OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Agent for Pro, Plus and Team users -- an AI-powered personal assistant that connects to your various services online to help complete tasks custom to you, the company said in a livestream on Thursday.
Using the power of OpenAI's "reasoning" o3 model, which has deep research capabilities, along with Operator, ChatGPT Agent can go step-by-step from one task to the other to put together complex reports. ChatGPT Agent can visualize what it's doing via a virtual computer interface. Here, you can see its train of thought, what it's browsing on the net and what systems it's connecting to.
During the livestream, OpenAI members demoed what it'd be like to use ChatGPT Agent to figure out travel plans for a wedding. Here, ChatGPT Agent was able to check the wedding site provided, find the date, find nearby hotels, what the weather might be like, browse other websites, look for tuxedos on Nordstrom's highly visual webpage, look for wedding gifts and present to you a final report. Users can also interject to ask for help finding a pair of men's black shoes.
ChatGPT Agent can also connect to various services, like your email, calendar, news apps and others. OpenAI says safety is foundational to this model and that ChatGPT Agent will request your permission before doing anything sensitive, like making purchases or submitting forms. ChatGPT agent won't do "high-risk tasks" like financial transactions or legal advice. The system will also reject "harmful or illegal requests."
OpenAI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
The debut of ChatGPT Agent is the next step in the chase for artificial general intelligence, or AGI. These are AI models so advanced that they would have a general understanding of the world around them and could outcompete humans in tasks. AI systems now, while seeming smart, actually have no understanding of the world and simply arrange words mathematically in a manner that best mimics human speech based on certain criteria. Agentic AI systems, ones that can go out and do complex tasks across various systems, have been seen as a major step towards achieving AGI. Because agentic AI can better mimic complex human train of thought, these systems can be given a task and can be sent off to get them accomplished. While it's hard to measure the economic impact of billions of AI agents doing the work once done by humans, entire industries will be affected.