OpenAI Launches the ChatGPT Atlas Browser - DTNS 5129

0:04This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October 21st, 2025. 5, we tell you what you need to know, follow up in the context of those stories, and help each other understand. And today, OpenAI officially entering the web browser arena. Oh, you had to see it coming. I'm Jason Howell. I'm Tom Merritt. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story.

0:29Shortly before Showtime, we heard, because OpenAI put it out there, that it was going to have one of its little live streams of four people sitting around a little table. They're all hunched over. Rudely scheduled at the time we normally record, but okay, fine. They didn't check with us first, but okay, fine. We'll record just a little bit later. And what they were showing off was their official entrance into the AI browser world. We've seen these coming from other companies. Of course, Perplexity has its Comet. That's the one that I've been using. Now OpenAI has its solution here, its software called ChatGPT Atlas.

1:08I think it's the whole thing. If you just say Atlas, people are going to be like, what are you talking about? So ChatGPT Atlas, you can get to it, chatgpt.com slash Atlas. And it's launching worldwide for macOS users, coming soon to Windows, to iOS, to Android. As far as we could tell watching the live stream, it looked like Chromium. Almost certainly it's Chromium, though I didn't hear them mention that at all. And yeah, it has the things that at least I've come to expect from or to get familiar with when it comes to Perplexity's Comet browser. It has this little ChatGPT side button or button up in the top right corner.

1:50When you hit that, it pulls out a little sidebar so you can essentially contextualize the browser that you're working in. Also, the open browsers that you have, so not necessarily just locked into the one that you see, but all of them potentially. You can integrate. You can ask ChatGPT questions in that little sidebar, and it will plug into the browsers that you have open, the tabs you have open. Or the tabs. It won't use other browsers. Right, yeah. Good clarification. The Omnibox is a place where you can throw searches in. So if you just want to do a quick ChatGPT query in the address box up top, you can do that.

2:30One thing that was interesting and definitely different is when they did that, it showed kind of like a multi-tabbed, within the window anyways, result. The first page of that result was your traditional chat GPT results. And then it had these other tabs for image, video, and news that really, in some ways, resembled what I'm used to seeing from like a Google search page, right? I mean, and you see that on Bing and everything else too, because they're all imitating Google. Right. Yeah, that's true. That's true. So definitely with this kind of getting a little bit closer to the see we replace search, use us instead sort of thing.

3:08um let's see here cursor chat uh i think is what they call their little chip it's like a writing assistance chip so the example that they showed is you're in gmail you're writing an email and a little open ai button the chip appears next to the text that you're highlighting let's say and that allows you to query around that or or get writing assistance or spell check or whatever you need to do there that's kind of neat and integrated um and then one of the big features that they showed off was agent mode. Now, this is only available to Plus and Pro users, so paid users, at least for now. And they said it uses the browser for you, and you can actually watch it do its things inside of the tab.

3:52You don't have to, they also said. So if you want to just fire off a command and then go do other things, I suppose that agent can work in the background. But what they showed was that it was kind of taking control of or taking over the actual tab. And then there is a little button down at the bottom so that if you say, I want to shop for these bell peppers, and it goes to Instacart and starts doing this for you in the window, there's a little button down at the bottom that says take control, which you can hit. That pulls it out of auto drive and gives you the control again. And then there's also controls around what access agent has.

4:32Inside of a query, there's a little pull down that they showed off that you can either say, yes, you have access to all of my logged in accounts or no, don't touch my logged in account. So you have control on that on a query basis. Yeah. And incognito mode too. So you can say, you know what, I want you to remember things most of the time, but right now I'm asking about a rash. So I don't want you to remember that. Or maybe you do, but whatever it is, you can go to incognito mode. And it doesn't execute buying choices. They demonstrated Instacart and got to the checkout portion and it just waited to say, like, hey, are you ready to check out?

5:11We're not going to buy this unless you say it's okay. Agents just aren't there yet. Yeah. How different, as somebody who uses perplexity quite often, Jason, how different is this to your experience using the Comet browser? I mean, it's very similar. And also the fact that it's based on Chromium, so there's a lot of The visible quality, the visible character of it looks very similar. The sidebar, very familiar. The little button, even the placement of the ChatGPT button that pulls out the sidebar, that's all super familiar. I think that my dog is whining at me right now. Sorry about that. The things that really stood out for me are the search results page or the thing that I was talking about that resembles a Google search.

