Serendipity35

OpenAI, maker of the world’s most popular chatbot, ChatGPT, launched a web browser, Atlas, this week. Will it make surfing the Internet smarter?

Atlas is available only for computers that run Apple’s MacOS operating system. The company plans to introduce a version for Microsoft Windows and mobile operating systems, including Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

I tried it out on my iPad. It doesn't have a traditional address bar. You type the address into the chat window. That essentially removes competing search engines from the process. Google did something similar more than a decade ago with Chrome by integrating the browser and their search engine.

Atlas is very light on using your device's resources because all the heavy lifting is done in the cloud. 

The biggest criticism, or maybe it's a fear, that I've seen early on is that Atlas allows OpenAI to directly gather all user data that can train their future AI technologies. Microsoft (who clearly have a horse in this race) cautions that in exchange for this AI and lighter load, ChatGPT wants permission to watch and remember everything you do online. They say it "out-surveils even Google Chrome, and that’s saying something."

It not only keeps track of which websites you visit. It also stores “memories” of what you look at and do on those sites. It can even control your mouse and browse for you. It could complete an online order for you. (more on that tomorrow)

It is still early to evaluate whether Atlas’s AI capabilities outweigh its data gathering, but the privacy concerns are real and huge. Does OpenAI offer sufficient controls for managing what Atlas remembers? That's unclear. 

This has been the appeal of other browsers, especially DuckDuckGo, which emphasizes its privacy and is also a lighter browser than Chrome or Opera. (I consider Firefox to be somewhere between.) After all, your default browser is your entry point to almost all of your online surfing. (Yes, apps can bypass it.) But Duck Duck Go has a small percentage of the browser market.

Adding AI to browsers is not a new thing that OpenAI invented. Another lesser-known search engine, Perplexity, makes a browser called Comet. Google has added its Gemini bot to Chrome and will soon add "agent" capabilities that let AI do tasks for you, and Atlas has an“Ask ChatGPT” button that lets you chat with the bot about pages you’re viewing. You can ask it to summarize an article, analyze data, or revise your email draft.

OpenAI's response to concerns about privacy and data collection? So far, just a shrug.