OpenAI released an AI-powered web browser called ChatGPT Atlas this week, which makes me wonder: Is it finally time to ditch Safari?
This news was on our minds as Max Zeff, Sean O’Kane and I discussed the browser landscape – including some lesser-known alternatives – on the latest episode of the Equity podcast. But it doesn’t sound like any of us will be making a big change anytime soon.
First, Sean noted that many companies have tried and ultimately failed to take down the major browsers due to their inability to make money from the browser alone. Of course, this is less likely to be a problem for OpenAI, with its increasingly massive funding rounds.
Max, meanwhile, has actually tested Atlas and other browsers that promise AI agents will do the work for you, and said there’s a “small performance gain” at best. Other times, you end up watching the agent “click to a site” — is that something normal users are really shouting? In addition, there are significant security risks.
Read a preview of our discussion below, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Anthony: I’m still on Safari, but as far as the search engine, which is tied to browsers, I’m actually trying to experiment with non-Google [options] because I just got tired of seeing all the genAIs at the top of my search results.
I think there’s also this question: If these AI browsers take off, what does that mean for the idea of the open web in general? You can still go to websites, but I don’t think it would be crazy to suggest that a website will become less and less important as more and more of our browsing is controlled by these AI interfaces and chatbots.
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Max. I think that was a big idea that people are talking about a lot: What does the agent web look like? And I think that’s a fascinating question. People have tried to find all these solutions to work towards this future [they] the feeling comes.
And I think there’s a certain aspect of it that reminds me of previous technology waves where it’s like, “Okay, but what’s the actual experience? What’s the value proposition for a consumer to use one of these tools?”
And it’s just not very exciting today. I’ve tried ChatGPT Atlas and Comet and the most generous estimate from them is that it’s a small performance gain. It makes you a little more efficient.
But most of the time I’ve tried these things, you slowly watch it click around a website, doing some task I’d probably never do in the real world. I would like to search for a recipe and add all the ingredients to Instacart. I’ve never done that. I think all the tech bros always say that example in the videos and I’m like, “I don’t know if people do it that much.”
That’s exactly the huge gap facing the tech industry right now [saying]”We’re building all these tools for the agent web,” but why would a normal person use this? And I don’t know.
Sean: I haven’t used any of them [AI browsers] but that’s largely because I’m still very old when it comes to searching and browsing in general — a lot of work I do involves document searching, which of course involves searching different discrete parts of web pages that I know, lots of Boolean searches on Google. Maybe I’ll try them one day if Google really does and kills Boolean search, which seems like it’s coming at some point, but it’s not there yet.
What interests me about these AI browsers is that we’ve seen other companies try to compete in the browser space and they always lose because it’s just impossible to monetize a browser as a product. And some have tried to charge it up front, they can get by for a while, but ultimately it’s not sustainable in the face of competition against Safari or Chrome or Firefox, for that matter.
What I’m interested in… is that finally you have these companies that just have infinite money so they can put it out there as much as they want because they’re not actually trying to make money off of these things yet. Eventually they probably will, but OpenAI doesn’t need to make money on this thing in the next couple of years, they can just have it out there and let it take shape.
