OpenAI launches an AI-powered browser: ChatGPT Atlas

OpenAI announced the launch of its AI-powered browser, ChatGPT Atlas, on Tuesday, a major step in the company’s pursuit of Google as the main way to find information online.

The company says Atlas will roll out to macOS first, with support for Windows, iOS and Android coming soon. OpenAI said the product will be available to all free users at launch.

Browsers have quickly become the AI ​​industry’s next battleground. While Google Chrome has long dominated the space, there’s a sense that AI chatbots and agents are fundamentally changing how things work online. A handful of startups have tried to capture this by launching their own AI-powered browsers, viz Comet of Confusion And By browser company. Google and Microsoft have tried to update Chrome and Edge respectively with AI-powered features to differentiate their legacy products.

OpenAI’s engineering lead for Atlas, Ben Goodger, said in a livestream on Tuesday that ChatGPT is native to the company’s first browser. Users of the ChatGPT Atlas can chat with their search results, much in confusion or in Google’s AI mode.

The killer feature for other AI-powered browsers is the built-in chatbot that sits in a side panel and automatically has context for whatever is on your screen. This may sound minor, but many users spend all day copying and pasting text or dragging files and links into ChatGPT, just to provide context. The sidecar feature removes that friction and creates a smoother user experience.

OpenAI’s Product Lead Adam Fry said during the livestream that ChatGPT Atlas will also have a sidecar feature. Also, ChatGPT Atlas has “browser history,” which means ChatGPT can now log the websites you visit and what you do on them, and use that information to further personalize its responses.

AI-powered browsers typically have an AI agent that aims to automate web-based tasks for users. In TechCrunch’s testing, we found that early versions of the web-browsing AI agent left something to be desired. While Perplexity’s Comet and OpenAI’s ChatGPT agents work well for simple tasks, They struggle to automate reliably More difficult problems users may want to offload to an AI system.

Sure enough, OpenAI’s browser also has a web-browsing agent. Using “agent mode”, users can ask ChatGPT to complete small tasks in the browser on their behalf. The company said that agent mode is only available to ChatGPT users on Plus, Pro and Business tiers at launch.

In an interview at OpenAI’s DevDay conference, Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, told TechCrunch that he The way is inspired by the browser Redefined what an operating system could look like. Turley notes that browsers have revolutionized the way people work online, and he thinks ChatGPT is a similar phenomenon.

Whether OpenAI’s browser can give a push to Google Chrome, which has more than three billion users worldwide, remains to be seen. AI browsers are pretty busy in Silicon Valley today, but their impact on the wider world is limited today.