ChatGPT Just Launched Atlas — Here’s How Get Value From Your AI Browser

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, a very launch-rich episode. In the main episode, we discuss ChatGPT's new browser, Atlas, while in the headlines, we talk about Google's new AI studio with one-click AI integration. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

0:24All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Robots & Pencils, KPMG, Superintelligent, and Blitzy. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief or subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And if you are interested in sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at AIDailyBrief.ai to learn about the opportunities. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. It is a trope at this point for when some new announcement happens, basically anything from Google or OpenAI or Anthropic, and frankly, now moving down a farther and farther line of companies, inevitably some hyped up thread will say, this is a game changer.

1:05This changes everything. And honestly, when I saw that Google was announcing a new vibe coding experience, my default is to assume that it would be cool, competent, good, useful, valuable because it's integrated with the Google ecosystem, but ultimately not all that different. Imagine my surprise when there was a feature that stands out as actually so clearly game changing that it deserves that ridiculously overused moniker. On Tuesday, Google AI Studio product lead Logan Kilpatrick tweeted, introducing the new AI-first vibe coding experience in Google AI Studio, built to take you from prompt to production with Gemini and optimize for AI app creation.

1:42Start building AI apps for free. Okay, so one part of this that's cool is that prompt to production part. This is the big trend that we've seen in vibe coding apps, moving you away from just prototypes to things you can fully deploy. It's why Lovable Cloud has been so valuable in their ability to integrate the full end-to-end experience. That's been transformative just in terms of how far you could get with something. But what makes this unique is that second part that he said, the idea that this is optimized for building AI apps. When you go into the Vibe Coding tool in Google AI Studio, you have your standard describe your idea, see it come to life kind of prompt input.

2:15But then you also have this ability to quote unquote supercharge your apps with AI. So with a single click, you can add photo editing with Nano Banana. You can add conversational voice agents to the app. You can animate images with VO. You can integrate Google search data, Google Maps data. You can add a chatbot to your app. I had been messing around with a prototype for an enterprise ROI tracker. And the difference that this made is that I was able to add voice agent integration even into this prototype. so that in addition to just regular surveying, I could add a voice experience where the agent asks for further information.

2:51This is something that we have spent months building into Super Intelligent. And while of course the off-the-shelf voice agent that just plugs into your Vibe app isn't anywhere near the tuned, tweaked thing that we've built for the sort of enterprise-grade, large-scale discovery process we do with Super Intelligent, the fact that that's a single click now as part of a Vibe coding experience is a total actual, I'm sorry to keep using the word, but game changer. Now, I had to mention this is the lead in the headlines because it just came out, but I'm planning on some content that goes much deeper on this, maybe provide some examples, maybe does even a live demo of how I'm using this either this week or next.

3:23So I'll cut it there, but suffice it to say, go check out Google AI Studio, add a chatbot to your website, go nuts. Of course, the Vibe coding competitors are not sitting on their laurels, and Lovable has just announced what is an extremely hyper useful integration as well. Lovable users will now be able to build an entire online store thanks to a partnership with Shopify. The new process of creating an online store is now as simple as a VibeCode prompt. The example they give, create a Shopify store for a minimalist coffee brand selling beans and brewing products. Lovable, they say, then instantly designs and builds the storefront, complete with product pages, checkout, and navigation.

3:58However, because it's lovable, you also have much more fine-tuned controls than you would if you were just, for example, using Shopify's templates. Now, what's interesting about this is that people are a little anesthetized to announcements at this point. And yet people instantly saw that this one was a big deal. Sumia wrote, this is a proper use case for the mass, not some AI slop pseudocoding timeway stuff. This clearly says lovable is going to remain mainstream for many more months. Aditya writes, wait, this is actually huge. Imagine just how low the bar has become to start an online store, basically non-existent.

4:28And while one could argue that just using Shopify already with their templates was good enough for most people, as someone who has built websites with both the template builders and WordPress and all these sort of things, and now maintains my website with Lovable, it is an incomparable experience in terms of how much control, how much creativity you can exert. These things are not shifts in scale, they are shifts in kind. And I actually think that this integration is going to be a huge deal. Next up, one that has gotten a lot of chatter on Twitter. A new investigative piece from the Wall Street Journal took readers behind the scene of OpenAI's multi-hundred billion dollar deals.

