\n<\/p>\n
According to Sam Altman, your web browser is outdated. \u201cAI represents a rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be,\u201d OpenAI\u2019s CEO said yesterday when announcing the company\u2019s latest product: ChatGPT Atlas.<\/p>\n
In this new AI-powered browser, ChatGPT becomes the central mechanism for surfing the internet. From any webpage in Atlas, you can click an \u201cAsk ChatGPT\u201d button to open a side conversation with the chatbot. Want cooking inspiration? Atlas can pull from recipes you\u2019ve recently viewed through its \u201cbrowser memories\u201d feature\u2014no need to personally dig up the NYT Cooking recipe you opened and closed last week. And as Altman and his colleagues were eager to show off while introducing Atlas yesterday, the browser has an \u201cagent\u201d mode, in which ChatGPT can use the web for you. For instance, it can, in theory, research and (with your permission) book a vacation.<\/p>\n
Given all of these big promises, I was struck, when I tried Atlas for myself, by how much the experience simply felt like browsing the internet. Fire up the browser, and Atlas opens ChatGPT in a new tab\u2014exactly what Chrome does with Google. (Atlas is built on Chromium, the same open-source browser project developed by Google that is the foundation for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.) Clicking on the \u201cAsk ChatGPT\u201d button in Atlas was akin to using any other browser and opening up ChatGPT. The browser memories are similar to the \u201cmemory\u201d feature already built into ChatGPT. I have found agent mode, if impressive, extremely slow and buggy, and it has been a stand-alone feature in ChatGPT since this past summer. OpenAI\u2019s bold attempt to rethink how people use the internet boils down to a fairly ordinary web browser that eliminates the already-tiny amount of friction needed to navigate to ChatGPT.com.<\/p>\n
The point is, fairly explicitly, to bring ChatGPT deeper into people\u2019s lives. An OpenAI spokesperson pointed me to a Substack post written by Fidji Simo, OpenAI\u2019s CEO of applications, announcing Atlas. The tool, Simo notes, \u201cmakes it easier for more people to tap into the potential of AI.\u201d Still, launching a web browser feels out of sync with the way OpenAI fashions itself as a revolutionary AI lab, not a traditional tech company. OpenAI is controlled by a nonprofit whose founding mission is to ensure that superpowerful AI \u201cbenefits all of humanity.\u201d Only a month ago, Altman said in an interview that OpenAI could one day use a large city\u2019s worth of electricity to power AI data centers that can \u201ccure cancer\u201d or \u201coffer free education to everybody on Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since then, his company has launched Sora 2, an AI video-generating app with an interface almost identical to TikTok\u2019s; described a coming update to ChatGPT that will allow adults to create erotica; further teased an AI device made in collaboration with Apple\u2019s former top designer, Jony Ive; debuted Instant Checkout, which allows users to buy items directly within ChatGPT; and now launched a web browser that looks similar to Google Chrome.<\/p>\n
OpenAI may have little choice but to undergo this commercial lurch. Yes, superintelligence may eventually bring the firm unimaginable riches. But for now, building extremely capable AI models is incredibly expensive\u2014and, at the moment, incredibly unprofitable. OpenAI, according to reporting from The Information<\/em>, lost billions of dollars in the first half of 2025 and expects cash burn to hit $115 billion by 2029. (OpenAI and The Atlantic<\/em> have a corporate partnership.)<\/p>\n To fund further AI development, OpenAI is looking to old revenue streams in Silicon Valley: social-media apps, e-commerce, web browsers, personal devices. (Which map, more or less, to Meta, Amazon, Google, and Apple.) \u201cWe do mostly need the capital for build AI that can do science,\u201d Altman recently wrote on X about OpenAI\u2019s commercial endeavors, adding that it is \u201cnice to show people cool new tech\/products along the way, make them smile, and hopefully make some money given all that compute need.\u201d The rest of the AI industry has done the same. Google has been rapidly integrating its chatbot, Gemini, into many of its apps and services, including the Chrome browser. OpenAI\u2019s other top rival, Anthropic, is piloting a Chrome extension to integrate its own chatbot, Claude, into the browser. Apple and Meta, too, are integrating AI throughout their products. Earlier this month, Meta announced that it would run personalized ads drawing from users\u2019 chats with its AI tools.<\/p>\n But compared with some other AI companies, it\u2019s less clear how OpenAI will generate revenue from most of these endeavors. There are no ads in Sora, for instance, nor in the Atlas browser, although Altman said on a recent podcast that he is open to introducing them. The computational cost of generating lots of videos or processing people\u2019s daily web interactions could be tremendous. OpenAI does use some of your interactions inside of Atlas to improve future models (which users can opt into or out of for various types of data). The breadth and granularity of information available from how people search and navigate the web\u2014data that Google, one of OpenAI\u2019s top competitors, already has access to\u2014could be invaluable for developing future chatbots. Right now, Atlas\u2019s agent mode remains slow and, at times, frustrating; given many more user interactions to train on, future versions could become swift and convenient. OpenAI says that ChatGPT Atlas is intended to spread the benefits of AI; conveniently, this noble aim also involves hoovering up more data and setting up new potential revenue streams. Perhaps revolutionary AI lab<\/em> and traditional tech giant<\/em> were never all that distinct.<\/p>\n Several years ago, Altman said in an interview that \u201cwe have no idea how we may one day generate revenue\u201d but that once OpenAI has built a \u201cgenerally intelligent system, basically, we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return.\u201d Until he builds that digital genie, Altman must instead look to his Silicon Valley forebears\u2014all of their gadgets and apps and subscription fees and ads\u2014to figure out how to run a profitable business. Even as Altman pitches a science-fictional future, his company is chained to products and business models from the recent technological past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" According to Sam Altman, your web browser is outdated. \u201cAI represents a rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be,\u201d OpenAI\u2019s CEO said yesterday when announcing the company\u2019s latest product: ChatGPT Atlas. In this new AI-powered browser, ChatGPT becomes the central mechanism for surfing the internet. From any webpage in Atlas, you can<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[8104,654,6597,1430,3352],"class_list":{"0":"post-29996","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-browser","9":"tag-cancer","10":"tag-cure","11":"tag-openai","12":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}