ChatGPT Atlas and the next era of web browsing — the OpenAI Podcast Ep. 9

1. 0:00 – 2:00

   What ChatGPT Atlas is: a browser built around natural-language interaction

   1. AMAndrew Mayne0:00

      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 Darin Fisher, and explore some of the reasons for why OpenAI decided to make a browser, what the future of agentic capabilities mean, and where everything's headed next.

   2. DFDarin Fisher0:27

      [upbeat music] The time is right 'cause it's actually how people should be starting their journey.

   3. BGBen Goodger0:32

      We're moving to a world where you can just tell the computer what you want.

   4. DFDarin Fisher0:35

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

   5. BGBen Goodger0:39

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

   6. AMAndrew Mayne0:45

      Let's begin with, what is Atlas and why?

   7. BGBen Goodger0:50

      So Atlas is a new kind of browser, uh, for an era of the web where people are interacting with new technology in natural language. And so it's a- the kind of browser where you can just tell it what you want, whether it's to find the next outfit that you're gonna 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. Um, and so central to this, this idea is that if we take ChatGPT and make it the heart of your browser, not just an add-on, uh, 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 take action on the web. It's something that can, you know, learn from your browsing to personalize your experience and help you with tasks that aren't just done in a few minutes, but might take days, or weeks, or months, or just generally help you, uh, become a more curious, more effective person.

   8. DFDarin Fisher1:48

      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, help you, uh, get right back into where you were.

2. 2:00 – 3:40

   Why build it now: models, computer-use, and the “slope” of capability

   1. AMAndrew Mayne2:00

      Why now?

   2. BGBen Goodger2:01

      I think the, the progression of technology, you know, with, with these AI models has been really stunning to watch over the past couple of years. Uh, and it feels like we're at this sort of sweet spot, where the capabilities of, of, um, not just the LLMs that have powered ChatGPT, but also sort of this new area of, uh, 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.

   3. DFDarin Fisher2:31

      You know, like Ben said, the models have gotten so much better, and they continue to get better, and you see the slope of innovation there and the pace of, of improvement. If you look back at the beginning of the year when Operator first came out, for example, and it sort of like hints at some of the potential, and now you fast-forward to where Atlas is with agent, agent and how much faster it is, how much more capable it is, just look at that slope, and you start to project, "What about ne- what's it gonna look like next year, five years out?" et cetera. And to get this sort of-- get that foundation in place, that's what we were excited about, and it felt like the right time. Uh, for me, personally, you know, I, I felt like, you know, I had made that transition to seeing how ChatGPT makes so much sense in my life to- and how much I was using it and feeling like I'm putting ChatGPT at the core of a browser, not just another tab that you have to go to, to... but to have it be at the core and part of that flow. The time is right 'cause it's actually how people should be starting their journey, and so we want to make that, uh, just so natural and easy. And, and, and, uh, so I'm really excited to-- that, that we've been able to bring Atlas up, and I'm excited to bring it to more platforms.

3. 3:40 – 10:08

   The browser isn’t going away: the durable, open platform for work and research

   1. AMAndrew Mayne3:40

      You two have quite a bit of history working in browsers. Uh, Netscape, uh, you've worked on Firefox and Chrome, and I'd like to kind of understand where you think we are right now with browsers. We've got, like, over a 30-year history of these, and now it seems like-- they seem like they've been changing a little bit incrementally, and then all of a sudden, now we're adding AI to it, et cetera. And how do you look at the browser landscape?

   2. BGBen Goodger4:04

      Well, I think we have, um, entered this really exciting time on the web, where we've added, um, this, this very, uh, human form of interaction, uh, in the form of these large language models, that you can just speak to the software and have it do the right thing for you. Uh, and so I think that's really gonna transform the way people get stuff done online. We've gone from a world where you've had to remember website addresses, you've had to go and search for them, and now you're just gonna be able to ask for the task that you want to get done, and you're gonna see it get done.

   3. AMAndrew Mayne4:35

      I've noticed that a lot of people were thinking, like: Will we still have browsers? That was a question, "Are we gonna have browsers?" And it seems like browsers are gonna be here to stay for a while. Is that something you both feel?

   4. DFDarin Fisher4:44

      It's a tool that people reach for a lot.

   5. BGBen Goodger4:47

      Mm-hmm.

   6. DFDarin Fisher4:47

      You get a lot of things done on the web and using a browser. It's, uh, it's hard to imagine that not being a, a big part of, uh, how, how people use, uh, their computers. Um, I think that, uh, you know, I've been- we've been through many phases of the internet and many phasors- phases of browser development. There was a time when, you know, "Here comes mobile. Why, why would anybody use their, their laptop anymore? Why would anybody use a desktop computer?" And yet people continue to use desktop computers. They reach for it for very different things, maybe, and now that they can also reach for their phone for certain things. But the, the web browser continues to be, like, such an important tool on your computer for how you get work done, how you do research tasks, how you, you know, look for information and do, um, that kind of work. You know, substantive work happens within the browser, happens on the web. Don't really see that changing. If anything, I see that growing, um, because it's a- it's this, like, conduit to all the world's information. It's such an easy platform for people to bring experiences and make it available to everybody, and the browser just makes that so easy.

   7. BGBen Goodger5:51

      There's something sort of, um, interesting about it, where, like, every-... well, you know, of all of the sort of technological advancements that we've had over the past, you know, twenty-five, thirty years, you know, with the web, um, there's something very durable, durable about the browser-

   8. DFDarin Fisher6:04

      Yeah

   9. BGBen Goodger6:04

      - where like, even if you look at this most recent wave of generative AI, you know, with, with ChatGPT launching, it launched on the web.

   10. DFDarin Fisher6:11

       Mm.

   11. BGBen Goodger6:11

       It's, uh, you know-

   12. DFDarin Fisher6:12

       It's true

   13. BGBen Goodger6:12

       ... I think, a very powerful reflection of the capabilities of this platform.