5:04The article discusses how deals with SoftBank, Oracle, AMD, and Broadcom came together over the past year. Of particular interest was a discussion of the NVIDIA deal. The article claimed that Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's CEO, of course, was jealous of the White House reveal of Project Stargate in January. Basically, he wanted to be the one, standing alongside Altman as the president announced half a trillion dollars worth of AI investment. NVIDIA later pitched OpenAI on a similar project, effectively looking to sideline SoftBank and help to raise the required funds themselves. However, by the summer, progress had stalled and the two companies had put negotiations on hold.

5:38Then in June, the information reported that OpenAI had begun renting Google's TPU chips to supplement their compute. That report apparently caused a ton of stir inside NVIDIA HQ, and Huang quickly called Altman to get negotiations back on track. Now, OpenAI never did consummate a deal to use Google's chips, and the result of this convoluted process was the$100 billion strategic partnership announced in September. Under the agreement, NVIDIA will lease up to 5 million chips to OpenAI worth some$350 billion, and NVIDIA also has the right to invest up to$100 billion in OpenAI in order to help them pay for the deal.

6:10New from this reporting is that NVIDIA is also discussing a guarantee of OpenAI's debt financing for the new data center bills, basically meaning that NVIDIA's free cash flow is also backstopping things. Now, Sam Altman already has a reputation as perhaps the most gifted dealmaker of his generation, and this only reinforced that point. Amit Is Investing summed it up. Remember when the information reported that OpenAI was thinking of using Google's TPUs? A few days later, NVIDIA's X account posts a screenshot of Reuters' article denying that OpenAI was going to be using Google. All of this seemed calculated from Sam to get Jensen to the table to make that$100 billion investment in them and further intertwine OpenAI's success to NVIDIA's success.

6:48After the deal was made, Sam went on to get deals with Broadcom and AMD, really making sure he could diversify as much as possible while bringing more companies and their progress into OpenAI's trajectory. The punchline being, Altman is ruthlessly trying to make sure that if AI ends up being the transformational technology we all think it can become, he is going to be at the center of it. Essentially, he's trying to make OpenAI too big to fail by making sure that every other important AI company fails if OpenAI does. Absolutely crazy time to witness this happening in front of us. And staying on the theme of these massive deals, Anthropic is in talks to sign a multi-billion dollar cloud deal with Google.

7:25Bloomberg sources has said the deal was still in its early stages, but would be valued in the high tens of billions of dollars. Now, while some are tempted to think that maybe this represents some sort of wobble in the relationship between Anthropic and AWS, to me it's pretty clear that the name of the game when it comes to AI compute is polyamory, and no one is being mad at anyone else for doing deals with everyone and everywhere they can get compute. Still, the market seems to think that it's bad news for Amazon with their stock falling 2 % after the news broke, and Alphabet's stock up a point and a half.

7:54Wild times out there in AI land, but we got a big product announcement from OpenAI as well that we have to get into. So with that, let's close the headlines and move on to the main episode.

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11:09Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today we have the latest entrant into the AI browser wars. ChatGPT has announced ChatGPT Atlas. Today we're going to talk about the announcement, the first reactions both good and bad, and my humble take on where currently to think about how to get value out of AI browsers. Let's talk first about the announcement. At Tuesday's launch, Sam Altman presented OpenAI's new browser as a fundamental revolution for computing. Here's how he put it. We think AI represents a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be. In the same way that for the previous way people used the internet, the URL bar, and the search box were a great analog, what we're starting to see is that the chat experience and the web browser can be a quick analog.

11:54Which is a little bit mealy-mouthed because it came out of a live presentation, but basically he's saying new types of behavior inspire new types of interfaces, and an AI-native browser is going to look different in some way than a pre-AI browser. The announcement post struck a similar tone. In it they wrote, AI gives us a rare moment to rethink what it means to use the web. Last year, we added search and chat GPT so you could instantly find timely information from across the internet, and it quickly became one of our most used features. But your browser is where all of your work, tools, and context come together.

12:24Editors note, big surprise, that context word is going to be the important one here. Continuing from their blog post, they write, A browser built with chat GPT takes us closer to a true super assistant that understands your world and helps you achieve your goals. Now, when it comes to features, Atlas largely matches competitors so far. Maybe the key aspect of the product is having a chat GPT assistant embedded in a sidebar, being able to draw context from what's going on in the browser window to answer questions, as well as carry out actions in agent mode. And it is these two pieces which I think ultimately will be key to the AI browser experience, understanding the context of what you're actually interacting with on the web on the one hand, and taking actions on your behalf on the other via agents.

