OpenAI unveiled a web browser on Tuesday in a bid to make its ChatGPT AI product the starting point for online access and establish itself as central pillar of the internet economy.
ChatGPT Atlas, as the new browser is called, looks and works much like a standard web browser but infuses generative AI capabilities throughout the experience, putting ChatGPT front and center for everything from internet search and e-commerce shopping to email.
“The browser is already where a ton of work and life happens,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a livestream announcement and demo of the new browser on Tuesday. “We think that by having ChatGPT be a core way to use that… we can take this pretty far.”
Shares of Alphabet, whose Chrome product is the world’s most popular web browser, fell 3.6% on the news, before recovering some ground; it was trading down 1.6% at $252.83 in midday trading Tuesday.
OpenAI, which is valued at $500 billion, started the generative AI boom with the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. Since then, a wave of well-capitalized companies, from Meta, Alphabet’s Google, and Microsoft, as well as startups like Anthropic, have invested aggressively in their own competing large language models and AI chatbots.
ChatGPT Atlas will initially be available for computers running the Mac operating system, OpenAI said.
Among the features in Atlas browser is an Ask GPT button; users can click it and ask the AI bot for additional information or insights relative to whatever web page they’re visiting. (In one example the company showed in the demo, a user could turn to the bot for advice about whether a pair of running shoes on a shopping site would be appropriate for a marathon.) The browser will also make it easy for users to set up “agents” that carry out tasks on their behalf.
ChatGPT Atlas represents a threat to Google not only as a web browser, but as a potential alternative to Google’s search engine. The Atlas “home page” looks similar to the Google search home page, except that the search box at the center of the white page is ChatGPT rather than Google. A handful of links directly under the ChatGPT search box list various topics, like trending news items, personalized according to the user’s history.