   14. DFDarin Fisher6:15

       And the platform's itself is amazing. I don't really need to recount all of the ways it's amazing, but the fact that it's this very inherently open platform, you know, content is published to an, an open un, you know, platform, an open internet, where anybody can stand up a browser to consume that content. There are really no gatekeepers when it comes to the web, which is a really remarkable aspect to it. So people can freely publish information, and p- people can freely go and find that information, and so it's, it allows it to just blossom and grow and evolve in different ways. And then it's very natural that you might want to take something like an LLM and point it at it, because now it can, on your behalf, try to understand it and help you navigate it. So the idea that, uh, it can do all that means it just makes it so much easier when you're trying to take advantage of all that information that's out there as a user. Here it is, it can go and find it for you or understand it for you, or explain it to you, or... I just want to say, I think it's been really interesting to see the evolution of the web. You know, we got started in an era where, you know, it was the coming off of the dot-com boom, right? The, the, the, the needs of the browser back then were different. The kinds of things people were doing on the internet were different. They were totally exploring, and then over the course of time, as we've worked on browsers, the kinds of things people tried to do in the browser was just so much more. If you go back to, like, um, early two thousands, you had the evolution of, like, these more advanced web applications. Like, you, you know, I remember marveling at Google Maps when it first launched.

   15. BGBen Goodger7:40

       Mm-hmm.

   16. DFDarin Fisher7:41

       The fact that you could just scroll and pan through a map so effortlessly, and then it goes on from there, you know, uh, all the different kinds of web apps that people take for granted, things like YouTube or, you know, I'm going to list a lot of Google apps 'cause I worked at Google, but-

   17. BGBen Goodger7:54

       Mm

   18. DFDarin Fisher7:54

       ... you know, Gmail, Google Docs, all these things. The kinds of things that, uh, you mean I can do all of that in my browser? It's kind of amazing. And-

   19. BGBen Goodger8:01

       It's become sort of like this, this operating system for your life-

   20. DFDarin Fisher8:04

       Yeah. Exactly

   21. BGBen Goodger8:05

       ... on your laptop kind of deal.

   22. DFDarin Fisher8:06

       Yeah, and it pushes the, uh, what the browser needs to be able to do, right? And so this era that, uh, we, uh, you know, developed Chrome in, was an era where people were already pushing the boundaries of what, uh, you could do inside of a browser. But they had good reason to do it because the web being this platform where it's so easy to put new experiences onto the internet, meant there was a lot of motivation to do that, and you wanted-- you know, developers are being very creative in how they could push the bounds of the, what the browser could do. But fast-forward to today, and it's, it's like you have all that, that's this foundation, and now, uh, just think about, like, how, you know, it's gotten-- the world's gotten more complicated. You know, I think there's a lot of opportunity for, um, it to feel overwhelming, the amount of complexity for people.

   23. BGBen Goodger8:51

       Well, actually, I, I think, you know, even going back a few years, like I remember when I was a kid, uh, and my, my school friends and I, we'd trade, uh, shareware with each other-

   24. DFDarin Fisher9:01

       Mm

   25. BGBen Goodger9:01

       ... on floppy disks, as you did back at that point. Um, and my mind is just not meant to retain certain types of information, and so all of the things like the command line for how to, to run, like your unzip tool or, you know, however that worked, this just was just something that felt entirely bizarre to me. And so in that sense, the web was kind of a really refreshing take on that. It was something where I could just go and click on things and, and explore without having to sort of understand the underlying nature of the machine.

   26. DFDarin Fisher9:27

       And view source.

   27. BGBen Goodger9:28

       That's, that's true. [chuckles] Um, but, uh, what I, um, what I find with, uh, you know, where the future of technology is going, um, is that, uh, you know, when we have these AI assistants that are attached to your computer, I think we'll find that we make that computing capability much more accessible to more people-

   28. DFDarin Fisher9:47

       Mm

   29. BGBen Goodger9:47

       ... who aren't necessarily experts. You know, even in, you know, maybe not just even in terms of, like, how an operating system works or how a browser works, but even how individual websites work. You can express yourself more naturally as to, like, how your int- what, what your intent is, what your goal is, and then the system can kind of figure out, you know, how best to accomplish that, uh, for you.

4. 10:08 – 13:30

   From “semantic web” dreams to models that meet the web where it is

   1. AMAndrew Mayne10:08

      It seems like there was a lot of ideas about what the web could be, and, and part of it is that a lot of standards were things that were sort of decided after the fact, or we had to sort of go here and do that, and then there was things that would've been nice to have, like the semantic web.

   2. DFDarin Fisher10:22

      Mm.

   3. AMAndrew Mayne10:22

      If we made sure that everything was sort of annotated, and you did that, but just in the real world, in the corporate world, it's often hard to do that. And now, did you think you'd see a world where, hey, we could have LLM sort of understand this and make that possible?

   4. DFDarin Fisher10:33

      Well, I think it's amazing to see-- this is, like, kind of the magic of, of these modern AI models, is that they are really, um, able to interact with things the way we interact with them-

   5. AMAndrew Mayne10:43

      Mm

   6. DFDarin Fisher10:43

      ... so systems, and that's, that's, that's- of course, the world is designed for people with e- eyeballs and, and mouth, and on the com- on, online for people with, uh, mice to click on things or-

   7. AMAndrew Mayne10:53

      Mm-hmm

   8. DFDarin Fisher10:54

      ... you know, fingers to tap on things, and so when you talk about the semantic web, of course, it would be really nice if people would publish websites that were more, you know, inherently understandable by ma- machines, but their motivation is to go where the users are. And as much as we, we make a push for websites that are more accessible and, uh, and, uh, you know, screen readers and whatnot, the reality, of course, is that that's just not where, um, developers, uh, spend their energy first and foremost, right? And it's usually an afterthought to make sure that you make everything extremely accessible. So kind of the beauty of these AI models is that they kind of meet the technology where it, where, where users are. You know, technology is designed for, uh, people to consume, so you take a look at the way that it, uh, interacts with language and understands language. It can interact with language the way we interact with language. Um, self-driving cars, they can interact with the roads and the, and the systems of transit the way that we interact with them. Um, and I think that's kind of the beauty of these AI models, is that they can, they can be developed to, uh, for this world that was designed for humans, and so that extends naturally to the browser.