13:03With agent mode, they write, In Atlas, you can now ask ChatGPT to take action and do things for you right in your browser. This is basically a native home for the ChatGPT agent that was introduced earlier this year. As always with agents right now, they gave a food-related example. Imagine you're planning a dinner party, they write, and you have a recipe in mind. You can give the recipe to ChatGPT and ask it to find a grocery store, add all the ingredients to a cart, and order them to your house. The work example they give is ChatGPT opening and reading through past team documents, performing new competitive research, and compiling all those insights into a team brief.

13:35One of the areas where they're trying to stand out is around memory. Atlas has the same memory design as normal chat GPT, so can learn your preferences and recall previous chat sessions. However, this gets turbocharged by giving Atlas the ability to draw from the browser history as another source of memory. OpenAI said you'll be able to ask Atlas things like, find all the job postings I was looking at last week and create a summary of industry trends so I can prepare for interviews. Now, of course, none of these features are completely novel. We already have Perplexity's Comet browser, which I've been using for the last couple of months.

14:06And there's also the browser company's Dia. But OpenAI entering with a ChatGPT-native version of the experience obviously ratchets up the competition to another level. The first thing that people discussed was what this means for OpenAI. Hater, at SlowDeveloper on Twitter, writes, OpenAI is clearly going for a full consumer strategy. Few realize how big the ChatGPT Atlas browser update is. Unlike perplexity, OpenAI can train its models to work natively with the browser. Because it controls the full stack, it likely delivers stronger agent capabilities than wrappers. Hold aside any claims that its performance is going to be better in the short term.

14:39I think what Hader is getting at is that OpenAI, with the run-and-away most popular consumer chatbot, has the ability to more closely integrate that into this experience, which could be a differentiator when it comes to these new AI browser wars. Noah Epstein thinks that it's all about targeting Google search dominance. He wrote, quote, over 50 % of Alphabet's$237 billion in annual revenue comes from search advertising. Chrome to Google Search to behavioral data to targeted ads equals their entire empire. Atlas threatens every single link in the chain. He then goes on to point out how all of OpenAI's moves start to add up to something that starts to not only command more and more of people's attention, but is able to collect context from them and then turn that context into both advertising, should that be the route they go choose, as well as commerce.

15:21They point out the recent checkout features as significant with this. Another set of first response takes was that some of the people who tried this really just liked the experience. I Rule the World, which is an OpenAI leaker account, says using the new OpenAI browser. It's actually insane how smooth it is. Feels like the future of the internet. Pat Walls from Starter Story writes, OpenAI is so good at product. ChatGPT Atlas is amazing. Immediately switched from Chrome and I've used that for 10 years. Everything they create is so, so good. This is why they'll win. But holding aside just fawning tweets about the quality of the product, others tried to figure out what it was actually useful for.

15:56Liam Ballin gave his first impressions. He found the new agent mode to work pretty well for him, around things like ordering coffee or filling out a TSA pre-check form. He also pointed out that because it's native to macOS, it's integrated with things like auto-filling iMessage two-factor authentication codes, and he really liked the UI. He did find that there was some variance in certain sites being blocked when it comes to summarizing content, creating kind of a balkanized experience when it came to the news, but overall favorable first impressions. Jackie Chow at Index. He said that he's currently using Atlas as a CRO asking chat GPT for landing page changes, using it for meta ads, asking how to optimize campaigns, using it to improve YouTube thumbnails, drafting cold email responses, and getting other suggestions for UI UX improvements.

16:40Reza Martin, who helped create Notebook 11 is now working on a new startup, did a head-to-head test between OpenAI Atlas and perplexity comment on a very specific real-world use case. She writes, I have a very real, very tedious use case, which is a manual task that I do every day. One, I go to the school website to look at each of my daughter's classes. Two, I look at her grades. Three, I look at her assignments, quizzes, and all classwork that are due. Four, I make a table that keeps track of all of this, which helps keep both of us accountable. Since there's so much manual clicking, scrolling, reading, and data, she asked both Common and Atlas to help with that, and then gave them a score on context, i.e.

17:13how well they understood the task, speed, how long it took, and then how well it did completing it correctly. Atlas pretty much smoked common in that test, especially the overall completion where common got just a one, but the Atlas agent got a five. She concluded, overall, I still don't have a ton of agentic web browsing use cases, but it's great to be able to automate this one particular task. And when it comes to finding use cases, I think that some people are viewing this as the opening salvo for an environment in which people will discover new use cases rather than there being preset use cases to just port over.

17:44Ada McLaughlin, who is a research scientist at OpenAI, writes, My quick two cents on the browser. I didn't use Codex that much when it was cloud-only, but when it came to my CLI, it became super useful. I didn't use Agent that much when it was cloud-only, but now that it's come to my browser, dot, dot, dot, with the implication being that having the integrated browser in that context opens up opportunities to use it. Some folks, of course, were zooming out ahead to the possibilities. Greg Eisenberg writes, My takeaway from today's OpenAI browser launch is that the internet just got hands. The average person won't Google, click, compare, or fill out forms within the next 24 months.

