Earlier this week, OpenAI unveiled an AI browser, dubbed Atlas, which is built around its blockbuster AI product, ChatGPT.
“A browser built with ChatGPT takes us closer to a true super-assistant that understands your world and helps you achieve your goals,” the company boasted in its announcement.
Thanks to an “agent mode,” the browser can complete entire tasks, such as booking flights or buying groceries online, a process OpenAI engineers quickly dubbed “vibe lifing.”
It’s not the first time an AI company has attempted to shoehorn AI chatbot functionality into a web browser. Atlas joins the likes of AI startup Perplexity’s Comet and Google’s AI model Gemini, which it’s baked into its ever-popular Chrome browser.
But given early adopters’ experience with the new tool so far, OpenAI has its work cut out to justify the existence of its newfangled browser — and that’s not to mention the glaring cybersecurity concerns experts have highlighted.
And for a company that’s planning to spend over $1 trillion in the next year to build out enormous data centers to support its AI operations, it’s not exactly a confidence-inducing product launch. As The Verge reports, Atlas’ functionality leaves a lot to be desired.
“The immediately obvious problem is that ChatGPT simply doesn’t feel like an adequate portal to the web,” wrote the site’s Emma Roth, who took the browser for an early spin.
For one thing, ChatGPT’s suggestions “aren’t always relevant.” Roth recounts being provided several search results, including local news that weren’t actually local to her.
OpenAI appears to be aware of how confined this basic functionality is — by making it easy for users to revert to a far more familiar method of searching the web.
“The limited search experience is probably why ChatGPT Atlas includes a link to Google in the top-right corner of each search results page,” Roth quipped.
Other users found that Atlas is heavily restricting many websites, including the New York Times and online banking portals.
Overall, the experience appears almost indistinguishable from similar offerings, which doesn’t bode well. The browser itself is built on Google’s Chromium, an open-source browser project used by a wide swathe of browser companies, including Opera, Arc, and Brave.
“It’s basically a ChatGPT-flavored version of Gemini in Chrome and Perplexity’s AI assistant in Comet, and after a bit of early testing, seems to work about as well,” Roth wrote.
Worst of all, its flagship “agentic mode,” intended to complete entire workflows without interruption, is painfully slow.
Roth asked it to “fill up my Amazon cart with items based on my recent browsing history,” which took an agonizing “ten minutes to add just three items.”
Comet completed the same task in just two minutes — which, for the record, also feels way too slow.
“At times, Atlas struggled with clicking the correct button; it was like watching my toddler feed himself — inefficient but ultimately successful,” Wall Street Journal columnist Nicole Nguyen wrote in a write-up about AI browsers. It took 16 minutes for Atlas to “find flights for a coming trip,” for instance.
Besides an underwhelming user experience, experts have warned of glaring cybersecurity concerns plaguing the crop of AI browsers. Just this week, web browser company Brave outlined major security flaws with Comet, noting how easily it falls prey to “prompt injections,” allowing hackers to deliver hidden messages to an AI to carry out harmful instructions.
How OpenAI will address the issue with its Atlas browser remains to be seen.
“There will always be some residual risks around prompt injections because that’s just the nature of systems that interpret natural language and execute actions,” UCL Interaction Center assistant professor George Chalhoub told Fortune. “In the security world, it’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse game, so we can expect to see other vulnerabilities emerge.”
“The main risk is that it collapses the boundary between the data and the instructions: it could turn an AI agent in a browser from a helpful tool to a potential attack vector against the user,” he added. “So it can go and extract all of your emails and steal your personal data from work, or it can log into your Facebook account and steal your messages, or extract all of your passwords, so you’ve given the agent unfiltered access to all of your accounts.”
Atlas is only the beginning. The browser is an early step in OpenAI’s larger ambitions to build out an entire operating system. Earlier this month, the company introduced apps in ChatGPT and an “Apps SDK,” which allows developers to build their own apps — including “mature” ones — using the chatbot.
More on Atlas: OpenAI Announces Browser-Based AI Agent for “Vibe Lifing”
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