ChatGPT Atlas. When the great Internet revolution promised by OpenAI seems just an illusion / What the rival Chrome actually brings

OpenAI has released ChatGPT Atlas, a new browser that revolves around the company's chatbot and that wants to answer a question that no one has ever asked: “What would it be like to talk to a browser?”. It hopes to draw from the 800 million already using ChatGPT, but inside Chrome. But what does the new product reveal about the OpenAI plan?

ChatGPT Atlas is clearly an attack on the supremacy of Google Chrome, by far the most used browser in the world. But what does Atlas bring us? Theoretically, the promise of the new browser is that if you use ChatGPT more than Google, then maybe you will also prefer Atlas, where it is much better integrated.

ChatGPT can take over your browser

The great innovation brought by Atlas is that every web page is studded with ChatGPT: on the left, you have the entire chat history at a click away, and on the right a new chat window appears.

Furthermore, those who pay a subscription to ChatGPT can also use “agent mode” where ChatGPT will take control of your browser and perform tasks for you. Right now, it's a painfully slow and inefficient experience, but also full of security risks, which you're warned about.

You also have the cursor mode in which after selecting a piece of text a window appears with ChatGPT above where you can transform the text (make it shorter, translate it, etc.). There's also the option where ChatGPT now knows all your browsing history, if you let it, so it can search your past tabs or give you better suggestions. But that's about it.

So is it worth switching to Atlas?

For now, OpenAI's new browser doesn't seem to bring anything necessarily revolutionary to the browsing experience, and for most people it might not be worth the effort to switch from the well-known Chrome to something completely new. After all, you can now use ChatGPT without any problems. Why switch to a new browser? Just to stop switching tabs?

OpenAI wants its ChatGPT users fully in its “ecosystem”.

For OpenAI, however, launching the browser makes sense. Google realized long ago that the more people use its search function, the more powerful the company will become.

All searches generate information that can make the feature better in the future, create new advertising opportunities, integrate people better into the Google ecosystem, and of course give the company a lot more data that they can then sell to advertisers.

Now it's OpenAI's turn to make the same attempt. They already have over 800 million people using ChatGPT, but most of them do so inside Chrome, a browser that is already slowly introducing AI features into search.

OpenAI doesn't want to lose its audience. Instead, it wants to mesh it into its own ecosystem, and that includes the ChatGPT chatbot, the ChatGPT Atlas browser, and even the controversial new social network, Sora 2.

An extraordinary level of access to user information

ChatGPT is currently ad-free, but OpenAI has hinted in the past that it is willing to add ads for other products or even for ChatGPT in the future.

Now that we also have Atlas, ChatGPT can collect much more user data from browsing history. That is extremely valuable information for ad targeting. That's a tremendous level of access, and it's hard to believe that OpenAI won't capitalize on it in the future.

It's a good time to remember that OpenAI's meteoric rise in recent years was based on the idea that this company would succeed in bringing us general artificial intelligence, basically a computer that can think and act like a human.

We're as far from that point as we were three years ago, when ChatGPT took off, and it seems increasingly clear that OpenAI is just another tech giant like any other. Another company that probably wants to collect as much data about us as possible to sell to advertisers.

When the future isn't so innovative

After all, OpenAI also released a social network this year, as well as the “Instant Checkout” feature for ChatGPT, which integrates Etsy and Shopify. They also introduced Pulse, a notification system from ChatGPT based on past conversations. This shows us quite clearly that their big vision for the new internet is, in fact, the same old internet: content generated by us, online shopping and advertisements.

The only difference is that this ecosystem has at its center an AI assistant who can convince you to enter into a relationship with him or that you are the second coming of Jesus on Earth.