5:58That's a little different. from what I'm used to seeing in Comet. I think, and some of the agentic stuff, I haven't, God, I'm trying to think if there's even the agentic stuff built into Comet. Well, there is a little bit of that, but I'm wondering if it goes a little bit deeper with what ChatGPT is pulling out here. Yeah, and OpenAI. Overall, though, very similar. It has some agentic stuff, too. Yeah, I mean, perplexity is probably a little nervous, right? Because ChatGPT does have such mindshare, and the products, I would say, are very, very similar. So they clearly were targeting Google. They showed you going into the address bar and doing a search, which would normally bring up Google for most people.

6:38And it went to ChatGPT. And then they showed it can look just like a search engine if you wanted to. Not a problem. In fact, it looks more like a search engine than Google does these days because the ChatGPT is in a separate tab from the main search results where Google has all these sponsored links and the AI overview. the chat GPT search window was just a list of links. It was very clean looking. Then, of course, they demonstrated the cursor chip, the cursor chat chip in Gmail. They demonstrated another agentic capability of translating tasks into a different system in Google Docs. So they were, I think, trying to show like, hey, yeah, Gemini can do a lot of things, but look what we can do with your Google products as well, which was a little bit of a gossipy thing, but like, oh yeah, they're definitely trying to show Google we can do this and maybe do it better than Gemini can.

7:36We still don't see Chrome with agentic capabilities built in. Now you could do agentic capabilities in Chrome, but it's not built into the browser the way it is with Atlas. Yeah, no, Google is definitely behind the ball as far as some of these other solutions that are coming out. That's probably part of what OpenAI is kind of poking and prodding at right now. It's like, see, we're there. Where are you at, Google? I still don't know how many people want a new browser for this. Lots of people are going to use this. Lots of people are going to make it their daily driver. But lots of people also make Dia, the browser company's version of this, which also we should acknowledge.

8:12OpenAI, Neon, Comet, Dia, they all do a similar version of this. Dia has some agentic stuff coming in. you don't see those gaining a lot of market share because I still am looking for the thing that makes me go, ooh, yeah, I really should use Atlas. I really should use Dia rather than, ooh, that's cool. I'll have to remember to use Atlas. I'll have to remember to use Dia because there are so many other roadblocks where you live in Chrome that keep it the dominant browser. That's why it's the most popular browser, why people don't switch to Firefox or Safari or anything else because they're just used to living in it.

8:51Yeah. Those tracks are well-worn at this point. I mean, I certainly face that too, right? Like I admit to being a user of perplexity comet and not using it full-time. Like I have not set it as my default browser. I do have the things that I use it for, and I use it very regularly for a few key things. And so it is part of my habit, my ritual of opening it for these specific tasks, just because it's a little easier to do that but i'm not all in like it would be really hard for for or at least it's proving to be really hard for me to be okay with just being like comments my new browser like yeah you know those tracks are well worn i mean chrome has proved you can do it because chrome is not the default browser on windows or mac os you have to download chrome install it and make it your default browser but most people do so it's possible uh but i i'm waiting to see and they even indicated in this this announcement like we can't wait to see what people use this for like they're kind of watching to see if someone discovers that compelling use case yeah and also i heard it we both heard a term we had never heard before vibe lifing yes because you're like vibe coding you're just describing what you want to happen um why not just apply the vibe to the rest of our lives there we go living is a vibe i agree you know what else is a vibe getting supporters like you to back the show at patreon.com slash dtns big thanks to miranda janelle that charlie dude justin zellers and david hagga for supporting the show and yeah possible y 'all rock

10:32there's more we need to know today so let's get to the briefs all right so we should follow up on that big AWS outage. AWS finally marked its US East 1 outage as resolved at 6.01 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, putting the entire outage, which started at 3.11 a.m. Eastern time at just short of 16 hours. The problem began, as we mentioned yesterday, with a DNS resolution problem in the DynamoDB API endpoint. Basically, that just means calls for data to that database API couldn't find anything. They didn't have the phone book, as Rob described it yesterday. They fixed that pretty quickly, 524 a.m. Eastern, so just a couple of hours.

11:20But by then, a subsystem responsible for loading EC2 virtual machines, which relied on DynamoDB, began to fail. And then now you're off to the races. That caused network load balancer health checks to fail. That led to connectivity issues in Lambda. Lambda is a way to run code without a server, serverless compute. Also caused problems in CloudWatch and caused problems in DynamoDB itself, like looping back the cascade, like hit DynamoDB again. They fixed that at 1238 a.m. or I'm sorry, actually 1238 p.m. So they fixed that within six or seven hours. But the network was a mess of queued requests by then.

