12 ms·

Scheduled tasks in ChatGPT

129 points by isaacdl 2y ago

DeepYogurt 2y ago
They're really trying to juice the usage numbers
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  As long as it’s generating hype and funding, it brings us closer to their own definition of AGI. It’s the perfect plan.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  "How chatgpt reminders saved my life and made me more productive." Videos on YouTube in 3,2,1.
UmYeahNo 2y ago
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/ https://help.openai.com/
- Terretta 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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".
retskrad 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Apple Intelligence is running on device instead of racks and racks of cloud hardware. Of course it’s less sophisticated.
  - amelius 2y ago
    Yeah, but knowing that doesn't make it much better; it's the wrong design choice.
    - mh- 2y ago
      Agreed. The vast majority of their audience doesn't understand the difference. And among the subset that do, I imagine there's a fair number of us that don't care about the distinction. I just want it to work well.
- paul7986 2y ago
  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.
kifler 2y ago
Oddly enough, I do not have access to scheduled tasks either on the app or web interfaces and I am a paying customer.
- delgaudm 2y ago
  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 2y ago
Can I ask it to check for deals on products and make it search the web several times a day?
ilaksh 2y ago
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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ProofHouse 2y ago
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.
headcanon 2y ago
I'm trying to figure out how this would be useful with the existing feature set. It seems like it would be good for summarizing daily updates against a search query. but all it would do is display them. I would probably want to connect it with some tools at minimum for it to be useful.
geor9e 2y ago
sounds like theyre trying to get ahead of cron job wrappers so they dont get slammed at peak times
- daveguy 2y ago
  If it works correctly, wouldn't those still be peak times? Except with this they have to process the initial scheduling request in addition to the at-execution task.
  - mh- 2y ago
    Everyone else's crons, synced to wall clocks, vs your centralized cron (task scheduler, really) that is aware of scheduled work and current load on your systems that consume the scheduled tasks. Controlling the ability to nudge the wakeup times by small amounts of time can make a huge difference to your ability to manage spiky workloads like this.
  - geor9e 2y ago
    A lot of answers don't go stale for hours or days. They'll do the task early, at an off-peak time, hidden from the user, double-check that it really wasn't time sensitive, then surface the saved answer at the time desired.
    - throwaway314155 2y ago
      How are they going to double check without incurring the cost of running it again?
      - geor9e 2y ago
        Start with a regex (or fast tiny model) to flag obvious time-sensitive tasks. Else, do the task early by prompting it "if this requires up to the minute information, output cancel, else [prompt]". At best, it's 1 regex + 1 full inference. At worst, it's 1 regex + 1 output token + 1 full inference.
dgfitz 2y ago
New killer feature: cron Can’t imagine why everyone doesn’t pay $200/mo for even more features. Eventually I bet they can clean out /tmp!
- chairhairair 2y ago
  cron, but completely unreliable. How nice. LLM heads will say “it’s not completely unreliable, it works very often”. That is completely unreliable. You cannot rely on it to work. Please product people, stop putting LLMs at the core of products that need reliability.
  - kenjackson 2y ago
    It's all a matter of degree. Even in deterministic systems, bit flipping happens. Rarely, but it does. You don't throw out computers as a whole because of this phenomena, do you? You just assess the risk and determine if the scenario you care about sits above or below the threshold.
    - great_psy 2y ago
      When’s the last time you personally had a bit flip on you?
      - mhitza 2y ago
        You generally cannot know because we don't measure for it? Especially not on personal computers, maybe ECC ram reports this information in some way? In practice I think it happens often enough, and I remember a blackhat conference talk from around a decade ago where the hacker squatted typoed variants of the domain of a popular facebook game, and caught requests from real end users. Basing his attack on the random chance of bitflips during dns lookups. Related, but not the video I was referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5446854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5446854
    - dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
      A bit flip is a rare occurrence in an array typically tens of billions large. The chance that the flipped bit changes a bit that results in a new valid state and one that does something actually damaging is astronomically small. Meanwhile LLM errors are common and directly effect the result.
elif 2y ago
Works on my machine. (tm) But it won't let me reschedule my task execution time or change its prompting... It will just go forever now I guess
jumploops 2y ago
I'm surprised it took OpenAI this long to launch scheduled tasks, but as we've seen from our users[0], pure LLM-based responses are quite limited in utility. For context: ~50% of our users use a time-triggered Loop, often with an LLM component. Simple stuff I've used it for: baby name idea generator, reminder to pay housekeeper, pre-natal notifications, etc. We're moving away from cron-esque automations as one of our core-value props (most new users use us for spinning up APIs really quickly), but the base functionality of LLM+code+cron will still be available (and migrated!) to the next version of our product. [0]https://magicloops.dev/ https://magicloops.dev/
- duskwuff 2y ago
  > Simple stuff I've used it for: baby name idea generator, reminder to pay housekeeper, pre-natal notifications, etc. Baby name generator: why would this be a scheduled task? Surely you aren't having that many children... :) Reminder to pay, notifications: what value does OpenAI bring to the table here over other apps which provide calendar / reminder functionality?
  - jumploops 2y ago
    > Baby name generator: why would this be a scheduled task? Surely you aren't having that many children... :) So far it's help name two children :) -- my wife and I like to see the same 10 ideas each day (via text), so that we can discuss what we like/don't like daily. We tried the sift through 1000 names thing and it didn't fit well with us. > Reminder to pay, notifications: what value does OpenAI bring to the table here over other apps which provide calendar / reminder functionality? That's exactly my point. Without further utility (i.e. custom code execution), I don't think this provides a ton of value at present.
- dimitri-vs 2y ago
  "ok Google, remind me to ____ every ____" Am I missing something or is there exactly zero benefit here over native Apple/Google calendar/todo apps?
  - 2y ago
UltraSane 2y ago
This could be done with an API key and AWS Lambda in minutes.
darkteflon 2y ago
Surely we want to be scheduling and calling LLMs from temporalio, dagster - even cron - instead of whatever this is. Why put the LLM at the middle?
srid 2y ago
Important caveat: > ChatGPT has a limit on 10 active tasks at any time. If you reach this limit, ChatGPT will not be able to create a new task unless you pause or delete an existing active task or it completes per its scheduled time. So this is pretty much useless for most real-world uses cases.
android521 2y ago
I tried it and it failed to send me desktop notification. I did receive emails (at the wrong time). I do think it is too early to launch. 5 min test could have found out these bugs.It really hurts their brand.
joshstrange 2y ago
This feature is really bad (unreliable) and they don’t even make a good case for _why_ you would want to use this over literally any other reminder system. I guess it can execute an LLM to decide what to send to you at the scheduled time but its unreliability would never have me relying on it. Some use cases that might be interesting * Let me know the closing stock price for XXXXX * Compile a list of highlights from the XXXX game after it finishes But everything I can think of is just a toy, cool if it works but not ground breaking and possible with much more reliable methods. OpenAI really seems just be throwing stuff at the wall to see if it sticks then moving on and never iterating on the previous features. Dall-e is kind of a joke compared to other things (one-shot only), I trust Claude more for programming, o1 was ho-hum for my needs, desktop app still feels like a solution in search of a problem, etc.
- reustle 2y ago
  Has been consistently working for me, and it does web searching within the tasks. i.e. look up some niche news on a topic and format it in a particular way