   9. BGBen Goodger11:58

      I think it's, um-... It's not necessarily that we predicted exactly a hundred percent how all of this would play out, but there are some very powerful ideas in that original internet.

   10. DFDarin Fisher12:07

       Mm-hmm.

   11. BGBen Goodger12:07

       Um, where, uh, like there was this idea that it was, you know, structured data, uh, that would be read and interpreted by a machine, and then presented to the user in some way. And so with the original web, there was this idea of a user's agent, a user agent-

   12. DFDarin Fisher12:21

       Mm.

   13. BGBen Goodger12:21

       - and that's a browser.

   14. DFDarin Fisher12:22

       Yeah.

   15. BGBen Goodger12:22

       Uh, and then that, you know, takes that, that machine-readable content and then applies some presentation preferences to it. Maybe you like your font to be a little bit bigger, so it's easier to read. Maybe you like it a certain style or weight or other stuff like that, and it does it. That was back in the original web-

   16. DFDarin Fisher12:37

       Mm

   17. BGBen Goodger12:37

       ... was that idea. Uh, and so I think that that carries forward in today's era actually very, very well, and you can view where we are today as just sort of the natural, um, endpoint or a continuation of that, that journey.

   18. DFDarin Fisher12:49

       Evolution of the user agent, right?

   19. BGBen Goodger12:50

       Mm-hmm.

   20. DFDarin Fisher12:51

       So back in the day, you, even in Netscape browser, you could write a cut-- what was called a custom style sheet or a user agent style sheet. You could override the colors of any website, and people maybe were, uh, who were more sophisticated would know how to do that. Later on, browser extensions kind of made that a more universally available kind of thing. People could write an extension, share it with other people more easily. But it just makes a lot of sense now to, like, empower an LLM to be able to go and on your behalf, as, as Ben said, to, to really supercharge that user agent, to be able to do more things on your behalf.

   21. AMAndrew Mayne13:23

       Yeah, there's, there were a lot of interesting ideas, I think, going back at kind of at the dawn of all of this, and you look even the names of some of the tools like Gopher and Watson-

   22. BGBen Goodger13:30

       Mm-hmm

5. 13:30 – 17:35

   Browsers are complex “mini operating systems,” and Atlas goes beyond a plugin

   1. AMAndrew Mayne13:30

      ... and Sherlock and whatnot, and how it was kind of more proactive, the idea that, as you mentioned, these are sort of tools that don't just, aren't document viewers, and I think that we kind of take the browser for kind of granted, and the idea that it just sort of like, it just shows me the website. And I can see where it's helpful for you two probably haven't spent most of your careers working in the space of browsers and trying to understand that, and it seems like there's like an inordinate amount of complexity there that's invisible. Could you give me an example of like, you know, the kinds of things you have to deal with when you're trying to figure out how to make something work?

   2. DFDarin Fisher14:01

      Oh, man, browsers are maybe surprisingly complex. I don't even know where to begin. I'm, I'm amazed at how much, um, work there is and how much technology goes into building a browser.

   3. BGBen Goodger14:12

      It's basically like a, an app platform or a mini operating system that's running on your desktop. So everything, every discipline of computing, it feels like there's like you can nerd out on some-

   4. AMAndrew Mayne14:22

      Mm

   5. BGBen Goodger14:22

      ... aspect of the browser.

   6. DFDarin Fisher14:24

      I was just having a conversation over lunch with one of the engineers on our team, explaining how, um, our Owl re- uh, Owl, Owl works, which is our embedding of Chromium that runs out of process.

   7. AMAndrew Mayne14:34

      Mm-hmm.

   8. DFDarin Fisher14:35

      Uh, I was explaining the rendering model for this, and it kind of led to a conversation about how Chrome first worked when we first built it, and then how, uh, the advent of, uh, GPU accelerated rendering e- evolved. And now fast-forward to the way it all works today and what we're trying to do with Owl, and, um, and just sort of the depth of complexities there, and, and, uh, yeah, I could go on and on, actually. [chuckles]

   9. AMAndrew Mayne14:58

      Well, it, it is interesting because I think that people kind of overlook, like kind of the browser wars led to technologies like, uh, running node on servers-

   10. DFDarin Fisher15:09

       Sure

   11. AMAndrew Mayne15:09

       ... to actually do stuff, which is, I think, nobody even thought would happen, but because just trying to make these things much more efficient and faster. And I, I, again, I, I kind of, you know, marvel that anything works at all, and looking at some of the technical stuff you have released on ChatGPT Atlas and understanding it's not just a plugin, it's not just a thing that adds a ChatGPT sidebar, could you explain a little bit more about the architecture?

   12. BGBen Goodger15:36

       So from a design perspective, I would say that we wanted to imagine the entire experience with ChatGPT at the heart of this thing.

   13. AMAndrew Mayne15:43

       Mm-hmm.

   14. BGBen Goodger15:43

       Uh, not just, I mean, w- you know, we have a, a ChatGPT extension as well that you can install on Chrome-

   15. AMAndrew Mayne15:48

       Mm

   16. BGBen Goodger15:48

       ... for example, but there are some limits to what that can do. And so when we approached this from a design perspective, we wanted to just be really empowered to look across the entire browsing surface, and I think, you know, maybe like, you know, two to five percent of what we want to do [chuckles] is there today. Um, but we think that this being able to, to own the whole browser experience in this way gives us the opportunity to, to weave that ChatGPT magic, uh, in throughout, and that includes things, for example, like on any, um, uh, uh, text field, uh, you can sort of invoke ChatGPT and have it help you write.

   17. AMAndrew Mayne16:21

       Mm-hmm.

