OpenAI has dropped another app that will compete with chrome

[justseyi]

That ominous creak you heard? Just the sound of Google execs bolting upright in a cold sweat. OpenAI, the AI wunderkind behind ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users, unveiled its own web browser Tuesday: ChatGPT Atlas. It’s not just a browser—it’s a full-throttle assault on Google’s Chrome dominance, embedding the company’s flagship chatbot directly into your surfing session for seamless, AI-fueled web wrangling.

“With Atlas, ChatGPT can come with you anywhere across the web… all without copying and pasting or leaving the page,” OpenAI beamed in its blog post, teasing a future where your browser isn’t passive—it’s proactive, agentic, and borderline psychic.

Launched globally on macOS today for Free, Plus, Pro, and Team users, Atlas ditches the tired address-bar ritual for a conversational vibe. Fire up a sidebar ChatGPT window, and it scans your current page to summarize, compare products, or even automate grunt work—like hunting job listings from last week’s tabs and spitting out industry trends for your interview prep.

The crown jewel? “Agent mode,” exclusive to paid tiers at launch: Tell it to book a trip, snag a recipe, or shop groceries, and it’ll tab-hop, click, and transact on your behalf (with your nod first, of course). In a demo, it zipped through Instacart to auto-add ingredients—flawed at times, but a tantalizing glimpse of AI as your digital butler.

Privacy hawks, take note: Video selfies for facial verification get nuked post-scan, but OpenAI hangs onto an “encrypted, non-reversible face map and vector” to flag duplicates and fraud. Browser “memories” log your history optionally (toggle it off in settings), feeding personalized smarts without the creepy factor—at least, that’s the pitch.

It’s rolling out to Windows, iOS, and Android “coming soon,” but for now, Mac faithful get first dibs. Early wins? A 60% slash in “bad actor” exposure and 40% fewer reports, per Tinder’s playbook (wait, no—OpenAI’s own stats).

Shares of Alphabet, Google’s overlord, dipped a few points post-announcement, a knee-jerk to the existential poke. Chrome’s 72% global stranglehold feels shakier as users flock to LLMs for answers over links—why click when ChatGPT can condense?

But OpenAI’s no stranger to the browser brawl: This builds on SearchGPT’s prototype from July 2024, challenging not just Chrome but the ad ecosystem that funds it. Rivals like Perplexity’s Comet, Microsoft’s Copilot Edge, and The Browser Company’s Dia are in the fray, but Atlas packs ChatGPT’s muscle—potentially siphoning data gold from publishers already suing over scraping (hello, New York Times).

For OpenAI, bleeding cash despite its user horde, Atlas is a monetization gambit: Hook ’em deeper into the ecosystem, upsell agents, and maybe eclipse the search bar forever. Sam Altman calls it a “super-assistant” rethink, but skeptics like Moor Insights’ Pat Moorhead bet mainstream holdouts will wait for Chrome’s AI tweaks. Either way, the web’s evolving—from window to wizard. If Atlas sticks, Google’s cold sweat might turn into a full-on nightmare. Who’s switching tabs first?

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