Some Thoughts on ChatGPT Atlas – spyglass.org
I’ve been all-in on the newfangled AI browsers for several months now. My go-to is still the real first-mover here, The Browser Company’s Dia, but I keep trying Perplexity’s Comet, and even the AI elements being tacked on to Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.1 And now the 900 pound gorilla of AI has finally entered the cage: ChatGPT Atlas.
First and foremost, the name is sort of interesting/telling: it’s not just ‘Atlas’, it’s ‘ChatGPT Atlas’. While it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, it ties the browser directly to OpenAI’s most well-known and most-used product. It’s marketing 101, but it also tells you what to expect here: this is very much a browser with not just AI, but ChatGPT baked into it.
To that end, while I noted the browsers were “newfangled”, the reality is that they’re less so than you might imagine. If AI is busy changing everything, it’s perhaps just tweaking the web browser. Undoubtedly, it’s a case of “don’t fix what ain’t broken” – or perhaps more accurately, “don’t break what billions of people know how to use”. To that end, each and every one of these browsers is built on top of Chromium, the open source project that is of course tied to Chrome – yes, even Microsoft’s browser. As such, each of these browsers very much looks and feels a lot like Chrome.
Again, it’s undoubtedly a good thing when it comes to getting people to actually use these new browsers – and, just as important, to ensure that the web actually fully works on them – but it’s also slightly disappointing. There’s probably an opportunity for a web browser completely reimagined from the ground-up with AI, instead, these are far more Chrome + AI. In Chrome itself, that’s literally the case as AI is oddly the most tacked-on of the bunch (perhaps for some regulatory concern reasons?). To me, Dia still feels the most “AI native”. Comet and now Atlas are sort of in between, just in terms of look and feel.
But unlike the other upstarts, Atlas comes with that big advantage in the form of hundreds of millions of people already using ChatGPT. Yes, they still have to download new software (which is only for macOS at the moment), but OpenAI will have some distribution levers to pull here. One they’re pulling day one: using Atlas gives you more credits for using ChatGPT itself, depending on your plan. Smart.
One thing I don’t love about Atlas is the cognitive load in having both left and right ChatGPT toolbars. On the right, you’ll find the seemingly now standard AI chat box. But on the left, you’ll also find the standard-for-ChatGPT “chat history toolbar”. I understand why OpenAI did this – again, it’s what people know from ChatGPT – but despite the name, Atlas is not ChatGPT itself. And to that end, I don’t really want everything I use Atlas for to go into my chat history.
I know there are ways to avoid this, such as with ‘Incognito’ mode, but to me it feels like ChatGPT chat and ChatGPT web browsing should be more separated. Maybe that’s just the old man yelling at the kids on the lawn situation since I come from the old school web browsing world, but I find what I’m doing on Atlas, even just one day in, to be cluttering up my ChatGPT logs.
Related to the above, another thing that I much prefer with Dia versus Atlas (and Comet) is that it smartly still knows when to default a query to Google. Again, this is undoubtedly an old school user issue in a way – i.e. I’m used to using Google for many types of queries – but I’m not sure that I’m wrong from a user experience perspective here. Atlas and Comet unsurprisingly just really, really want to default you to ChatGPT and Perplexity, respectively. Dia tries to more smartly route you to AI or Google Search depending on what you’re typing.
Yes, Atlas and Comet have ways to get you to Google quickly via their drop-downs or keyboard shortcuts, but for “regular” users, they’re probably going to be frustrated by this new behavior.
To that end, one other nice bit about Dia is the so-called “Switzerland” element. That is, because they don’t have their own AI, they’re working behind the scenes to try to route you to the best answer/outcome regardless of the technology – be it AI (mostly with ChatGPT via APIs) or Google. This would have been the obvious PR answer for how Dia can survive an onslaught from the much larger (and much better funded) players. But the reality is that all that matters in the browser space is distribution, and Dia was never going to be able to compete there alone (see also: The Browser Company’s first attempt at a new browser with Arc). So they were smart to sell when they did to Atlassian. Hopefully they’re given all the resources they need to try to become the true “Switzerland” AI browser here (and hopefully they don’t start routing all of Dia through “Rovo” Atlassian’s own AI “teammate” thing). We’ll see.
Of course, beyond the AI chatbot stuff, the real key to these browsers may be the “agentic” use cases. When I first tried “Operator”, OpenAI’s first true agent last January, there’s a reason why my title was: OpenAI’s ‘Operator’ Shows Why They’ll Build a Web Browser. My point was that in order to fully do everything they were trying to do with Operator, OpenAI clearly needed to control their own browser. And now they do. And so it’s no surprise that a big portion of their intro video for Atlas is all about the agentic use-cases.
To me, all of this is still more compelling as a demo of what’s possible versus something I’m going to use regularly.3 We not only need some killer use cases, I suspect we need some new types of sites/services purpose-built to be used by agents, with human usage as the fall-back option, versus the other way around. Couldn’t that just be done via APIs? Ideally, yes, but there are always going to be edge-cases and websites that simply don’t have the resources to conform to whatever the hot new thing is, so agentic web browsing still makes sense in that context. But still, it can be far more tailored than it is right now.
There’s also just a user mind shift that clearly needs to occur: am I really okay letting my browser look up, say, the travel logistics for a trip? I probably should be, just as I would be with an assistant! But then again, 99% of people don’t have an assistant. And while they can get a digital one now (well, Plus and Pro users at least), it takes some getting used to letting go of the responsibility of doing everything yourself…
Back to pure aesthetics – which matters here, given that everything just looks a lot like Chrome! – I just slightly prefer the simplified look and feel of Dia. Atlas has some nice touches – the accent color slider is fun, as is the cursor hover-state with the ChatGPT logo3 – and I prefer it over Comet, which feels too heavy-handed. But I also have grown to love the side-tabs (option) on Dia for when I’m diving deep into a tab-heavy workload. And even little things, like showcasing the bookmarks bar on a new tab screen versus having it always visible (or not).4
Anyway, those are my initial thoughts on Atlas – sorry, ChatGPT Atlas. It’s a solid first attempt at an AI browser, but I still prefer Dia from a user experience perspective, even though ChatGPT is my AI tool of choice. Maybe agents eventually change that equation, maybe not.
One more thing: the aforementioned demo video was a bit odd in that Sam Altman was present but seemed distant – almost as if he was disinterested. Everyone has their off days – even Tim Cook! – but also sort of strange that he was there versus Fidji Simo, the new, um, CEO of applications.5 Altman undoubtedly oversaw most of the development of Atlas, but still, this would be an easy unveiling (and a high profile one) for him to hand off.
1 No, I’m not on the Opera ‘Neon’ train yet…
2 To be fair to OpenAI, in the demo video, they basically acknowledge that it may end up being the user base that ends up figuring out the best ways to use agents to enable “vibe lifing” versus what their demos showcase today…
3 The app icon is also nice, following the Sora precedent of maintaining the ChatGPT icon outline with a twist (this one being a cursor icon). I sort of wish it was lighter though and easier to see?
4 This is straight out of Chrome itself, but the others may not copy it to focus more on their own chatbot look and feel in the new tab page.
5 I mean, they even do an agentic demo with Instacart – the company Simo famously walked away from being the CEO of to be the second CEO here. That would have been a fun moment!