   18. BGBen Goodger16:22

       Uh, and then as it is helping you write, that is, you know, your personalized ChatGPT. You know, it can sign, uh, your email as you because it knows you from your other use of ChatGPT. Uh, and so being able to, to build it in a way that en- enables these very like richly integrated use cases, uh, felt, you know, it felt very important to have a browser as opposed to, um, you know, just an add-on-

   19. AMAndrew Mayne16:43

       Mm

   20. BGBen Goodger16:43

       ... for an existing app.

   21. DFDarin Fisher16:44

       And it gets to some of the, like, the foundational stuff. When ChatGPT is at the core of this thing, and you, you enable things like, um, the memories feature-

   22. BGBen Goodger16:52

       Mm

   23. DFDarin Fisher16:52

       ... it means that you can ask this thing, "Hey, what was that thing I was looking at again?" And it's gonna know, and it's gonna help you. Like, uh, I, who hasn't had this, this sort of experience of: "Oh, yeah, I remember I saw some video or I saw something. What was that again? How do I get back to it?

   24. BGBen Goodger17:08

       Mm.

   25. DFDarin Fisher17:09

       I want to share it with somebody else." Traditionally, you might go through your browser history or your YouTube history and scroll through there trying to find it, or you're like: What was that tweet again that I saw? Or I was looking at a recipe with my son on the weekend. It, what was, what was the third buffalo wings recipe that we found-

   26. BGBen Goodger17:26

       [chuckles]

   27. DFDarin Fisher17:26

       ... that I wanted to make? How do I find it again? And just to be able to easily recall it because this thing is able to do that so effortlessly. It's a side effect of it just being there.

6. 17:35 – 19:29

   Agent workspace: separating your tabs from the agent’s tabs (and why it matters)

   1. BGBen Goodger17:35

      Probably the most, and probably the, um, probably what I would say is the biggest advantage for doing this, and especially in the way that we've done it, is, um, how we thought about integrating this agent-

   2. AMAndrew Mayne17:47

      Mm-hmm

   3. BGBen Goodger17:47

      ... capability. Uh, and this is really where having our own concept of browser-

   4. AMAndrew Mayne17:53

      Mm

   5. BGBen Goodger17:53

      ... including what it means to have a collection of tabs. If you think of your regular browser window, that's a collection of tabs, then you can also imagine that your agent has a collection of tabs. Maybe each instance of the agent that you've chosen, that you've asked to go off and do something for you, you might have, like, five of them, each running on, on different problems, and each one of those has its own collection of tabs. And, of course, they're not showing up on your top tabs because you didn't open them, uh, but it nonetheless has them, and it's working through them, and it's getting information from them, and it's processing it and taking action on your behalf and clicking on things and all that sort of stuff.... that is the sort of, um, functionality that you can have when you go and you design a system like this, sort of end-to-end. You can invent all these abstractions.

   6. DFDarin Fisher18:33

      And you had this in the very, very first version. I remember when I joined Ben to work on this, and he had, uh, already had sort of this idea, this, this idea that we would be able to segment tabs between the tabs that are the user's tabs and that tabs that are- that the agent is working on, uh, for your behalf. And that kind of shows up in the product today. When you, uh, start an agent task, you go- it goes off, and it's gonna work on whatever you asked it to work on, and it might need to open some additional tabs. And instead of those tabs just appearing in your tab strip and, and perhaps, uh, feeling a little d- uh, discombobulating because, like, where are all these-- what are all these tabs?

   7. BGBen Goodger19:10

      Mm-hmm.

   8. DFDarin Fisher19:11

      Um, it, it has just sort of accumulated some work in the background, and when it's done, then it presents it to you in a tabular form. You can go and click through and see what it actually did, or you're just happy with the outcome, and you really didn't need to see all the intermediate steps. And so I think it's kind of powerful, this idea that it- uh, the agent has its own workspace.

7. 19:29 – 22:00

   What counts as an “agent task”: acting on the web while you watch and learn

   1. AMAndrew Mayne19:29

      I would say, for many people using this, on the surface, it seems pretty easy to understand. I've got a browser, I've got ChatGPT, but we also have agent mode. What is an agent task? What is not? What would be a ChatGPT task? Could you explain that?

   2. BGBen Goodger19:41

      Yeah. So, um, uh, agent mode is basically you're inviting ChatGPT to take action on the web, uh, on your behalf. Uh, and so maybe you are, um, looking at a website, uh, and you would like to do something on that site, but you're not quite sure how to do it. What you can do is you can just ask ChatGPT directly. Uh, if you're-- let's say, you're on a spreadsheet, and you want to synthesise a pie chart, and you don't know how to do that, you can just say: "Hey, make a pie chart with this data." Uh, and it'll go off, and it will figure out how to use that software. Now, if you could think about sometimes some of the software that you use, it can be pretty complicated. So just being able to ask in natural language, in your own words, what you want to see, and then you can just sort of si- sit back and watch it take over, and it starts moving the mouse around and doing stuff like that for you. It's pretty, pretty amazing.

   3. DFDarin Fisher20:24

      And, and, and you, you could see how it's going to do it.

   4. BGBen Goodger20:26

      Mm.

   5. DFDarin Fisher20:26

      So actually, you can learn how to now-

   6. BGBen Goodger20:28

      Mm

   7. DFDarin Fisher20:28

      ... make that pie chart 'cause it's gonna show you, which is pretty cool.

   8. AMAndrew Mayne20:33

      I found it pretty useful. Like, I like, I like to study memory methods and stuff, and I have to do a thing where you have to have, like, a system for decks of cards and stuff, and I didn't want to have to paste in a bunch of, like, card emojis, and I'm like: "Can you just go do this for me?" And pff, it's like magic. It's like witchcraft.

   9. BGBen Goodger20:49

      One of the fun, fun things I've seen people do around the office is they'll have written a doc, and then they'll ask it to take a review pass on their doc and, like, add some comments.

   10. AMAndrew Mayne20:58

       Mm.

