ChatGPT's New Task Scheduling Feature | Baby Step to the Agentic Era?

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Matvid Pro AI YouTube channel. Chat GPT has a brand new feature as of today, and that's what I want to talk about. So let's crack this one open and dive in. I'm not here to waste your time, so I want to give you guys the Cliff Notes brought to us by Rowan Chung, a fantastic account on X. If you do use that platform, I recommend you follow them. So the new feature that OpenAI just launched is called Tasks within Chat GPT and as you might expect, it allows users to schedule actions and reminders within Chat GPT. Now this could be like a one time thing like hey, you have a dentist appointment. Or it could be a recurring action that occurs. And the example Rowan provides here is a daily news update, right? Chat GPT can, on a timer go and find some news in whatever domain you're looking for and then present it to you. Right now you can have up to 10 active tasks scheduled at one time. And and the way you access this is a new model called OpenAI GPT4O. So this is a variation of the 4 Omni hyper optimized really fast large language model, but with the scheduled tasks active basically. So I don't know if they had to actually fine tune it to work with scheduled tasks or if it's literally just a pre prompt and some code to ping the API at a certain time. It's a beta feature rolling out to Plus Team and Pro ChatGPT subscribers. So everyone's getting access and it's going to be a rollout over the next few days. Rome points out here a very, very important concept. Is this the first baby step in chat GPT's agentic era? Are we going to see ChatGPT become more agentic this year? And will we see more capabilities that are autonomous, such as this one? Well, we're going to talk about that towards the end of the video. Let's first take a quick peek at what the UI is all about. Here's the basic rundown. Obviously this video is from that same Twitter post. You can have all of your scheduled tasks. The examples that see right here are sending a knock knock joke daily at 9pm Obviously not super useful, but something fun. Next up we have sending a fantasy basketball recap, which actually could be pretty useful if you're into fantasy basketball. Could give you basically the highlights and what's going on keeping you up to date without you actually having to Even prompt the AI more than just setting up a scheduled task once 7am, starting your day off with affirmations, obviously, you know, more towards the mental health side of things, but easy enough for a large language model to do. I don't think any of these examples we've seen so far are really pushing the capabilities that I think Tasks really has to offer. Creator Economy summary here at 9am this is getting more into the work sort of things. Obviously, if this is Rowan Chung's personal scheduled tasks, this makes a lot of sense. New, updated, well organized summaries every day about whatever field you're particularly involved with. Next up, we actually get into the weekly tasks. Rowan has set up a weekly meal plan on Sundays. Now, immediately, I have a question about this one. If every Sunday it's going to send you a meal plan for the rest of your week, isn't it going to need some information about what kind of food you like to eat, what food you already have? There are a lot of little nuances in there and I question how well you could make something like this work. But hey, what if we had a daily reminder to update the AI about the kinds of food that you have available? Moreover, this leads me into the concept of can you actually tie these scheduled tasks together? Can they work together to create something more? Then obviously, you know, you have practicing Italian, learning a new language, check New Year's resolutions, that's monthly, and then cousin's birthday on a very specific date. So, yeah, makes sense. I think this is a nice little list of lightweight examples, but like I said, I'm more interested in the deeper use cases that extract more value from the model. Again, that touch that lead into the agentic era of Chat GPT, which we're all sort of hoping is going going to be this year in 2025. So let's actually take a look for ourselves. I am here on the Chat GPT website and you'll notice I do have access GPT4O with scheduled tasks beta. Ask Chat GPT to follow up later. All right, Chat GPT, let's make a new task. I'm sorry, what? Task scheduling failed. It looks like there was an issue determining the next scheduled time for the task. Could you clarify what, when exactly you'd like the task to run? Okay, I see, I see. This model very much is like, all right, let's schedule the task right away. Let's start with the obvious one. I need you to update me every day at 4pm on the current AI landscape. I want the best news and research fresh off the presses. Can it schedule the task? And there it goes. It schedules the task. Get desktop notifications sure. Obviously to update you, but I assume this will also connect to the ChatGPT app on my phone, which is logged into the same exact account. All right, so it seems like it succeed successfully. Made the task, it made a name, it made its own custom instructions. And then here's the schedule ui. So pretty much exactly what we would expect. Can also pause them at will or delete them. And as we learned earlier, it seems like we can make up to 10 of these. It almost is 4pm EST for me, so we're gonna see if this works in 10 minutes. Also, digging into the settings here, it doesn't seem like we can just view all of our tasks in one area, similar to memories. So it looks like everything has to be done through the ChatGPT4O with scheduled tasks Chatbot. Is the memory unified though? Like if I just go to regular 4.0, do I have any scheduled tasks? And okay, clearly it doesn't have access to that information because it is the wrong model. Interesting. So regular GPT4O and I assume 0101 mini and any other model is not going to be able to access the information in your scheduled tasks. But does GPT GPT4O with scheduled tasks actually have access to your regular memories? Let's say who am I? Oh, okay. That's something only you can answer. What? Based on your knowledge of me. Oh, okay. So yes, Chat GPT with tasks does have access to your memories. These are all things that it knows about me and is in the collective memories that are manageable in your Chat GPT settings. So interesting that information is accessible by Chat GPT tasks. But none of the other models seem to be able to access your scheduled tasks, except