129 points by isaacdl 2y ago

DeepYogurt 2y ago

They're really trying to juice the usage numbers

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
As long as it’s generating hype and funding, it brings us closer to their own definition of AGI. It’s the perfect plan.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
BoredPositron 2y ago
"How chatgpt reminders saved my life and made me more productive." Videos on YouTube in 3,2,1.

UmYeahNo 2y ago

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/ https://help.openai.com/

Terretta 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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".

retskrad 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
Apple Intelligence is running on device instead of racks and racks of cloud hardware. Of course it’s less sophisticated.
- amelius 2y ago
  Yeah, but knowing that doesn't make it much better; it's the wrong design choice.
  - mh- 2y ago
    Agreed. The vast majority of their audience doesn't understand the difference. And among the subset that do, I imagine there's a fair number of us that don't care about the distinction. I just want it to work well.
paul7986 2y ago
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.

kifler 2y ago

Oddly enough, I do not have access to scheduled tasks either on the app or web interfaces and I am a paying customer.

delgaudm 2y ago
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 2y ago

Can I ask it to check for deals on products and make it search the web several times a day?

ilaksh 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ProofHouse 2y ago

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.

headcanon 2y ago

I'm trying to figure out how this would be useful with the existing feature set. It seems like it would be good for summarizing daily updates against a search query. but all it would do is display them. I would probably want to connect it with some tools at minimum for it to be useful.

geor9e 2y ago

sounds like theyre trying to get ahead of cron job wrappers so they dont get slammed at peak times

daveguy 2y ago
If it works correctly, wouldn't those still be peak times? Except with this they have to process the initial scheduling request in addition to the at-execution task.
- mh- 2y ago
  Everyone else's crons, synced to wall clocks, vs your centralized cron (task scheduler, really) that is aware of scheduled work and current load on your systems that consume the scheduled tasks. Controlling the ability to nudge the wakeup times by small amounts of time can make a huge difference to your ability to manage spiky workloads like this.
- geor9e 2y ago
  A lot of answers don't go stale for hours or days. They'll do the task early, at an off-peak time, hidden from the user, double-check that it really wasn't time sensitive, then surface the saved answer at the time desired.
  - throwaway314155 2y ago
    How are they going to double check without incurring the cost of running it again?
    - geor9e 2y ago
      Start with a regex (or fast tiny model) to flag obvious time-sensitive tasks. Else, do the task early by prompting it "if this requires up to the minute information, output cancel, else [prompt]". At best, it's 1 regex + 1 full inference. At worst, it's 1 regex + 1 output token + 1 full inference.

