OpenAI introduced its own web browser, Atlas, on Tuesday, putting the ChatGPT maker in direct competition with Google as more internet users rely on artificial intelligence to answer their questions.
Making its popular AI chatbot a gateway to online searches could allow OpenAI, the world's most valuable startup, to pull in more internet traffic and the revenue made from digital advertising. It could also further cut off the lifeblood of online publishers if ChatGPT so effectively feeds people summarized information that they stop exploring the internet and clicking on traditional web links.
OpenAI has said 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 is losing more money than it makes and has been looking for ways to turn a profit.
OpenAI said Atlas launches Tuesday on Apple laptops and will later come to Microsoft’s Windows, Apple’s iOS phone operating system and Google’s Android phone system.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it a “rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be about and how to use one.”
But analyst Paddy Harrington of market research group Forrester said it will be a big challenge “competing with a giant who has ridiculous market share.”
OpenAI’s browser is coming out just a few months after one of its executives testified that the company would be interested in buying Google’s industry-leading Chrome browser if a federal judge had required it to be sold to prevent the abuses that resulted in Google’s ubiquitous search engine being declared an illegal monopoly.
But US District Judge Amit Mehta last month issued a decision that rejected the Chrome sale sought by the US Justice Department in the monopoly case, partly because he believed advances in the AI industry already are reshaping the competitive landscape.
OpenAI’s browser will face a daunting challenge against Chrome, which has amassed about 3 billion worldwide users and has been adding some AI features from Google’s Gemini technology.
Chrome’s immense success could provide a blueprint for OpenAI as it enters the browser market. When Google released Chrome in 2008, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was so dominant that few observers believed a new browser could mount a formidable threat.
But Chrome quickly won over legions of admirers by loading webpages more quickly than Internet Explorer while offering other advantages that enabled it to upend the market. Microsoft ended up abandoning Explorer and introducing its Edge browser, which operates similarly to Chrome and holds a distant third place in market share behind Apple's Safari.
Perplexity, another smaller AI startup, rolled out its own Comet browser earlier this year. It also expressed interest in buying Chrome and eventually submitted an unsolicited $34.5 billion offer for the browser that hit a dead end when Mehta decided against a Google breakup.
Altman said he expects a chatbot interface to replace a traditional browser’s URL bar as the center of how he hopes people will use the internet in the future.
“Tabs were great, but we haven’t seen a lot of browser innovation since then,” he said in a video presentation aired Tuesday.
A premium feature of the ChatGPT Atlas browser is an “agent mode” that accesses the laptop and effectively clicks around the internet on the person’s behalf, armed with a users’ browser history and what they are seeking to learn and explaining its process as it searches.
“It’s using the internet for you,” Altman said.
Harrington, the Forrester analyst, says another way of thinking about that is it's “taking personality away from you.”
“Your profile will be personally attuned to you based on all the information sucked up about you. OK, scary,” Harrington said. “But is it really you, really what you're thinking, or what that engine decides it's going to do? ... And will it add in preferred solutions based on ads?”
About 60% of Americans overall — and 74% of those under 30 — use AI 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 poll taken over the summer.
Google since last year has automatically provided AI-generated responses that attempt to answer a person’s search query, appearing at the top of results.
Reliance on AI chatbots to summarize information they collect online has raised a number of concerns, including the technology's propensity to confidently spout false information, a problem known as hallucination.
The way that chatbots trained on online content spout new writings has been particularly troubling to the news industry, leading The New York Times and other outlets to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement and others, including The Associated Press, to sign licensing deals.
A study of four top AI assistants, including ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, released Wednesday showed nearly half their responses were flawed and fell short of the standards of “high-quality” journalism.
The research from 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 ascertain quality responses and identify problems to fix.
