Episode 9 - ChatGPT Atlas and the next era of web browsing

Hello, I'm Andrew Main and welcome to the OpenAI Podcast. There have been a lot of exciting releases from OpenAI recently including GPT 5.1, Sora, and one of my favorite new applications, ChatGPT Atlas. Today we're going to be talking to the team behind it, Ben Goodger and Darren Fisher, and explore some of the reasons for why OpenEye decided to make a browser, what the future of agentic capabilities mean, and where everything's headed next.

The time is right because it's actually how people should be starting their journey. We're moving to a world where

you can just tell the computer what you want. So I think

it's kind of powerful, this idea that the agent has its own workspace.

My view for this has always been that this is like a long term investment.

Let's begin with what is Atlas and why? So Atlas is a new kind

of browser for an era of the web where people are interacting with new technology in natural language. And so it's the kind of browser where you can just tell it what you want, whether it's to find the next outfit that you're going to buy or to help you solve a really hard problem. And then it can help you harness the web to get a bunch of stuff done. And so central to this idea is that if we take ChatGPT and make it the heart of your browser, not just an add on, it's something that can actually help you make sense of the content that you're seeing on the web. It's something that can help you

And it can help you come back to a task that maybe you've not had a chance to work on in a while because it will remember what you were doing for you and help you get right back into where you were. Why now?

I think the progression of technology, you know, with these AI models has been really stunning to watch over the past couple of years. And it feels like we're at this sort of sweet spot where the capabilities of not just the LLMs that have powered ChatGPT but also sort of this new area of computer use and some of the other surrounding technology is at a point where we can build some really compelling experiences for people. So we wanted to give it a shot.