Ep 637: ChatGPT’s New Agentic browser: Hands on with OpenAI’s Atlas
🎯 Summary
Podcast Episode Summary: Ep 637: ChatGPT’s New Agentic Browser: Hands on with OpenAI’s Atlas
This episode of The Everyday AI Show focuses on the immediate hands-on experience and strategic implications of OpenAI’s newly released Atlas agentic browser. The host argues that Atlas is potentially OpenAI’s most significant product release to date, even surpassing GPT-5 or Sora, because controlling the browser grants control over user habits and data monetization—a direct challenge to Google’s dominance.
1. Focus Area
The primary focus is a technical deep dive and initial review of OpenAI’s Atlas agentic browser. Discussions cover its core features, agentic capabilities (automation), user interface (UI/UX), security considerations, and how it compares to existing Chromium-based agentic browsers like Perplexity’s Comma.
2. Key Technical Insights
- Agent Mode Capabilities: Paid users can activate “Agent Mode,” allowing Atlas to navigate websites, fill out forms, and complete complex, multi-step actions on the user’s behalf (e.g., researching and updating old content across multiple sites).
- Context Persistence: Atlas leverages existing ChatGPT context (including memory settings) and integrates it directly into the browsing experience via a persistent sidebar, aiming to eliminate the friction of copying and pasting context between tabs and applications.
- Chromium Base & Data Sync: Atlas is built on the Chromium open-source standard, allowing users to sync existing Chrome data. However, a notable current limitation is the apparent inability to import Chrome extensions, unlike competitors.
3. Business/Investment Angle
- Challenging the Browser Duopoly: Atlas represents OpenAI’s aggressive move to capture a share of the lucrative browser market, currently dominated by Google (via Chrome and default engine payments to Apple). Controlling the browser is key to controlling user pathways and monetization.
- Enterprise Readiness Concerns: While powerful, the ability for the agent to store credentials in a cloud browser raises significant security and compliance questions that OpenAI must address before Atlas is widely adopted in enterprise environments.
- Competitive Landscape: The host positions Perplexity’s Comma as the current leader in the agentic browser space, setting up Atlas as a direct competitor that needs to prove its superior integration and agentic reliability.
4. Notable Companies/People
- OpenAI: The creator of the Atlas browser and the central subject of the discussion.
- Google (and NotebookLM): Mentioned as the current browser market incumbent (via Chrome and default search deals) and as the sponsor, featuring a plug for Stephen Johnson’s NotebookLM tool.
- Perplexity: Mentioned specifically for its competing agentic browser, Comma.
5. Future Implications
The conversation suggests the industry is rapidly moving toward fully autonomous, context-aware browsing agents. The success of Atlas will determine if users are ready to delegate complex, multi-step digital tasks (like research compilation or data entry) to AI, fundamentally changing how users interact with the web beyond simple search queries. The introduction of an “agent checkout protocol” hints at future transactional capabilities.
6. Target Audience
This episode is most valuable for AI/ML professionals, product managers, and tech-savvy business leaders who need to stay current on cutting-edge AI product releases, understand competitive dynamics in the AI ecosystem, and evaluate the practical utility of new agentic tools.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
💬 Key Insights
"Potential there? Absolutely. Is it great at instruction following? No. Is it 100% accurate? No. Is the potential absolutely mind-blowing? Yes. But it's not there yet."
"So, if you are going to use this, if you're going to put this to work for you right now, you always need to be paying attention to the results."
"Agent mode—I technically have done this exact one three times, and it found three different episodes. So, there is a factual problem, right? I wouldn't say this is a hallucination, I mean, maybe it is, right? But something you have to keep an eye on."
"I had it—I instructed it to go use Google, Google Gemini's deep research. Yeah, that's good. We can have Atlas, an agentic browser, go use other large language models. One of my favorite tips or tricks to do."
"I said, 'In my Buzzsprout episode stats, find my most popular episode from 2025 Quarter 2. Go find that episode and remember the content. Then run a deep research query using Google Gemini with an emphasis on updating the episode for this quarter... Follow each step precisely. As an example, you must do the research with a Google Gemini deep research query and not using ChatGPT.'"
"A browser is how you own user data and control their habits. After all, Google was paying Apple reportedly more than $20 billion a year to be the default engine on Apple's Safari browsers."