Nathaniel Whittemore

Maybe the key aspect of the product is having a ChatGPT assistant embedded in a sidebar.

being able to draw context from what's going on in the browser window to answer questions as well as carry out actions in agent mode.

And it is these two pieces which I think ultimately will be key to the AI browser experience, understanding the context of what you're actually interacting with on the web on the one hand and taking actions on your behalf on the other via agents.

With agent mode, they write, in Atlas, you can now ask ChatGPT to take action and do things for you right in your browser.

This is basically a native home for the ChatGPT agent that was introduced earlier this year.

As always with agents right now, they gave a food-related example.

Imagine you're planning a dinner party, they write, and you have a recipe in mind.

You can give the recipe to ChatGPT and ask it to find a grocery store, add all the ingredients to a cart, and order them to your house.

The work example they give is ChatGPT opening and reading through past team documents, performing new competitive research, and compiling all those insights into a team brief.

One of the areas where they're trying to stand out is around memory.

Atlas has the same memory design as normal ChatGPT, so can learn your preferences and recall previous chat sessions.

However, this gets turbocharged by giving Atlas the ability to draw from the browser history as another source of memory.

OpenAI said you'll be able to ask Atlas things like, find all the job postings I was looking at last week and create a summary of industry trends so I can prepare for interviews.

Now, of course, none of these features are completely novel.

We already have Perplexity's Comet browser, which I've been using for the last couple of months.

And there's also the browser company's Dia.

But OpenAI entering with a ChachiBT native version of the experience obviously ratchets up the competition to another level.

The first thing that people discussed was what this means for OpenAI.

Hater at Slow Developer on Twitter writes, "'OpenAI is clearly going for a full consumer strategy if you realize how big the ChatGPT Atlas browser update is.

Unlike perplexity, OpenAI can train its models to work natively with the browser.'"