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.
OpenAI is going all-in on the most-hyped trend in AI right now: AI agents, or tools that go a step beyond chatbots to complete complex, multi-step tasks on a user’s behalf. The company on Thursday debuted ChatGPT Agent, which it bills as a tool that can complete work on your behalf using its own “virtual computer.”
In a briefing and demo with The Verge, Yash Kumar and Isa Fulford — product lead and research lead on ChatGPT Agent, respectively — said it’s powered by a new model that OpenAI developed specifically for the product. The company said the new tool can perform tasks like looking at a user’s calendar to brief them on upcoming client meetings, planning and purchasing ingredients to make a family breakfast, and creating a slide deck based on its analysis of competing companies.
The model behind ChatGPT Agent, which has no specific name, was trained on complex tasks that require multiple tools — like a text browser, visual browser, and terminal where users can import their own data — via reinforcement learning, the same technique used for all of OpenAI’s reasoning models. OpenAI said that ChatGPT Agent combines the capabilities of both Operator and Deep Research, two of its existing AI tools.
To develop the new tool, the company combined the teams behind both Operator and Deep Research into one unified team. Kumar and Fulford told The Verge that the new team is made up of between 20 and 35 people across product and research.
In the demo, Kumar and Fulford demonstrated potential use cases for ChatGPT Agent, like asking it to plan a date night by connecting to Google Calendar to see when the user has a free evening, and then cross-referencing OpenTable to find openings at certain types of restaurants. They also showed how a user could interrupt the process by adding, say, another restaurant category to search for. Another demonstration showed how ChatGPT Agent could generate a research report on the rise of Labubus versus Beanie Babies.
Fulford said she enjoyed using it for online shopping because the combination of tech behind Deep Research and Operator worked better and was more thorough than trying the process solely using Operator. And Kumar said he had begun using ChatGPT Agent to automate small parts of his life, like requesting new office parking at OpenAI every Thursday instead of showing up Monday having forgotten to request it with nowhere to park.
Kumar said that since ChatGPT Agent has access to “an entire computer” instead of just a browser, they’ve “enhanced the toolset quite a bit.”
According to the demo, though, the tool can be a bit slow. When asked about latency, Kumar said their team is more focused on “optimizing for hard tasks” and that users aren’t meant to sit and watch ChatGPT Agent work.
“Even if it takes 15 minutes, half an hour, it’s quite a big speed-up compared to how long it would take you to do it,” Fulford said, adding that OpenAI’s search team is more focused on low-latency use cases. “It’s one of those things where you can kick something off in the background and then come back to it.”
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