   11. BGBen Goodger20:58

       And so it'll actually go into your doc, and it can use sort of the integrated commenting tool of whatever document editing system you're using, and it will just add comments as if it was a collaborator. [chuckles]

   12. DFDarin Fisher21:07

       Yeah, it's really amazing. I mean, just we-- of course, being software engineers, we experience the model, um, critiquing our code.

   13. AMAndrew Mayne21:13

       Mm-hmm. Right.

   14. DFDarin Fisher21:13

       And over the past year, just amazing to see how much better it's gotten at that. Like, in the beginning, and it was not always the case, that it would find things that were useful, uh, but it's-- these days, I'm like: "This thing is sharing important, like, amazing nuggets that are saving me from, uh, you know, shipping bugs." And I can just- you know, I can see the analogy to, like, reviewing any document that I might have and just asking it to, to go and give me some, some style feedback or, you know, maybe some grammar suggestions or like, you know, tone suggestions, and I, I just- it's, it's very exciting to think about how any tool you're using on the internet, you could ask this- invoke this agent and ask it to interact with that in the same way that I would or somebody else would, and just see what it would do. And maybe you learn from it or, or, or, or whatnot.

8. 22:00 – 25:29

   Building Atlas with AI: Codex-driven productivity and faster platform expansion

   1. AMAndrew Mayne22:00

      One of the things that's come up a lot during my conversations with the, the teams inside OpenAI is how much they're using the tools. You know, they're using GPT-5, GPT-5 Codex to do that.

   2. BGBen Goodger22:13

      Mm.

   3. AMAndrew Mayne22:13

      And how has that affected you, and do you think that's gonna create an accelerated product cycle?

   4. BGBen Goodger22:18

      So, uh, so absolutely. [chuckles] A couple, a couple of, uh, anecdotes on this one. Um, you know, uh, one of the top Codex users at the company is on our team, and they're just sort of like r- raw productivity in terms of like PR output is like off the charts, you know, as a result of using this tool. And, you know, it's really exciting to see what, what-

   5. DFDarin Fisher22:38

      Good PR output.

   6. BGBen Goodger22:39

      Yes.

   7. AMAndrew Mayne22:39

      Yeah.

   8. BGBen Goodger22:39

      So, so it's really exciting to see what experienced engineers can do with these tools because they can- it can both sort of explore an area, help you explore an area, decide if something is worth doing, uh, and then you apply your judgement, you kind of tell it what you want it to do, and it goes off and does it. And then for folks like me, who maybe spend less time coding than I used to, I can also have it go off and, and, and prove some stuff out. So, like, everyone on our team is able to contribute. You know, our product managers are producing PRs, our designers are producing PRs, um, because of these tools, and so I'm like a true believer.

   9. DFDarin Fisher23:11

      Yeah, I did a, uh-- for be- before GA, I did this, um, week-long refactoring to try to unlock, uh, a certain, uh, feature that we were trying to ship, and then I had one more to do, and this time I asked Codex to do it, and it was done within- the whole project was done within an hour, and it was of similar scale. And I was able to tell it, "Hey, just do this other one, kinda like I did that one." So I had shown it the way, and I just asked it to do this other task that was very similar, and it was, it was almost one shot.

   10. AMAndrew Mayne23:38

       One of the, the promises of really capable code tools that are able to write multiple languages, porting code from one language-

   11. DFDarin Fisher23:46

       Oh, yes

   12. AMAndrew Mayne23:46

       ... to another. We saw with Sora and how, you know, they said, "Hey, Android is coming-"

   13. DFDarin Fisher23:50

       Bringing it to Android. Yep.

   14. AMAndrew Mayne23:51

       Yeah, and people were like: "Oh, great. When will that..." They're like, "Oh, no, it shipped."

   15. DFDarin Fisher23:54

       No, no.

   16. AMAndrew Mayne23:54

       It was weeks.

   17. DFDarin Fisher23:54

       I mean, actually, ChatGPT's been amazing at doing, um, cross-language translation for quite a while-

   18. AMAndrew Mayne24:00

       Mm

   19. DFDarin Fisher24:00

       ... I mean, coding languages. So, um, and, uh, you know, we're building, bringing this product to Windows now, and, uh, we're actually gonna be using Swift, which because we are a bunch of, uh, the team is full of Swift experts, and we, we, we are excited to have a shared common code base and, and, uh-

   20. AMAndrew Mayne24:16

       So you're gonna use Swift in the Windows?

   21. DFDarin Fisher24:18

       Yeah, Swift-

   22. AMAndrew Mayne24:18

       Interesting

   23. DFDarin Fisher24:18

       ... in Windows. And so, uh, the-... I'm not, I'm, uh, you know, I think it's very, in my p- past experience, I've s- I've been- I was marvelling even years ago at just how good ChatGPT was at being able to essentially generate a code for me in Swift that was, uh, that did not exist on the internet.

   24. AMAndrew Mayne24:37

       Mm-hmm.

   25. DFDarin Fisher24:37

       So it was taking code that maybe was written for .NET-

   26. AMAndrew Mayne24:41

       Mm-hmm

   27. DFDarin Fisher24:41

       ... and, uh, could, could translate it to Swift for me, and I was just, I was marvelling at its capability or, or to generate a bunch of obscure WinRT code that's norm- normally a very tedious C code with, uh, lots of GUIDs and all kinds of things that are very detailed, uh, but it was all just spitting out this code and saving us just an enormous amount of time.

   28. AMAndrew Mayne25:04

       Yeah, I had Codex CLI spin up a Swift app without ever having to go into Xcode to paste anything in, and it was worked just right out of the box.

   29. DFDarin Fisher25:12

       Yes.

   30. AMAndrew Mayne25:13

       It really impressed me.
9. 25:29 – 28:42

   Safety and user control in agent mode: sensitive tasks, stop buttons, and auth choices

   1. AMAndrew Mayne25:29

      So I've been using this, and I've been switching it to agent mode to do stuff, and I know sometimes I can just leave a tab and go off and do something else, and sometimes it's like, "Hey, if you leave this tab, I'm gonna pause." What's going on there?