12:04So they had to throttle EC2 launches. They had to throttle Lambda requests until they restored everything to normal operations. That happened at 6, 10 p.m. Eastern. Some services still had a backlog after that, but they weren't throttled anymore. And so they called it resolved at that point. Things are still fine now. I think we're back to normal. But Amazon has not said what caused that initial issue in the DynamoDB DNS. So I will be keeping my ear to the ground if I hear either Amazon come out and say it or someone kind of figure it out or someone leaks it out. Because they did a good job of explaining, once we detected this DynamoDB DNS issue, here's everything that happened.

12:49And they were very good and very forthcoming in explaining all of that. But they haven't said which person pushed the wrong code or what file got mistakenly updated or what caused that issue in the first place. Oh, boy. If it is a certain person, if it is a specific person, that person is encountering a major significant life event right now. Yeah, they are not life vibing. Yeah, no, they are definitely not life vibing. um what like what's your perspective on what this means for the the reliance in cloud computing in general like this i mean this is about as big as it gets that you know so many services that you wouldn't have even imagined would be connected to anything along the same lines they all went down it was pretty hard to not notice it in some way shape or form does this mean that our cloud infrastructure is too, I don't know, too narrow.

13:42No, it doesn't. And in fact, when we get to our emails at the end of the show, we've got some good theories as to why there are too many services concentrated in that US East 1 region. But when US West goes down, which happens sometimes, it doesn't have this effect. You don't hear this happening with Azure. You don't hear this happening with others. There is something specific about US East that probably needs to be resolved, but I don't think we should panic and say, oh, because US East has a problem. Cloud infrastructure is a problem. We're putting too many things. We have great competition in cloud.

14:20Azure and AWS are at loggerheads. Google is making progress. Oracle's now making progress. I don't think this should be a everybody take their shoes off from now on going through security situation. But like I said, we could talk about this a little more about why does U.S. East have too much effect, too much of an effect on things. And maybe Amazon needs to do something about that because this does happen every couple of years now, as we mentioned yesterday. Yeah. Interesting. Well, I'm sure Amazon will be back just like Napster. Napster's back. Yeah, there's a nice segue. Napster's back again, again, again, because I feel like Napster's often back.

15:05Every couple of years, Napster's back. I mean, these are the people who bought the name Napster. It's not even like the original company. But yeah, it's just, I don't know. It lives in our consciousness somehow. It's a copy of a copy of a copy at this point. And this time, they're back as a gadget company offering a holographic screen called Napster view that attaches to the top of a MacBook M1 or higher. So it requires MacBook processor with M1 or higher. I can't get this on Windows, in other words, at least not for now. And it shows on this little screen, this holographic screen, one of 15 ,000 agents that keep you company.

15:42The device can monitor the contents of your screen. It can analyze the user's facial expressions with permission, of course. And so you get from that insight into what you're working on, suggestions while you work. The agents use models from a wide variety of services, depending on the function or the necessity. The avatar is created through a partnership, at least partially, with Eleven Labs. And if you're wondering, like, hey, Napster is a music company, like, what the heck? The agent can also create music if you're into that sort of thing. So there's the music shoehorn for Napster View to exist.

16:21It starts at$99 with additional service fees. I saw this. Oh, you have to subscribe to your friend. Okay. That makes sense. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. It's like Tamagotchi meets agentic browsing is what this sounds like to me. Honestly, I'm sure some people have fun with this. It's probably tempting to shake your head and go, oh, my gosh, this is the stupidest thing ever. But there have been stupider things. And I don't think this is necessarily the weirdest thing that people could do with this. Some people like stuffed animals sitting on their desks. This is like the stuffed animal of gadgets, sort of, just a little companion.

17:00It's not that bad at$99, although you'd have to pay a service fee for it. It has nothing to do with music, though, which makes me think that at some point, all restaurants will be Napster. That is the weird thing about this. is, you know, I know they stuck in that music thing, but it really isn't about that. No, it's not at all. You know, we have a history that goes back with Napster. We have an association with it because we lived through the Napster era. It's hard to see Napster and to not immediately think about that. And I get the idea of, yeah, well, it's IP that everybody recognizes. There's got to be some value here.

17:36We'll see what happens here. I think in the world of AI and technology right now, there is kind of a subset, a tangent in AI that is, what is an AI hardware? What is AI hardware? What can it be? What is it defined by? And they're all kind of throwing little pieces of spaghetti at the wall to try and figure this out. And that's where this squarely lies, obviously. Yeah, there's a little Y2K nostalgia too with the Napster name. Well, the New York Times has seen leaked documents that indicate Amazon plans to automate 75 % of its operations, which could mean 600 ,000 potential jobs would be handled by robots by 2033.

