In a quick live stream today, OpenAI announced ChatGPT agent, which improves on its promising, but limited Operator feature announced a few months ago. Here’s how it works
Operator meets Deep Research
What OpenAI did was combine Operator, which already had agentic browsing capabilities, and Deep Research, which can quickly consume, understand, and infer on website content.
The result is an agent that gets spun up on a virtual machine when you assign it a task, and then it just… goes.
It can ask follow-up questions to clarify the user’s intent, and can ask the user to log in to services in order to complete transactions.
Users can take over at any point, as well as send in complementary instructions halfway through.
The way OpenAI set up ChatGPT agent is pretty interesting. It basically combines:
Text-based browsing through Deep Research
through Deep Research Visual browsing through Operator
through Operator Its own terminal to generate code and analyze data
to generate code and analyze data API (public and private) calls for services and platforms like Google Drive, Google Calendar, GitHub, and SharePoint.
Another interesting aspect of ChatGPT agent is that it provides the user with a timeline of its browsing and reasoning process, which makes it easier to understand where each aspect of the final result came from.
New possibilities, new security risks
OpenAI says it went to great lengths to train its model to identify suspicious or malicious websites that will inevitably try to trick agents and users into handing in credentials, or buying products at fake websites.
Still, it repeatedly said that this is new territory for everyone involved, so users should be careful when using ChatGPT agent.
Availability
As detailed by OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, ChatGPT agent is rolling out today for Pro, and “very soon” for Plus and Team users.
Pro users get 400 queries per month, while Plus and Teams users get 40 queries per month.
The company also plans on making ChatGPT agent available for Enterprise and Edu users by the end of July.
Do you see yourself using this? Let us know in the comments.
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