   2. BGBen Goodger25:41

      Yeah, so this is, um, sometimes you'll have asked the agent to do something that's very sensitive. You know, an example is it's looking at your email-

   3. AMAndrew Mayne25:48

      Mm.

   4. BGBen Goodger25:49

      - uh, and we would like you to keep your eyes on the road, so to speak. You know, I have a car that has, um, sort of an auto-drive feature, and it wants me to pay attention to the road, and it's, it's helping me drive, but it's not gonna let me, like, check my phone or, you know, take a nap or something like that. And so it has a little camera that's watching my eyes, uh, it's making sure that I'm paying attention. So you can kind of view this sensitive mode and, and agent mode as kind of like that. It wants me to pay attention to this tab while it completes, just so that I feel like I have a good level of control over it. And in fact, if you look at the bottom of the tab, you'll see that there's a little bar that has a big red stop button in it, and if you've ever, ever been in a machine shop, you'll know that the machines there-

   5. AMAndrew Mayne26:27

      Mm

   6. BGBen Goodger26:27

      ... have these big red buttons on them. If suddenly it starts to do something that you don't want it to do, you just whack that button, and it stops, and so that's the idea. You just, um, yeah, just, just keep an eye on it, uh, watch it go, uh, and you can always take over, uh, if you wanna do it yourself.

   7. DFDarin Fisher26:41

      Yeah, we put a lot of thought into making sure that, that these features, um, help you feel in control of the experience and take away some of that maybe uncertainty when you wanna go use them. For example, on top of what Ben mentioned, there's also the signed-out, um, uh, method of using agents. So if you wanna start without it being, uh, in an authenticated session, meaning it doesn't have the cookies required to even access your email, you could do that, and I think that can be a great way to kind of try some things-

   8. BGBen Goodger27:09

      Mm

   9. DFDarin Fisher27:09

      ... and do, do it where you're learning, like: How does this thing actually work? And you might, uh, then, uh, hit a point where in order to take the next step with Agent, well, actually, it would be helpful if it were authenticated. And so then you might try, uh, doing a task where it does benefit from having your cookies.

   10. BGBen Goodger27:26

       You might not remember, probably the first time you actually run Agent, it, um, shows the screen. It explains how all of this stuff works for you.

   11. DFDarin Fisher27:33

       Mm.

   12. BGBen Goodger27:33

       So you can... Like, if you read through that, you'll see sort of the choices that you have, and you'll learn about how to, to use them.

   13. DFDarin Fisher27:38

       Yeah.

   14. AMAndrew Mayne27:39

       I, uh, have about a half million unread email. I'm ready to go full auto. It can't do a worse job than I have so far.

   15. BGBen Goodger27:45

       You might find it-

   16. AMAndrew Mayne27:46

       That was-

   17. BGBen Goodger27:46

       ... just hit Select All, Archive.

   18. AMAndrew Mayne27:48

       Yeah, but it wouldn't, [chuckles] be the worst, you know?

   19. DFDarin Fisher27:50

       Declare bankruptcy.

   20. AMAndrew Mayne27:51

       Yeah, I could have somebody to blame. Uh, but it has been- it's been super helpful for me because there have been times when I'm trying to surface an email, and the keywords just don't work, or the results-

   21. DFDarin Fisher28:02

       Mm

   22. AMAndrew Mayne28:02

       ... are too many, and just being able to go in and say, "Find this thing about that."

   23. DFDarin Fisher28:06

       Yeah.

   24. BGBen Goodger28:07

       Yeah.

   25. AMAndrew Mayne28:07

       It's saved me numerous times.

   26. BGBen Goodger28:09

       And so one of the other things that we did, uh, with Agent as well, 'cause there are times when you'll wanna keep an eye on it, is that we, uh-- and I'm, I'm pretty proud of what the team was able to come up with here, is to make it, like, very visually compelling.

   27. AMAndrew Mayne28:20

       Mm.

   28. BGBen Goodger28:20

       Um, and so there's, you know, all of the little, little sparkles and, and pixie dust and so on that appear around it as it, as it's working. Uh, it's pretty cool. Uh, so yeah, love to, to see more people try it out.

   29. AMAndrew Mayne28:31

       Yeah, it's fun to watch that, and, and also with ChatGPT, too, in agent mode, I've, I've said that I could probably watch a live stream of just watching these systems solve problems-

   30. BGBen Goodger28:40

       Mm-hmm.
10. 28:42 – 32:03

    Attention, ecosystem, and serendipity: expanding the web without getting trapped

    1. AMAndrew Mayne28:42

       ... watching computers do it. Uh, it, it's exciting to see where this is headed. I also sort of wonder, what's it going to be like when, you know, there's gonna be a lot of different AI-powered browsers out there, and also we have to think about, like, what is, what is the ecosystem like when most of my tabs are opened by my agent and not me, and somebody's trying to capture my attention?

    2. BGBen Goodger29:03

       The way Agent works right now is that it's only g- it's only, like, running in response to your request.

    3. AMAndrew Mayne29:10

       Mm-hmm.

    4. BGBen Goodger29:11

       Um, and so if the agent is doing something, it's because, you know, at some level you asked for it.

    5. AMAndrew Mayne29:16

       Mm.

    6. BGBen Goodger29:18

       Um, pages that it opens actually have some limitations. Um, so, like, you might be used to browsing around the web, and you'll see some page, you know, show a pop-up window saying-

    7. AMAndrew Mayne29:27

       Mm

    8. BGBen Goodger29:27

       ... "Give me, like, notifications permissions-

    9. AMAndrew Mayne29:29

       Mm

    10. BGBen Goodger29:29

        ... so that I can sort of spam you with updates" and that kind of stuff.

    11. AMAndrew Mayne29:31

        Never, ever clicked on that anybody.

    12. BGBen Goodger29:32

        Yeah, no.

    13. DFDarin Fisher29:32

        Yeah.

    14. AMAndrew Mayne29:33

        Nobody's ever intentionally clicked on that.

