OpenAI launches its own browser to compete with Google

OpenAI has launched its own web browser called Atlas, hoping to use its artificial intelligence superpowers to take market share away from Google, which has dominated the browser and search markets for decades.

“AI represents a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be,” said Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, at the Atlas launch. “The tabs were great, but we haven’t seen much innovation since. »

With ChatGPT at its core, users can use Atlas to chat with a website, search for products, and ask it to do things on users’ behalf, like make appointments or schedule events, all while continuing to browse.

While web browsers of yesteryear accessed the Internet through a URL and a search box, future Internet access will be through the chat experience and a web browser, Altman said.

With the launch of Atlas, OpenAI is not only looking to dethrone Google Chrome as the default browser: it also wants ChatGPT to be the default operating system in the AI ​​era.

Google has a clear head start, owning all the technology infrastructure, including its own AI chips (called Tensor Processing Units) and its Gemini chatbot. And it has a 90% search market share.

OpenAI has amassed 800 million weekly users on ChatGPT since its launch in 2022 and is using this reach as leverage to incentivize developers to build apps within ChatGPT, allowing users and AI agents to purchase from within the app. The company is also co-designing its own AI chips tailored to ChatGPT.

OpenAI has received support from Nvidia, which has promised to invest $100 billion in the company in the coming years.

Atlas still faces an uphill battle against Chrome, which has 3.45 billion users worldwide.

ChatGPT Atlas has the typical browser features, such as tabs, bookmarks, and password remembering. But instead of a search bar, the Atlas browser home page opens a ChatGPT chat box.

The running chat follows users as they browse the web and can be invoked at will. The browser’s memory features remember all actions performed by the user.

“If you enable browser memories, ChatGPT will remember key details of the content you’re browsing to improve chat responses and offer smarter suggestions, like creating a to-do list from your recent activity or continuing to search for holiday gifts based on the products you’ve viewed,” the company said in a blog post.

Atlas’ agent mode does things on users’ behalf, like finding a grocery store, adding ingredients to a map, and ordering them, simply based on a recipe shared by a user. Users can also schedule events, make appointments, and automate search in agent mode, available for Plus, Pro, and Business users.

In September, a federal court ruled that Google maintained an illegal monopoly in search and advertising, but did not force the company to sell Chrome, as was initially demanded in the lawsuit.

During the proceedings, OpenAI expressed interest in acquiring Chrome. Another browser competitor, Perplexity AI, also launched a failed $34.5 billion bid to acquire Chrome, weeks after launching Comet, an AI-powered browser.

In the late 1990s, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer came out on top in the battle against Netscape Navigator to become the default browser of the personal computing era.

Ultimately, the rise of Google Chrome through smartphone adoption replaced Internet Explorer as the default browser. And now, ChatGPT Atlas could be the start of the third chapter of the browser wars.