{"id":251245,"date":"2025-10-25T19:00:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T19:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/251245\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T19:00:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T19:00:08","slug":"who-are-ai-browsers-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/251245\/","title":{"rendered":"Who are AI browsers for?"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

OpenAI launched an AI-powered web browser called ChatGPT Atlas<\/a> this week, which makes me wonder: Is it finally time to ditch Safari?<\/p>\n

That news was on our minds as Max Zeff, Sean O\u2019Kane, and I discussed the browser landscape \u2014 including some lesser-known alternatives<\/a> \u2014 on the latest episode of the Equity<\/a> podcast. But it doesn\u2019t sound like any of us will be making a big switch soon.<\/p>\n

For one thing, Sean noted many companies have tried and ultimately failed to unseat the major browsers due to their inability to make money on the browser alone. Of course, that\u2019s less likely to be a problem for OpenAI, with its increasingly massive funding rounds<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Max, meanwhile, has actually tried out Atlas and other browsers that promise AI agents will do the work for you, and he said there\u2019s a \u201cslight efficiency gain\u201d at best. At other times, you end up watching the agent \u201cclick around on a website\u201d \u2014 is that something normal users are really crying out for? Plus, there are significant security risks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Read a preview of our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

Anthony: I\u2019m still on Safari, but as far as the search engine, which is tied to browsers, I\u2019ve actually been trying to experiment with non-Google [options] because I\u2019m just tired of seeing all the genAI stuff at the top of my search results.<\/p>\n

I think also there\u2019s this question of: If these AI browsers take off, what does that mean for the idea of the open web in general? You can still go to web pages, but I don\u2019t think it would be crazy to suggest that a website is just going to become less and less important as more and more of our browsing is controlled by these AI interfaces and chatbots.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Max: I think that this has been a big idea that people talk about a lot: What does the agentic web look like? And I think it is a fascinating question. People have tried to come up with all these solutions to work toward this future that [they] feel is coming.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And I think that there is a certain aspect of it that reminds me of previous tech waves where it\u2019s like, \u201cOkay, but what is the actual experience? What is the value proposition to a consumer of using one of these tools?\u201d<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s just not super compelling today. I\u2019ve tried out ChatGPT Atlas and I\u2019ve tried out Comet and the most generous estimation of them is, it\u2019s a slight efficiency gain. It makes you slightly more efficient.<\/p>\n

But most of the time that I\u2019ve tried these things, you\u2019re slowly watching it click around on a website, doing some task that I would probably never do in the real world. I would have it, like, look up a recipe and add all of the ingredients to Instacart. I\u2019ve never done that. I think all the tech bros always say that example in the videos, and I\u2019m like, \u201cI don\u2019t know if people are doing that that much.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is just this huge gap, in the face of the tech industry right now [saying], \u201cWe\u2019re building all these tools for the agentic web,\u201d but why would a normal person use this? And I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

Sean: I have not used any of those [AI browsers] but that\u2019s in large part because I\u2019m still very much an old head when it comes to search and browsing in general \u2014 a lot of the work that I\u2019m doing involves looking for documents, which just naturally involves looking through different discrete parts of web pages that I\u2019m familiar with, lots of Boolean searches on Google. Maybe I\u2019ll try these one day if Google really does up and kill Boolean search, which it feels like is coming at some point, but it\u2019s not there yet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The thing that is interesting to me about these AI browsers is that we\u2019ve seen other companies try to compete in the browser space and they always lose because it\u2019s just impossible to make money on a browser as a product. And some have tried to charge up front for it, they can kind of get by for a little while, but it\u2019s just ultimately not sustainable in the face of competing against Safari or Chrome or Firefox, for that matter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What\u2019s interesting to me \u2026 is you finally have these companies that just have infinite money, so they can ride it out as long as they want, because they\u2019re not actually trying to make money on these things yet. Eventually they probably will, but OpenAI doesn\u2019t need to make money on this thing in the next year or two, they can just have it out there and let it take shape.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI launched an AI-powered web browser called ChatGPT Atlas this week, which makes me wonder: Is it finally…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":251246,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,136849,28480,1283,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-251245","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-chatgpt-atlas","12":"tag-equity","13":"tag-openai","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/251246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}