    15. BGBen Goodger29:34

        Yeah. Um, the agent tabs can't do that.

    16. AMAndrew Mayne29:37

        Mm.

    17. BGBen Goodger29:38

        Uh, they're actually blocked, uh, from doing... So there's a bunch of stuff like the design of the system-

    18. AMAndrew Mayne29:41

        Mm

    19. BGBen Goodger29:42

        ... uh, to avoid you accidentally ending up in that, that state.

    20. AMAndrew Mayne29:45

        Mm.

    21. BGBen Goodger29:45

        Now, of course, you're free, you know, when you browse to a website, and you're asked for a notification permission, if you want to receive updates from that site, it might-

    22. DFDarin Fisher29:52

        It might be your calendar.

    23. BGBen Goodger29:53

        Right.

    24. AMAndrew Mayne29:53

        Mm-hmm.

    25. BGBen Goodger29:53

        You're free as a user to go and, like, say, "Uh, yes, I want this," but the agent won't ever do that, uh, on your behalf.

    26. DFDarin Fisher29:59

        Mm-hmm.

    27. AMAndrew Mayne29:59

        It's an interesting world where we think about part of the beauty of the early web was the serendipity.

    28. BGBen Goodger30:04

        Yeah.

    29. AMAndrew Mayne30:04

        "Oh, I found this other thing. I found these other links." But I think then that kind of got sort of weaponised against the user, where basically you try to do a thing, and it's hard to do a thing, and I think we got to a place-

    30. DFDarin Fisher30:14

        Yeah, it's, it's really interesting. I don't know if this is where you're going with that, but, like, a lot of websites wanna just keep you on their website.
11. 32:03 – 33:29

    Browser memories and personalization: recall, context-aware search, and controls

    1. BGBen Goodger32:03

       That's actually another, um... Like, so I, I- for ChatGPT as a whole, like, the personalisation features, the fact that it sort of learns more about you the more you use it, uh, has been, like, a super popular feature of ChatGPT. With Atlas, you know, this extends to, to this, your browsing activity, uh, like your, your sort of web history. Um, and this- and, and so this allows the browser to create these, these browser memories-

    2. AMAndrew Mayne32:28

       Mm-hmm

    3. BGBen Goodger32:29

       ... um, which Darin pointed out before, is kind of, uh, something you can use to help you get back to a site if you kind of can't remember it later. But it also helps in situations like with the agent. Um, you know, I'm a United MileagePlus member, and so I tend-

    4. AMAndrew Mayne32:42

       Mm

    5. BGBen Goodger32:42

       ... to like to look for flights on that site.

    6. AMAndrew Mayne32:44

       Mm-hmm.

    7. BGBen Goodger32:45

       Um, it would be very tedious if every time I ask the agent to go and do something like that, if I had to tell it, "And always use United Airlines."

    8. AMAndrew Mayne32:53

       Mm-hmm.

    9. BGBen Goodger32:53

       Uh, but it kind of knows from my browsing, my browser memories, that I'm a frequent user of United, and so it will just go there, uh, by default.

    10. DFDarin Fisher33:00

        Yeah, it helps you in the forward queries, right?

    11. BGBen Goodger33:02

        Yeah.

    12. DFDarin Fisher33:02

        Because it's, it's like s- now, now this, uh, search experience has so much more context-

    13. BGBen Goodger33:07

        Mm

    14. DFDarin Fisher33:07

        ... about what matters to you. So it just, it ends up being a lot more efficient.

    15. BGBen Goodger33:12

        Right.

    16. DFDarin Fisher33:12

        Saves you a bunch of time 'cause you don't have to tell it as much again and again.

    17. BGBen Goodger33:15

        So I feel like that's something that helps me a lot. I think some people probably have, you know, different preferences around the- these things as well, so there are controls where people can go and see and control what, um-

    18. DFDarin Fisher33:25

        Yeah

    19. BGBen Goodger33:25

        ... what memories are, are used-

    20. DFDarin Fisher33:26

        You can turn it off

    21. BGBen Goodger33:27

        ... for personalization.

    22. DFDarin Fisher33:28

        If you want.

    23. BGBen Goodger33:28

        You can turn it off entirely.

12. 33:29 – 41:28

    Search inside the browser: familiar entry points that reveal “model superpowers”

    1. AMAndrew Mayne33:29

       And you also have to, when you use it, and I don't go into these tabs as much, I'm starting to do that more 'cause I realise they're there, is I can go to Images, I can go to News-

    2. BGBen Goodger33:38

       Mm

    3. AMAndrew Mayne33:38

       ... and I have kind of like a search engine, and that's... The, the thing I'm trying to sort of understand is, it's a browser, but it's also OpenAI heading towards its own search engine.

    4. DFDarin Fisher33:46

       Well, part of that comes from the fact that, um, when you're building a browser, people come to that browser with existing intents, like navigational intents or the, the, the idea that they do want to look for images, right?

    5. BGBen Goodger33:57

       Yeah.

    6. DFDarin Fisher33:57

       Or they want to see a certain kind of, uh, subset of information, and so we brought those, those controls into the, the landing page of chatgpt.com, uh, so that it would be both familiar to people but also useful in the way that they're, they're used to, right? Uh, we want to make sure people didn't feel like they're so out of, um, you know... That, that, that we didn't want people to have to learn so many new things in order to be successful using this product. We wanted them to have a lot- a, a good dose of familiar tools and familiar sorts of things, and plus- and anyways, these are just useful. For many people, search and browse are just very connected.

    7. BGBen Goodger34:32

       Yeah.