18:17This is being reported as job loss, but it's job loss in the sense of those are jobs that otherwise might have added humans in some cases. They're not all eliminating jobs. Some of it is, well, instead of having to add jobs, we will do this instead. It could reduce the costs for Amazon by 30 cents per item. That would save Amazon around$12.6 billion by 2027 because they move a lot of items. Amazon is also considering strategies to counter backlash. There are documents, I should say, that ponder countering backlash by doing things like avoid terminology like automation and AI use advanced technology and my favorite, Cobot for a robot that cooperates with you.

19:04Oh, so nice. Amazon told The Verge, quote, Leaked documents often paint an incomplete and misleading picture of our plans, and that's the case here. In our written narrative culture, thousands of documents circulate through the company at any given time, each with varying degrees of accuracy and timeliness. I think that that is a fair response. And the fact that they said that's what's the case here is them pointing out like, yeah, we have documents where people are like, what if we did this? What if we did that? What are the estimates? That doesn't mean it's our plans. On the other hand, whether it's 600 ,000, whether they're not going to use the term co-bot or will is irrelevant.

19:41there are going to be a lot of automation here. What this New York Times reports leaves out is any indication of Amazon's ability to take those efficiencies and create new businesses. And that's probably what Amazon doesn't want to tell anyone, but is indicating like, we also have plans that would create jobs as well. And they did try to say like, we're creating jobs all the time right now. But that is the important question here. It's not get mad at Amazon because they're going to get rid of 600 ,000 potential jobs. It's, are you going to create more than 600 ,000 jobs with the extra capacity that you get by automating?

20:19Yeah. I mean, it's just a very sensitive time right now with people when it comes to the potential of job loss, the uncertainty around what AI can and cannot or will and will not do. And certainly Amazon is right at the top of that heap when it comes to the spotlight that is put upon them as far as like, you took our jobs and all that kind of stuff. And then at the same time, I totally agree. I think the response is super fair. I think companies, whether you're Amazon or any other company, in order to do business properly, you have to consider all options about what it means to be a healthy business.

20:59And that doesn't necessarily mean that you do these things, but it does mean that you may reject those options, but you have to consider everything. And I guarantee you all companies that exist have considered things that someone, if they saw the possibility that it may happen, then it ultimately doesn't. But if they saw that, be like, oh, I can't believe you even consider that. Well, they're a business. And really, at the end of the day, they have to report to the shareholders and consider these things. And not even Amazon famously doesn't satisfy its shareholders. It keeps margins, has kept margins really low.

21:34It also just wants to make a sustainable business. I think if you're someone who's like, hold on though, I don't want to go easy on Amazon. Don't get lured into criticizing them for getting rid of 600 ,000 jobs because it will be easy for them to defend that and say, but we're not. These are jobs that wouldn't have been created, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What you want to come at them is how is your automation going to create jobs? How is it going to increase welfare for people? Hold their feet to the fire on that. Indeed. This one just kind of stuck out. It's not like the biggest news in the world, but I think it's interesting.

22:11Digital picture frame company Aura now offers its first color e-ink frame. It's called Simply Ink with a 13.3-inch Spectra 6 display. It's cordless as well, and it's pretty pricey,$499. But the battery inside of the frame lasts, reportedly anyways, up to three months because it has that e-ink technology. And because it's cordless, you can really mount this frame anywhere, and it doesn't require that constant power source like an LED digital frame does. It always has to be plugged in, then you've got to hide the cord, that sort of stuff. The e-ink panel shows 60 ,000 colors. The Verge noted that some photos that have heavy saturation or maybe a lot of detail in darker parts of the image might not look as good as brighter images just simply because color ink isn't as crisp and vibrant as, say, an LED technology.

23:08but users can upload photos remotely with support for google photos and apple photos and the frame does do the thing where it auto wakes when motion is detected that actually extends battery life as well because it keeps it power you know the screen uh off i guess the the lighting on the screen anyways off uh unless there's somebody in the room so yeah one of the benefits of e-ink is you don't have to supply power to keep the image up right image just stays up uh and and it's fun to see the new things that color e-ink uh is bringing us finally you know totally wanting color e-ink to be practical for over a long time yeah i think that's pretty neat apple's ios s apple's ios 26.1 developer beta has introduced a new setting to let users adjust the transparency level of liquid glass you get two options uh you could either have it clear which is what everybody has now or tinted, which kind of subtly shifts colors and contrast to improve readability.