18:18They'll just say, book my trip, find me a job, launch my store, and the agent will do 20 steps behind the scenes. That means whole industries, travel, e-commerce, real estate, insurance, education, are about to get rebuilt around outcomes instead of pages. If you're a founder, this is the moment to think in verbs. You won't go to Expedia, you'll just get the trip. The web is shifting from human browsing to agent doing. Now, this is the bet that a lot of people are making is the trajectory of the internet. Less human browsing, more agent browsing, and things are slowly or quickly, depending on your perspective, being redesigned around agents doing things on people's behalf.

18:52And yet, not everyone had so rosy a take on the browser. Ben Hilack initially tweeted, I'm not sure it'll be successful, but the level of polish on ChatGPT Atlas is just way higher than anything they've shipped in recent memory. Which he followed up a few hours later with, I take this back. Everything just feels really janky, lots of little missing features. I can't get used to the address bar search box thing, the chat GPT sidebar being the thing that opens when I click the sidebar is just insane to me. It's a confused app. Now maybe a more discreet line of critique had to do with privacy. Tiffany Fong wrote, If you like to open AI downloading the internet, you'll love open AI downloading your personal data.

19:31Aiden Bai had the same thought saying, pretty sus way to collect massive amounts of data to train computer use. Definitely not spyware, trust me bro. Now it should be noted that hold aside any sort of tinfoil hat conspiracy theories, one of the next frontiers for the model companies is absolutely collecting data that comes from real human usage patterns. It's why companies like Cursor are valuable, not just because of how many people are paying to use them, but because of the data exhaust that comes from that usage, which is unique and totally discreet from the existing training sets that are available to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

20:04Meaning that while there may be wildly different interpretations of what is and isn't reasonable to collect and what sort of guardrail should be around that, it is certainly the case that at least part of the strategy here is to have access to this very discrete level of consumer behavioral data. For some, they think that's just going to be too insurmountable a challenge. Simon Willison tweeted, wrote up my first impressions of ChatGPT Atlas, OpenAI's new browser. I remain unconvinced by the entire category of browser agents, the security and privacy challenges still feel insurmountable to me.

20:33And for him, it's less about OpenAI training on his data and more about the wide world of security concerns that come out of this. For example, he writes, I'd like to see a deep explanation of the steps Atlas takes to avoid prompt injection attacks. Right now, it looks like the main defense is expecting the user to carefully watch what agent mode is doing at all times. Okay, so you've got some questions around the experience, you've got concerns around privacy and security, and then there are also censorship concerns. Jason Botterill gave it a test, saying, asking the browser to look up videos of Hitler, to which the Atlas browser said, I can't browser display videos of Hitler, since footage of him and Nazi propaganda are tightly restricted for ethical and legal reasons.

21:11However, if what you're after is historical context, I can point you towards legitimate archives and documentaries that use such footage responsibly. It also refused to translate a Hitler video on YouTube, and for some, this is just a level of nanny state sort of behavior that they're never going to be comfortable with. I think that it brings up the concern in general of how much power the chatbot companies are going to have to shape reality based on what they do and don't allow people to have access to. Now, Hamza did point out that this censorship is a choice, and it's one that while OpenAI is making, perplexity isn't.

21:40They put in the same prompt into Comet and found a set of videos from Getty Images, Shutterstock, and YouTube. Hardly radical sources. And yet for all of this, I think the most damning critique so far is just the underwhelmingness of the agent. Back to that same post from Simon Willison, he wrote, I also find these products pretty unexciting to use. I tried out agent mode and it was like watching a first-time computer user painstakingly learn to use a mouse for the first time. I have yet to find my own use cases for when this kind of interaction feels useful to me, though he says I'm not ruling that out.

22:11And this I feel like was a lot of people's experience. Yuchen Jin wrote, tried the OpenAI browser for 20 minutes, quit and went back to Chrome. Agent mode is slop. Most of the time I just want to yell, stop thinking and click that effing button. The models are not there yet. We've got a whole decade of AI agents ahead. Of course, referring to the Andre Carpathy dust-up that we've covered extensively. Yuchen also pointed out, it's also scary to give an incompetent agent access to all my passwords and data. What if it goes crazy? If the OpenAI browser agent leaks my bank and Robinhood passwords causing me to lose all my money, who's responsible?