for that particular one. What I don't understand is why they needed to make an entire separate model inside of Chat GPT just for scheduled tasks. I don't see why it couldn't have just been a new tool that GPT4O already has access to, such as web search or image uploading. It does appear to be a separate model. Look, we could see right at the bottom here Attach files is unavailable in GPT4O with tasks. This is a common thing that I'm starting to notice with Chat GPT whenever they want to try out a new feature, it seems to be a completely separate model that doesn't have access to a lot of the other features that other models might have access to. I think a lot of people are looking for features such as tasks, but they're also looking to do more. I don't know it's kind of a pain in the butt that we have all of these separate models for separate tasks, but it's more of a pain in the butt that they can't communicate with each other or share a lot of the same capabilities abilities. Don't know if this is specifically because of safety or issues getting the models to work as expected. All right, it's almost coming up on our time here for the task to ensue. I suppose I'd love to see how Chat GPT approaches this. Is it going to make a whole new chat in my list of chats to the side? How's this going to work? I'd also like to make you guys aware on the Chat GPT app. On my actual iPhone here, I don't have access to this new tasks model. So can I make tasks and will it actually notify me of my tasks on my phone? Oh, if I switch to the chat I previously made on the PC, I can actually turn on notifications to make sure that my tasks work. So it seems like the feature does work on iPhone, even if it thinks I don't have access to the model. All right, it's now 4pm oh, task scheduling issue. Oh, it looks like it did it. So it just kicks off the API things Chat GPT right inside of the same chat that you set up the task in in the first place. And it seems to went and completed the task as expected. Getting the updates obviously executive order on AI infrastructure. That's a pretty big one going on. AI is popular at a certain trade show. Not too important. I'd probably want to fine tune this task to look at more specific sources rather than just get general stuff from like Ford or Wired or whatever. See, this is old news. OpenAI releasing 01 as its latest model. I already know about that. Okay, I'm in the Chat GPT app and then it gives you like a random resource for a valuable place to find research papers on AI. So honestly, not a great recap here overall, like I said, I'd probably heavily edit this task. It did indeed work though on time. Not really a miracle though. This is a pretty standard thing that can be set up within the Chat GPT app. Also did not receive a notification on my phone from the ChatGPT app and notifications are also allowed in my settings, so that's a little strange. Seems like the app might not fully be set up to work with tasks. All right, let's do an update to make this better. Search for the latest AI news articles from the past Three days only. Specifically news about papers, new models and any general mainstream news. I guess we'll have to see how this goes. I'm going to try to use this feature make me a news task that looks up Internet trends every day at 4:15pm EST, then generates a dolly image reflecting what you discovered. Obviously not very useful, but kind of just silly fun. I'm interested to see if this tasks model can use the tools such as Dall? E and web search together. That seems to be the only thing it has access to, not even file uploading, which kind of makes me sad. Imagine if it could just pull a particular file from your computer or pull a particular file from your phone, but nope, no file uploading available. And it would have to do it autonomously as well, which obviously comes with its own challenges in developing the ChatGPT app itself. I don't know, this feature feels pretty underwhelming as a whole. It's basic task scheduling. Send ChatGPT a prompt with specific instructions on whatever date you want in the future and you could have it repeating, etc. How is this any different than having a reminder on your phone? Not really all that different. Other than the fact that it's just just pinging the Chat GPT API to do a task. There's not too many useful things I can think of that this would be able to do right now because it has limited access to the information. That's going to be important for a lot of people again, like the meal plan one for example. That would be really cool. Oh, every week you, you make me a meal plan, but it's gonna need to be pre prompted with a bunch of information and that information probably is going to change over time, which just is gonna make more work for you. Kind of negating the whole idea of scheduling the task in the first place. Some slack if it could be like reminding me every day to hey, take a picture of your pantry so I can get an update on what you have in stock. But it can't do that because it can't even accept image inputs. What I really want to see is the ability to schedule a task to go do more than just search the web or generate an image. With Dall? E, I want this thing to have the ability to use my computer, let's say. I mean there actually is a Windows Chat GPT app. There is a Mac Chat GPT app. If they implemented that computer user functionality in the future with tasks, that could be a real game changer. Oh, every day at 5pm go to Chrome, go to my YouTube video, look at my latest YouTube video, scroll through the comments, and then give me a general sentiment on my latest video from the comments or based on the comments or check my email. These are the kinds of things that we want the AIs to be able to do on a recurring basis. And I think if Chat GPT wants to stay competitive, then this is something that they are going to have to implement hopefully this year. There are other platforms that already allow for automation like this. They have Zapier, for example, or Lindy, which I've covered on this channel before, which can do pretty much exactly that. Lindy already can have scheduled tasks at certain times of the day or certain times of the week or whatever specific date that you have in mind. But it can also connect to things like your email or other APIs, for example. Obviously no computer use, that would be a different story. But the features we're seeing today already exist in other apps for sure. Honestly, my biggest hunch here is that OpenAI is gearing up for a more agentic 2025 with Chat GPT and this is the