NEW YORK — OpenAI introduced its own web browser, Atlas, on Tuesday, putting the creator of ChatGPT 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 attract more internet traffic and revenue from digital advertising. It could also further cut into the lives of online publishers if ChatGPT feeds people summary information so effectively that they stop exploring the Internet and clicking on traditional web links.
OpenAI 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 is looking for ways to turn a profit.
OpenAI said Atlas would launch on Apple laptops on Tuesday and would come later 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-in-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be and how to use it.”
But analyst Paddy Harrington of market research group Forrester says it will be a big challenge to “compete with a giant that has a ridiculous market share”.
OpenAI’s browser comes just months after one of its executives said the company would be interested in buying Google’s industry-leading Chrome browser if a federal judge had required its sale to avoid the abuses that led to Google’s ubiquitous search engine being declared an illegal monopoly.
But U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta issued a ruling last month rejecting the sale of Chrome requested by the U.S. Justice Department in the monopoly case, in part because he believed that advances in the AI industry were already reshaping the competitive landscape.
OpenAI’s browser will face a significant challenge from Chrome, which has about 3 billion users worldwide and has added some AI features from Google’s Gemini technology.
The immense success of Chrome could serve as a model for OpenAI as it enters the browser market. When Google launched Chrome in 2008, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was so dominant that few observers believed a new browser could pose a formidable threat.
But Chrome quickly won legions of fans by loading web pages faster than Internet Explorer while offering other advantages that allowed it to disrupt the market. Microsoft eventually abandoned Explorer and introduced its Edge browser, which works similarly to Chrome and ranks third in market share behind Apple’s Safari.
Perplexity, another small AI startup, rolled out its own Comet browser earlier this year. He also expressed interest in buying Chrome and ultimately submitted an unsolicited $34.5 billion offer for the browser that hit an impasse when Mehta decided against splitting up Google.
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 much innovation in browsers since then.
–Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
“Tabs were great, but we haven’t seen a lot of innovation in browsers since then,” he said in a video presentation released Tuesday.
A premium feature of the ChatGPT Atlas browser is an “agent mode” that accesses the laptop and efficiently clicks around the Internet on the person’s behalf, armed with the user’s browser history and what they are looking to learn and explaining their research process.
“It uses the Internet for you,” Altman said.
Harrington, the Forrester analyst, says another way to think about this is “taking away your personality.”
“Your profile will be personally tailored to you based on all the information collected about you. OK, scary,” Harrington said. “But is it really you, really what you think, or what this engine decides to do? …And will it add preferred solutions based on ads?”
About 60% of all Americans — 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 results of an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted over the summer.
Since last year, Google has automatically provided AI-generated answers that attempt to answer a person’s search query, appearing at the top of results.
The reliance on AI chatbots to summarize the information they collect online has raised a number of concerns, including the technology’s propensity to confidently spread false information, a problem known as hallucination.
The way chatbots trained on online content generate new writing has been particularly troubling to the news industry, leading the New York Times and other media outlets to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement and others, including the Associated Press, to sign licensing deals.
A study released Wednesday of four leading AI assistants, including ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, showed that nearly half of their responses were incorrect and did not meet the standards of “high quality” journalism.
Contribute: Jamey Keaten
