American artificial intelligence company OpenAI on Tuesday announced the launch of its own web browser, Atlas, to rival Google’s popular Chrome browser.
Atlas will be powered by OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT, as the California-based company seeks to revolutionize the way people use the internet.
“Tabs were great, but we haven’t seen a lot of innovation in browsers since then,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a video presentation released Tuesday, speaking of a “rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be and how to use it.”
How is the ChatGPT Atlas different?
For example, Altman suggested that the classic URL search bar at the heart of traditional browsers could be replaced with an AI chatbot interface.
The browser will initially only be available for Apple’s Mac computers, the company said, adding that it is designed to help users complete “tasks without copying and pasting or leaving the page.”
Another key feature of the Atlas Browser is its “agent mode” which automatically surfs the Internet on the user’s behalf, armed with a person’s browser history and predicting the type of information they are likely to search for.
“It uses the Internet for you,” Altman said.
Criticism of AI-powered browsers
That’s one way of looking at things. But analyst Paddy Harrington of London-based market research group Forrester warned that another way to think of OpenAI’s new browser is that it “takes away your personality.”
“Your profile will be personally tailored to you based on all the information collected about you,” Harrington told the Associated Press (AP) news agency. “OK, that’s scary. But is it really you, really what you think, or what this engine decides to do? And will it add preferred solutions (to user queries) based on ads?”
Regardless, Harrington said it would be a big challenge for Atlas to “(compete) with a giant that has a ridiculous market share.”
Atlas launched in a market dominated by Chrome
Since its launch in 2008, Google Chrome has amassed around 3 billion users worldwide, blowing competitors such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and then Edge browsers out of the water.
But AI chatbots such as ChatGPT are increasingly summarizing information on the Internet so effectively that many users are turning to them rather than the traditional practice of clicking on links suggested by a browser.
OpenAI said ChatGPT already has more than 800 million users, while a survey conducted on behalf of AP this year found that about 60% of Americans — and 74% of those under 30 — use AI to find information at least some of the time.
Browsers such as Chrome have also integrated AI summaries into their search results, usually visible at the top of the results page, above the first link, although concerns have been raised about the accuracy of this information.
How accurate is the information provided by AI?
On Wednesday, a study published by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the BBC found that 45% of AI responses studied contained at least one significant problem, and 81% had some form of problem.
The study evaluated AI assistants in 14 languages for accuracy, sourcing, and ability to separate opinions from facts, including ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity.
In one case, ChatGPT confidently reported that the current pope is Pope Francis, several months after the previous pontiff’s death – the kind of error that can significantly undermine trust and reliability, with potentially harmful effects, according to EBU media director Jean Philip De Tender.
“When people don’t know what to trust, they end up trusting nothing at all, which can discourage democratic participation,” he told the DPA news agency.
Edited by: Elizabeth Schumacher