dgfitz 2y ago

New killer feature: cron Can’t imagine why everyone doesn’t pay $200/mo for even more features. Eventually I bet they can clean out /tmp!

chairhairair 2y ago
cron, but completely unreliable. How nice. LLM heads will say “it’s not completely unreliable, it works very often”. That is completely unreliable. You cannot rely on it to work. Please product people, stop putting LLMs at the core of products that need reliability.
- kenjackson 2y ago
  It's all a matter of degree. Even in deterministic systems, bit flipping happens. Rarely, but it does. You don't throw out computers as a whole because of this phenomena, do you? You just assess the risk and determine if the scenario you care about sits above or below the threshold.
  - great_psy 2y ago
    When’s the last time you personally had a bit flip on you?
    - mhitza 2y ago
      You generally cannot know because we don't measure for it? Especially not on personal computers, maybe ECC ram reports this information in some way? In practice I think it happens often enough, and I remember a blackhat conference talk from around a decade ago where the hacker squatted typoed variants of the domain of a popular facebook game, and caught requests from real end users. Basing his attack on the random chance of bitflips during dns lookups. Related, but not the video I was referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5446854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5446854
  - dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
    A bit flip is a rare occurrence in an array typically tens of billions large. The chance that the flipped bit changes a bit that results in a new valid state and one that does something actually damaging is astronomically small. Meanwhile LLM errors are common and directly effect the result.

elif 2y ago

Works on my machine. (tm) But it won't let me reschedule my task execution time or change its prompting... It will just go forever now I guess

jumploops 2y ago

I'm surprised it took OpenAI this long to launch scheduled tasks, but as we've seen from our users[0], pure LLM-based responses are quite limited in utility. For context: ~50% of our users use a time-triggered Loop, often with an LLM component. Simple stuff I've used it for: baby name idea generator, reminder to pay housekeeper, pre-natal notifications, etc. We're moving away from cron-esque automations as one of our core-value props (most new users use us for spinning up APIs really quickly), but the base functionality of LLM+code+cron will still be available (and migrated!) to the next version of our product. [0]https://magicloops.dev/ https://magicloops.dev/

duskwuff 2y ago
> Simple stuff I've used it for: baby name idea generator, reminder to pay housekeeper, pre-natal notifications, etc. Baby name generator: why would this be a scheduled task? Surely you aren't having that many children... :) Reminder to pay, notifications: what value does OpenAI bring to the table here over other apps which provide calendar / reminder functionality?
- jumploops 2y ago
  > Baby name generator: why would this be a scheduled task? Surely you aren't having that many children... :) So far it's help name two children :) -- my wife and I like to see the same 10 ideas each day (via text), so that we can discuss what we like/don't like daily. We tried the sift through 1000 names thing and it didn't fit well with us. > Reminder to pay, notifications: what value does OpenAI bring to the table here over other apps which provide calendar / reminder functionality? That's exactly my point. Without further utility (i.e. custom code execution), I don't think this provides a ton of value at present.
dimitri-vs 2y ago
"ok Google, remind me to ____ every ____" Am I missing something or is there exactly zero benefit here over native Apple/Google calendar/todo apps?
- 2y ago

UltraSane 2y ago

This could be done with an API key and AWS Lambda in minutes.

darkteflon 2y ago

Surely we want to be scheduling and calling LLMs from temporalio, dagster - even cron - instead of whatever this is. Why put the LLM at the middle?

srid 2y ago

Important caveat: > ChatGPT has a limit on 10 active tasks at any time. If you reach this limit, ChatGPT will not be able to create a new task unless you pause or delete an existing active task or it completes per its scheduled time. So this is pretty much useless for most real-world uses cases.

android521 2y ago

I tried it and it failed to send me desktop notification. I did receive emails (at the wrong time). I do think it is too early to launch. 5 min test could have found out these bugs.It really hurts their brand.

joshstrange 2y ago

This feature is really bad (unreliable) and they don’t even make a good case for _why_ you would want to use this over literally any other reminder system. I guess it can execute an LLM to decide what to send to you at the scheduled time but its unreliability would never have me relying on it. Some use cases that might be interesting * Let me know the closing stock price for XXXXX * Compile a list of highlights from the XXXX game after it finishes But everything I can think of is just a toy, cool if it works but not ground breaking and possible with much more reliable methods. OpenAI really seems just be throwing stuff at the wall to see if it sticks then moving on and never iterating on the previous features. Dall-e is kind of a joke compared to other things (one-shot only), I trust Claude more for programming, o1 was ho-hum for my needs, desktop app still feels like a solution in search of a problem, etc.

reustle 2y ago
Has been consistently working for me, and it does web searching within the tasks. i.e. look up some niche news on a topic and format it in a particular way