
|
| It interfaces with other AI Agents of businesses, companies,
| your doctor, friends & family to schedule things & used as a
| knowledge-base (ask friends birthday if they allow that info).
|
| Apple is indeed stale & boring to me (heavy GPT user) in 2025.
| extr wrote:
| The ChatGPT UI/UX is pretty middling. They still don't have a
| proper answer to Claude Projects, plus they are focusing on
| shipping stuff like this instead of fixing the numerous
| papercuts with the chat experience in their UI. How is it that
| I can access the most powerful AI on the planet with o1 pro,
| but if I paste more than few pages of text there's no solution
| for that, it just overflows the input box and makes it
| impossible to navigate?
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| > They still don't have a proper answer to Claude Projects
|
| They added Projects in December:
|
| https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10169521-using-
| projects-...
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| OpenAI projects don't work very well compared to Anthropic
| (which has its own limitations as is).
| apwell23 wrote:
| this has to be sarcasm
| dmonitor wrote:
| their commenting behavior is strange. i'm not certain.
| kifler wrote:
| Oddly enough, I do not have access to scheduled tasks either on
| the app or web interfaces and I am a paying customer.
| delgaudm wrote:
| It took me a minute to find it. It's a different model -- pull
| down the models list and you might see one with tasks.
| amelius wrote:
| Can I ask it to check for deals on products and make it search
| the web several times a day?
| ilaksh wrote:
| This will be a lot more useful when it's able to combine with
| more tools, such as in custom GPT actions, APIs, "computer use",
| the Python interpreter, etc.
| ProofHouse wrote:
| Yeah, it's pretty bad, embarrassingly so quite honestly.
| Literally a single developer in a day could probably
| significantly improve it. I'm sure that's coming, but why don't
| they just launch these MVP features at least a quarter baked.
| It's essentially unusable as is. If it could ping me on my phone
| And advanced voice could open or I could go do a basic task,
| great I'm back to using it. But essentially as it is rolled out,
| it's hilariously minimal and borderline unusable.
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