OpenAI announced on Tuesday the launch of its own web browser, Atlas, putting the creator of ChatGPT in direct competition with Google at a time when more and more internet users depend on artificial intelligence to answer their questions.
Offering more online searches could allow OpenAI, the world’s most valuable startup, to attract more internet traffic and the revenue generated by digital advertising. It could also further cut off the vital flow of online media if ChatGPT efficiently feeds people with summarized information to the point that they stop browsing the Internet and clicking on traditional web links.
OpenAI has said that ChatGPT already has more than 800 million users, but many of them get it for free. The San Francisco-based company also sells paid subscriptions, but it is losing more money than it makes and has been looking for a way to turn a profit.
OpenAI announced that Atlas will be available starting Tuesday on Apple laptops and will later come to Microsoft’s Windows operating system, Apple’s iOS phone operating system, and Google’s Android phone system.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it a “special opportunity… to rethink what a browser is and how it should be used.”
But analyst Paddy Harrington at market research group Forrester said “competing with a giant that has a ridiculous market share” will be a big challenge.
OpenAI’s browser comes to light just months after one of its executives testified that the company would have been interested in buying the industry-leading Chrome browser if a federal judge had ordered Google to sell it to prevent abuses that resulted in Google’s search engine being declared an illegal monopoly.
However, last month, Judge Amit Mehta issued a decision rejecting the sale of Chrome sought by the Justice Department in the monopoly case, in part because he believed that advances in the AI industry are already reshaping the sector.
OpenAI will find it extremely difficult to compete against Chrome, which has around 3 billion users worldwide and has been adding some AI features from Google’s Gemini technology.
Chrome’s immense success could provide a model for OpenAI entering the browser market. When Google launched Chrome in 2008, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was so dominant that few analysts believed a new browser could pose a formidable threat.
But Chrome quickly won legions of fans by loading web pages faster than Explorer, while offering other advantages that allowed it to revolutionize the market. Microsoft eventually abandoned Explorer and introduced its Edge browser, which operates similarly to Chrome and ranks a distant third in the market behind Apple’s Safari.
Perplexity, another smaller AI startup, launched its own browser, Comet, earlier this year. He also expressed interest in purchasing Chrome and eventually submitted an unsolicited $34.5 billion bid for the browser, although the deal came to nothing when Judge Mehta ruled against breaking up Google.
Altman predicted that a chatbot interface will replace a browser’s traditional URL bar as the center of how people use the Internet.
“Tabs were great, but we haven’t seen much innovation in browsers since then”he said in a video presentation broadcast Tuesday.
A premium feature of the Atlas browser is an “agent mode” that accesses the computer and browses the Internet on the person’s behalf, armed with what it has learned from users’ browsing history and what they are seeking to learn, explaining its process as it searches.
“It’s using the internet for you,” Altman said.
Harrington, the Forrester analyst, notes that another way to think about that concept is that “it’s taking away your personality.”
“Your profile will be personally tuned based on all the information absorbed about you. OK, that’s scary,” Harrington said. “But is it really you, is it what you’re really thinking, or is it what that engine decides it’s going to do? …And will it add preferred solutions based on ads?”
About 60% of Americans overall — and 74% of those under 30 — use artificial intelligence to find information at least some of the time, making online searches one of the most popular uses of AI technology, according to findings from an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey conducted over the summer.
Since last year, Google has automatically provided AI-generated responses that attempt to answer search queries, appearing at the top of results.
But the reliance on AI chatbots to summarize the information they collect online has raised a number of concerns, including the technology’s propensity to provide some false information, a problem known as hallucination.
The way chatbots trained on online content generate new text has been particularly troubling for the news industry, leading The New York Times and other outlets to sue OpenAI for copyright violations and others, including The Associated Press, to sign licensing agreements.
A study of four top AI assistants — including ChatGPT and Gemini — published Wednesday revealed that nearly half of their responses were flawed and did not meet standards for “high-quality” journalism.
The research by the European Broadcasting Union, a group of public broadcasters in 56 countries, compiled the results of more than 3,000 responses to news-related questions to help determine quality answers and identify problems to solve.