24:05It makes it look sort of frosted. Apple also added a feature that lets you disable swipe to camera from the lock screen for better privacy. Okay. So, all right. So Apple, you know, I mean, so much has been said about this whole liquid glass thing, I think at this point. And, you know, I'm used to hearing Apple being not bulletproof, but pretty solid when it comes to the decisions they make on design. They don't always make the right decision, but this clearly has people – this hasn't been a slam dunk, let's say. There is a subsection of people. I'll be honest. Most people don't care. Most people got used to liquid glass within their first couple of days, but there is a subsection of people that this does not work for.

24:45So this is beyond just, oh, I don't like change. This is like, I can't read this. This makes me motion sick. Stuff like that, right? Yeah. And Allison Sheridan had an interview on her last NoSilvaCast where she did a great job going through, here's all the things you can already do, like increase contrast or turn off motions and all of that. And then as soon as she published that, Apple comes out and is like, oh, we could also add tinting to the mix. Here, we've got a button now. Yeah, yeah. Just hit that. So that's good. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it does improve things, you know, seeing the before and after.

25:17If that contrast is really distracting to you, this definitely helps. Definitely. if it satisfies. All right. Finally, we got some quick headlines. Good to know if you want to understand the news in the future. Perplexity's AI search app is now available on Samsung's 2025 smart TVs. The 2023 and 2024 models will receive the app later this year. Curious to see how that surfaces there. Google and Epic Games requested an extension to October 29th for Google's deadline to comply with a court order that requires sweeping changes to the Play Store related to its loss to Epic Games. Yeah, Epic asked for that delay.

25:59Interesting. Yeah, it's so interesting. For the third year, HBO Max has raised its price. The Basic with Ads plan goes up$1 to$10.99. Standard with No Ads goes up$1.50 to$18.49. And Premium, which adds 4K, goes up$2 to$22.99. And finally, your last dose of AI, maybe not until the feedback anyways. Anthropic is launching a web app for Cloud Code for Pro and Max Plan users. It allows them to access its coding agents, AI coding agents, directly from the browser instead of having to use the command line. If you want to talk about stuff like this with us, we've actually been talking about servers and the AWS outage and all kinds of things in our Discord.

26:43You can join our Discord by linking your Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS.

26:53We end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom today. TJ and Matt are helping us understand why it always seems to be AWS's U.S. East 1 region that causes these major outages. Yeah, TJ wrote to answer that question, there is still latency over the wire and data centers on the U.S. East Coast are closer to Europe and closer to the majority of users in the United States. More people live east of the Mississippi than west. That's actually true for Canada, too. TJ writes, the company I work for uses Azure, not AWS, and the same reasoning applies. The further you are from the data, the longer it takes to get the data back.

27:34Same goes for using virtual machines and other services in those centers. Yes, it may seem like less than a second, but multiply that by many billions of bits of data and it adds up. This is the same reason that companies that do automated stock and commodity trading invest huge money on large throughput and try to be as physically close to stock data centers as possible. Microseconds in an automated trade delay can cost or gain you millions of dollars. Super true. But why not have better redundancies, you know, just in case? Well, Matt wrote, I think part of the reason you don't see this as much with other regions is exactly as you pointed out, since AWS grew out of that region, so many core things for customer apps are hosted there, too.

28:19Most customers that are in other regions had the advantage of thinking about multi-region out of the gate, so they were able to make better decisions. Yeah, there's just a lot of companies that started when U.S. East was the only region, apparently, and never added redundancies. Many did, and you saw those companies not go down as fast. And more recent customers, at least according to Matt, were like, oh, okay, we want that U.S. East so we get the lower redundancy with Europe, but we're also going to add West, we're going to add Europe, you know, we're going to add a Europe data center, we're going to add all that stuff.

28:55So it's just kind of a historical thing, which goes back to what we were saying earlier. I think Amazon does need to do more to get companies to add those kinds of redundancies and not have it feel like just a sales job. Maybe give people discounts, free migrations, whatever it takes, but add that in so that if there is a problem in one region, it is not so significant. Interesting. Well, what are you thinking about? You got some insight into the story like Matt and TJ did? Share it with us. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Big thanks, TJ and Matt, for contributing to today's show.

29:31And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business. We hope that you do become a patron. All you got to do is go to patreon.com slash DTNS. We'll see you tomorrow.

29:47The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.