ChatGPT Tasks: Here’s How to Use Them Right

today openi announced a new feature called tasks this was a highly anticipated feature essentially this is a Cron job with a predefined prompt that chat GPD executes and sends a reminder to the user at predefined times now this seems to be a first tab of opening at a usable agentic system as Sam said in his recent essay we believe that in 2025 we see the first AI agents join the workforce and materially change the output of the companies what exactly is scheduled tasks in chat TBT this is a new feature that gives a chat TBT the ability to create tasks for itself to run later based on the user prompt and task can be either at a specific times one off or recurring tasks are executed regardless of whether the user is currently online so you can set a task and then it will run at a uh predefined time you will get an email as a notification currently it's in early beta so uh some things may not work I'm going to show you how you can set up tasks and what to expect and I'll also show you a couple of use cases which I found interesting Beyond coming up with the reminder for a workout but let's first look at some of the things that I didn't like the first thing is there is a new model gbd4 with scheduled tasks now in order to enable tasks you have to select this I think it's a pretty bad UI design because you already have gbd 40 so that model should have the ability to schedule tasks on your behalf I don't really see a point of having yet another model in the model list and the second one is that chart GPT has a limit of 10 active tasks at a time so you can have only up to 10 tasks if you want to add another task you'll have to remove one of the previous tasks so I'm going to show you a couple of quick examples of uh tasks that I personally will find useful so let's select GPD 4 with tasks now this is going to be my first prompt and basic it's going to be extremely useful if you want chat GPT to perform some sort of analysis aggregate results and then send you an daily basis now at the moment the only operation that it can really do is web search so it's very limited and since it's in beta so that is expected but if it has the ability to let's say access your calendar or modify Google Docs I think this is going to be extremely helpful so this example will give you a sense of what kind of things you can do so I'm asking it that 7:15 PST every day check the stock price of Apple Tesla Google Nvidia and for each company report the closing price along with the following analysis so I wanted to look at the relative exchanges Trend analysis volume insights and then key news events and at the end I'm saying format the output in a structure table with a column for the company name closing price percentage changes Trend directions average volume comparison and relevant news highlights and let's ask it to run this Crown job or sorry tasks at 7:15 p. m. now if I execute this you're going to see that it will simply acknowledge this so it says sure I'll provide that every day at 7:15 p.

m. and if you click on this that's basically provides you the name of the task you can modify this if you want then based on your prompt it comes up with a modified prompt that the agent is executing in the background and you can pause or delete a task or you can also change the schedule now you can even run this on an hourly or minute by minute basis it doesn't have to be a daily task so I'm going to wait for this to execute but essentially you're going to see something like this whenever it executes a task you will receive an email from open a with the name of the task and then you can click on this to view the actual execution so there's a task list as well so if you go to chat gp. com tasks here you will see all your tasks and then here you want to make sure that you don't exceed more than 10 tasks you will have to delete those tasks so in order to delete a task you just click on these three buttons you can either pause a task or delete it right away here are the results of my task that was executed so it give me a table with all the information that we were looking for so for each of the company we have the C closing price then a percentage change from uh previous close 5day Trends then volume comparison and key insights so for Tesla for example it found a news article this is coming from Investopedia and I think there's another news article for NVIDIA as well it's just one example of market research that you can do chbd tasks and imagine it can do a lot more complex report generation and can send you that report daily or hourly if you want to now one of the limitations is that from my understanding these tasks don't have memory so let's say if I were to ask it to generate this report on a daily basis it just execute that task every day without having any memory of the previous tasks I think it would be awesome if could if it could keep memory of all the previous reports that it has generated or even better if it could write this report into some sort of external table that would be extremely valuable here's one more example that I'll personally be interested in So currently um I am in Los Angeles uh and my prompt is uh compil a report in a table format summarizing all the latest news on the LA fires each row in the table should represent uh separate incident and the column should include the name area impacted what is the severity what is the containment percentage right last update updated and just to make sure that it generates that report we we wanted to run it at 720 p.

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