ChatGPT maker OpenAI has unveiled an artificial intelligence-powered web browser that will challenge rivals such as Google, which operates Chrome, the world's most popular browser.
ChatGPT Atlas does away with the address bar, which is a key search feature. Chief executive Sam Altman said it was “built on top of ChatGPT” as the company unveiled a new browser for Apple's MacOS operating system on Tuesday.
The arrival of Atlas comes as OpenAI is looking for new ways to monetize its huge bet on artificial intelligence (AI) and capitalize on its growing user base.
OpenAI said Atlas will also offer a paid agent mode that independently searches for users of its popular chatbot.
The agent mode feature will only be available to paid ChatGPT subscribers. It uses the chatbot to make “improvements that make it faster and more useful by working with browsing context.”
The company announced a series of new efforts to attract users to its online services, entering into partnerships with e-commerce sites such as Etsy and Shopify, as well as booking services such as Expedia and Booking.com.
At the OpenAI DevDay event earlier this month, Altman announced that ChatGPT had reached 800 million weekly active users, up from 400 million in February, according to data and research firm Demandsage.
“I believe early adopters will be the new OpenAI browser,” said Pat Moorhead, CEO and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
But he said he's skeptical that Atlas will pose a serious challenge to Chrome or Microsoft Edge, “since most casual, beginner and enterprise users will simply wait for their favorite browsers to offer this capability.”
Microsoft Edge provides many of these capabilities today, Moorhead added.
The OpenAI issue comes a year after Google was declared an illegal monopolist in online search.
In a recent decision aimed at prescribing remedies for Google's dominance, the search giant was not ordered to disable its Chrome browser, as US Justice Department lawyers had sought.
The number of Internet users is growing choice use large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT when searching for answers and recommendations.
Research firm Datos reported that 5.99% of desktop browser searches were for LLM as of July, more than double the figure a year earlier.
Google is also investing heavily in artificial intelligence and has been prioritizing AI-generated query responses in search results for the past year.