beginning of their tasks feature that hopefully will be able to connect to other apps or connect to other APIs, or connect directly to your computer or phone and pull more relevant information to actually do things that are genuinely useful for you in your life, not just, you know, giving you a reminder or summarizing some news, which is pretty cool, but not like mega useful. All right, it is now 4:15pm Is it going to do the task? Wonder if I actually have to refresh the browser. Oh, yep, there it goes. Check Internet trends. Okay, so it's getting the the Internet trends. Obviously it already did that. And then it tried to generate a Dall E3 image, but it did not happen. It did not occur. So this appears like it's probably a bug because this is in beta. It's trying to send off the prompt to the Dall E3 API and it's clearly not working. Retry generating the image. Okay, there it goes. Oh, new updates and all the the latest tech trends. Thank you. All right, to cap this off, I'm going to show you guys a few more use cases. Maybe this will spawn some extra ideas that we haven't seen that could be used with tasks that are more mind blowing. First up, we got checking stock prices every morning again and there are definitely already apps that could do this for you. I'm pretty sure you could just have a widget on your phone. When you just open your phone, it just shows you the Stock prices. But yep, this is definitely something that can occur. It is something that it can do and maybe in a more customized way. Right. Maybe it can can tell you exactly what you're specifically looking for if you prompt it to do that way. But again, information can change and your needs can change pretty dynamically, which is going to be the biggest setback for tasks in my opinion right now. Next up, we've got Chat GPT WR Sci Fi stories in Canvas on a regular basis and then getting those stories in your inbox like tiny gifs, that's pretty cool. But does it actually send it to your inbox? No. Okay, so it looks like it's just sort of writing the story every single morning, but it can't connect your email and then email you those stories summarizing latest AI news. Already did that. If you have an upcoming interview or an exam, you can delegate ChatGPT to come up with new puzzles to solve to become better at it. It in Canvas. I guess that's also true. Oh yeah, that's true. It can run code now in Canvas, so maybe that's. That's a better use case. I don't know. It couldn't generate dall e images though, so I'm a little bit worried that it wouldn't be all that reliable if it is running some useful code. Genuinely useful code that could do more. Let's see what the community is saying as well as we close this out. I know this is an early feature and it sounds amazing, but when are the plans coming out for it to access email and communicate? Great question. That's also what I'm going to ask. Obviously there are security questions here. There's also the question of having it connect directly to Google or whatever email service you use. There are going to be complications there. I wonder if they're working on that. Are tasks voice activated? If not, it should be a priority. Not sure exactly what this means or what this person is asking, but I think it would be pretty cool if. If that alarm happens, right? Oh, task begins. Let's say it's at 5pm and chat GPT literally calls you because maybe it needs information, right? Maybe to complete the task, it needs to have an update on something only you can check on. That would be pretty cool because voice mode would be very seamless if it was just like a phone call through the Chat GPT on your phone, like, hey, it's chatgpt. I'm just checking up to see how blah blah blah is going so I can complete the task for you. That's kind of cool. Maybe binary forking is onto something here. Will it be able to whisper in my ear and wake me up? Okay, Cyber dreams. That's a little creepy. The start of the truly smart home and assistants. A home not only with sensors and actuators, but brains. I imagine Google will copy this very soon. I don't doubt that. I think everyone's headed in the agentic era, but I have a feeling that Google's out of the box is going to be able to connect to your Google Drive and your Google suite of apps. So your email, your docs, having access to all that information is mighty important, man. That's what we're looking for in relation to automating tasks on the daily, right? Oh hey, actually guys, they do have this. Every time a task is completed it seems like it does send you an email at whatever specific account is tied to your chat GPT account. So it does send you your little task updates from OpenAI. But to even view the message you do have to click View message and then it's going to go ahead and bring you to your chat GPT website. So you might have to re log in. It won't be super seamless, but at least it is tied to your email in some way, which is a nice general area for all of your information. Alright, to wrap things up here, I think I have a good use case for myself particularly that I would like to see which would be just the ability to connect to my Google Drive, right? I want it to access my calendar, I want it to access my emails, I want it to be able to access my docs and all that stuff so it can pull that information automatically on a timer. I would love to just get an email update of hey, here's your calendar every morning you want me to make any adjustments? That would be cool. And that's something that I actually got working with Lindy. So again, OpenAI is technically a little bit behind some other platforms that specialize in this stuff, but once it catches up I think it'll be a lot easier and probably work a little bit better inside of chat GPT itself. So some of you think is this kind of like a nothing burger for you guys? Are you actually going to be able to use tasks in a like meaningful way in your life or are you still waiting for more accessibility and features to actually make that happen? I can see the super bright future for this and it's something that we are all thinking about. Automated AI doing tasks for you in the background and then coming back to you with completed tasks like it's the beginning of the agent era, but right now they're not super useful. Thank you so much for watching folks. Just a quick update bringing you the latest. The AI space as a whole has been moving a little bit slower as of late. We just got out of ces, but I'm sure things will ramp up as they always do. Thanks so much. I'll see you guys in the next video. And goodbye. By.