OpenAI Atlas: One Fatal Flaw That Could Defeat an Otherwise Great Launch

Removing the human-in-the-loop is not always a good thing

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OpenAI just shipped an impressive product: ChatGPT Atlas, an AI-powered browser with an agent mode (Plus and Pro subs only). With Atlas, ChatGPT is not so much a tool among many to retrieve information from the web (e.g., Google Search or other AI products) as it is a tool to interact with it directly.

It’s like Google Chrome (also built on Chromium) except you can talk to it in natural language (e.g., English) because ChatGPT is embedded in the structural design (not added as a plug-in!) and it does stuff on the web on your behalf: it can plan trips, fill forms, make reservations, edit docs inline—the typical examples.

I don’t think I need an AI browser just so that I don’t have to click on things, but Atlas seems like a genuine advance over Google Chrome. (The market seems to agree.) This is not a review of the product itself, though, but a review of the very feature that makes it exciting—which is also the one that could break it.