Nathaniel Whittemore

We have ChatGPT, arguably OpenAI's most important asset with 800 million weekly users and growing.

Codex, a coding agent specifically for software engineering.

With ChatGPT Atlas, we now have a browser that combines many functions such as ChatGPT Agent as computer use agent.

And next year, the standalone device together with Johnny Ive.

But where is OpenAI headed?

What is the next big goal?

And I'm not talking about AGI.

Rather, where do the threads come together?

Is ChatGPT supposed to become the all-in-one app of the future, replacing smartphones with devices, searching the internet with browsers, and then perhaps even its own operating system?

Is that what it's all leading up to?

Currently, there are numerous useful applications running alongside each other.

I wonder where they will ultimately converge.

So in my estimation and my experience so far, both using Common for the last couple of months and playing around with Atlas over the last day, is that at core, there are two big features of the AI browser experience.

The first is agents.

And frankly, in my estimation, they are just not there yet.

I think that the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

I think the things that they can do are not sufficiently difficult to justify all of the new complications they introduce.

I think that there may be discrete, very person-to-person specific use cases like raises that we heard about.

And to the extent that there are ways to incrementally grab 15 minutes or 20 minutes of time back a day or even a week, I'm all for it.

I also think that there's no way to learn what generalist agents are useful for without people trying, so I'm encouraging of it.