is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
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OpenAI’s next move in its battle against Google is an AI-powered web browser. The tool, dubbed ChatGPT Atlas, is out today. The company announced it in a livestream after teasing it earlier Tuesday via a mysterious video of browser tabs on a white screen.
ChatGPT Atlas is available “globally” on macOS starting today, while access for Windows, iOS, and Android is “coming soon,” per the company. But its “agent mode” is only available to ChatGPT Plus and Pro users for now, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the livestream.
“The way that we hope people will use the internet in the future… the chat experience in a web browser can be a great analog,” Altman said.
Besides Altman, the livestream featured OpenAI employees Will Ellsworth, who works on post-training research; Adam Fry, the product lead for ChatGPT Search; Ben Goodger, a staff member who in previous roles helped develop Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox; Ryan O’Rouke, an interface designer; Justin Rushing, who previously worked at Apple; and Pranav Vishnu.
Fry said one of the browser’s best features is memory — making the browser “more personalized and more helpful to you,” as well as an agent mode, meaning that “in Atlas, ChatGPT can now take actions for you… It can help you book reservations or flights or even just edit a document that you’re working on.” Users can see and manage the browser’s “memories” in settings, employees said, as well as open incognito windows.
The browser’s agent mode clearly builds on OpenAI’s past forays into agentic AI, such as its Operator tool, an early version of a tool allowing ChatGPT to use a computer on a user’s behalf, and ChatGPT Agent, the next iteration, which was designed to be able to complete more complex tasks, shop, and more (though it wasn’t always successful in that realm).
Whenever you click a link from a search result in Atlas, it’ll by default show a split-screen with the webpage and the ChatGPT transcript, with the goal being to display a “companion” at all times, employees said, though a user can turn off the split-screen if they’d rather. On the livestream, employees also demonstrated the browser’s summarization features for webpages, as well as selecting text from an email and clicking a button to have ChatGPT tidy up the sentence in-line — the latter feature is called “cursor chat.”
“This is just a great browser all-around — it’s smooth, it’s quick, it’s really nice to use,” Altman said.
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