Yesterday, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Atlas – its web browser with ChatGPT built in. Based on early reviews, it seems more like “Atlas Shrugged” to me.
As the blog post promoting the release of ChatGPT Atlas states: “With Atlas, ChatGPT can come with you anywhere across the web—helping you in the window right where you are, understanding what you’re trying to do, and completing tasks for you, all without copying and pasting or leaving the page. Your ChatGPT memory is built in, so conversations can draw on past chats and details to help you get new things done.”
In this Halloween season, should Google “be afraid, be very afraid”? Well, CNBC did report that “Shares of Google parent Alphabet sank lower on the news.” Alphabet did hit a low of $245.33 per share in the morning yesterday (off the previous day’s high of $256.90), but that’s only a 4.5% drop. And the stock has rebounded today, at one point getting almost back to that closing price Monday.
Based on reviews, I can see why. Niki Black noted in a LinkedIn post that she “asked it to add wine to my wine.com shopping cart. It refused because it apparently can’t assist with alcohol.” Well, that’s a deal breaker right there for me! 😉
In a post on Project Counsel Media, Eric De Grasse notes: “Like Perplexity’s browser Comet, or the Browser Company’s competitor Dia, Atlas is built on Chromium — the open-source web browser developed by Google that also serves as the basis for Chrome. As such, Atlas will be immediately familiar to any user of Chrome”. He also notes that the “familiarity has pros and cons” and that “Atlas can look so familiar that it’s not entirely clear why anyone would switch away from Chrome.”
Both Niki and Eric note how slow ChatGPT Atlas is: Niki states “right now it takes its time finishing tasks”, while Eric says that an agent that will take over the browser for you and attempt to get things done “will do so with excruciating slowness, and probably not to your specifications. But if you want Atlas to shop on Instacart for you, it will try.”
To be fair, OpenAI just released the product and, as Eric noted: “the worst day to review new large language models is the day they are released”, as “it can take days or weeks to fully understand how they differ from their rivals and predecessors.”
I thought about trying it myself, but I think I’ll hold off for now. Not only because of its slowness, but also because it’s another potential source of personal data that could someday become vulnerable. As Joe Patrice noted in Relativity Fest a couple of weeks ago, there’s a concern about AI agents suffering prompt injection attacks (Eric mentions this as well via blogger and developer Simon Willison, calling ChatGPT Atlas “a security nightmare”).
We don’t have to try every new platform “just because”, right? Until I learn more about ChatGPT Atlas and get a sense that it is addressing speed and security concerns, it might as well be “Atlas Shrugged” to me. See what I did there? 😉
So, what do you think? Have you tried ChatGPT Atlas? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Image of Ayn Rand from Wikipedia here.
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