Who are AI browsers for?

OpenAI launched an AI-powered web browser called ChatGPT Atlas this week, which makes me wonder: Is it finally time to ditch Safari?

That news was on our minds as Max Zeff, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed the browser landscape — including some lesser-known alternatives — on the latest episode of the Equity podcast. But it doesn’t sound like any of us will be making a big switch soon.

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’s less likely to be a problem for OpenAI, with its increasingly massive funding rounds.

Max, meanwhile, has actually tried out Atlas and other browsers that promise AI agents will do the work for you, and he said there’s a “slight efficiency gain” at best. At other times, you end up watching the agent “click around on a website” — is that something normal users are really crying out for? Plus, there are significant security risks

Read a preview of our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Anthony: I’m still on Safari, but as far as the search engine, which is tied to browsers, I’ve actually been trying to experiment with non-Google [options,] because I’m just tired of seeing all the genAI stuff at the top of my search results.

I think also there’s 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’t 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.

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. 

And I think that there is a certain aspect of it that reminds me of previous tech waves where it’s like, “Okay, but what is the actual experience? What is the value proposition to a consumer of using one of these tools?”

And it’s just not super compelling today. I’ve tried out ChatGPT Atlas and I’ve tried out Comet and the most generous estimation of them is, it’s a slight efficiency gain. It makes you slightly more efficient.

But most of the time that I’ve tried these things, you’re 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’ve never done that. I think all the tech bros always say that example in the videos, and I’m like, “I don’t know if people are doing that that much.”

This is just this huge gap, in the face of the tech industry right now [saying] “We’re building all these tools for the agentic web,” but why would a normal person use this? And I don’t know.

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

The thing that is interesting to me about these AI browsers is that we’ve seen other companies try to compete in the browser space and they always lose because it’s 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’s just ultimately not sustainable in the face of competing against Safari or Chrome or Firefox, for that matter. 

What’s interesting to me … is you finally have these companies that just have infinite money, so they can ride it out as long as they want, because they’re not actually trying to make money on these things yet. Eventually they probably will, but OpenAI doesn’t 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.