    8. DFDarin Fisher34:32

       Almost one and the same, and, um, you know, it's- so it's very important to-

    9. BGBen Goodger34:37

       Mm

    10. DFDarin Fisher34:37

        ... to internalise that as we're building this experience. Uh, I think it's very powerful that, and I was touching on this before, that as people search and use the browser in maybe a very normal way, they're also learning about, uh, that there's a model there that's gonna respond to them. So you get the- a set of chips across the top, which is like quick links to go to where you were trying to go, perhaps, uh, these, these different tabs where you can click on to see, like, familiar different kinds of subsets of information, but also this model response coming in. And so you start to... vanligly using a product in a normal way, you start to learn that there's a, there's another way-

    11. BGBen Goodger35:11

        Mm

    12. DFDarin Fisher35:11

        ... or that there's a superpower that this thing's providing. And it's- some of it is just the normal ChatGPT experience that people are used to, but not everybody's using ChatGPT to the fullness. And so when you- and when it's core and central to the experience, we have an opportunity to present that to people as part of their normal journey, and I think that's really cool. Similar to Sidechat, um, of course, you have to activate it, but it's right there, Ask ChatGPT, and you might be curious, and now y- you kind of unlock this superpower, but it's right there. You- the context is there.

    13. AMAndrew Mayne35:41

        The initial experience for me was the, the very first day when I started using it, and I look at this, I'm under- trying to understand, okay, this is basically... It's, it's an app that has a browser and ChatGPT. It's not like we just sort of glued those things together. It's sort of like they're both there, and there's a deep connection to the ChatGPT, and I asked it to, "Could you add a bookmark for-

    14. DFDarin Fisher36:02

        Yeah

    15. AMAndrew Mayne36:02

        ... you know, Amazon?" And then a moment later, the bookmark appeared, and that was a really kind of special moment to sort of understand what happens when your, the LLM deeply understands the system, you know, and is able to make those kinds of changes.

    16. BGBen Goodger36:16

        I think we're, um, very excited about this. I think from a, a, just, like, a conceptual transformation point of view, [chuckles] we're moving to a world where you can just tell the computer what you want-

    17. DFDarin Fisher36:28

        Mm

    18. BGBen Goodger36:28

        ... in, like, whatever way you want to tell it, uh-

    19. DFDarin Fisher36:30

        Simplest way possible-

    20. BGBen Goodger36:31

        Right

    21. DFDarin Fisher36:31

        ... just tell it.

    22. BGBen Goodger36:32

        And so w- what this means for making computing more accessible to more people is just, like, really profound, and that's, like, the company's mission is to make AGI beneficial to all of humanity.

    23. AMAndrew Mayne36:41

        Mm-hmm.

    24. BGBen Goodger36:41

        We take that really seriously, and I think-... being able to transform computing in ways like this that might seem very small on, on face of it, they add up to something, you know, far more profound.

    25. DFDarin Fisher36:52

        Yeah.

    26. BGBen Goodger36:52

        Uh, and so, yeah, that we're, we're excited about that kind of thing.

    27. DFDarin Fisher36:54

        Some of my first experiences with ChatGPT as a user was really this idea Ben's talking about. You know, I was comfortable and happy just sitting there, uh, doing my Google searches, but sometimes I didn't quite know what Google query to type in.

    28. BGBen Goodger37:06

        Mm-hmm.

    29. DFDarin Fisher37:06

        And, [exhales] you know, when I, when I realized I could ask sort of a really poorly formed question to ChatGPT, and it would come back with- make some sense of what I asked, what I said, and it would, it would give me something that maybe now I could query Google for. And that's how I first started using ChatGPT, and then I started to realize over time that, like, "Oh, why am I not just asking it in the first place?" You know, and, and it's sort of- I think for people, they all have like a-- there's like a bit of a journey with new technology, right? You're y- we're all creatures of habit. We're used to the things the way we work, and, and it works well for us, the things we're used to. We're used to it, so it's not a problem. And but as you maybe explore something new, you start to see, oh, there actually is a better way. And for everybody, that journey's a little different. And so for me, one of the things I was most excited about with, uh, Atlas was this idea that, uh, when you're typing into the address bar, that, that the default is ChatGPT. Because for me, that actually makes sense for most of what I'm gonna do. And-

    30. BGBen Goodger38:02

        This is one of these things where I feel like now when I don't have access to that-
13. 41:28 – 52:44

    Favorite non-AI primitives: scrolling tabs, tab search, and performance architecture

    1. AMAndrew Mayne41:28

       What was some of your favorite features, some of the things you're glad you were able to implement?

    2. DFDarin Fisher41:34

       Oh, man. You know, um, it's interesting whenever you get a chance to build a new browser, uh, you, you have, have, having, having worked on quite a few, uh, you get a chance to sort of, uh, start over and reset on certain things. Um, not everything-

    3. BGBen Goodger41:49

       Mm

    4. DFDarin Fisher41:49

       ... because I think one of the core tensions is that people are used to their browser the way it is, and, but you do have a chance to rethink some things. So one of the features I worked on was, uh, the scrolling tabs feature.

    5. AMAndrew Mayne42:00

       Mm-hmm.

    6. DFDarin Fisher42:01

       It kind of came from an insight of, um, [tsk] that, uh, you know, life, tab life could be a little better if maybe new tabs all started, all were inserted on the left-

    7. AMAndrew Mayne42:10

       Mm-hmm

    8. DFDarin Fisher42:11

       ... or just on one side. Um, you know, if you're a user who pins tabs in your browser, which is a pretty advanced use case-

    9. AMAndrew Mayne42:17

       Mm

    10. DFDarin Fisher42:17

        ... maybe a lot of people don't know that you can pin tabs to the tab strip in Chrome or Safari or other browsers, but it is a common thing, and if you pin a tab, it'll be pinned on the left side. And whenever- suppose that was like a Gmail tab. When you click links, those new web pages would open just adjacent to that pinned tab. But if you press the plus button, uh, the new tabs would appear off to the right.

    11. AMAndrew Mayne42:39

        Mm-hmm.

    12. DFDarin Fisher42:39

        And what ends up happening is, you're working throughout your day. You're going to Gmail, opening a, a, a URL from there. You're pu- hitting the plus button, opening buttons, uh, tabs on the right, and you're sort of accumulating old tabs in the middle.... And so, uh, it becomes a little bit painful to, uh, close all of the tabs to the right from the middle, you know, to, to-

    13. BGBen Goodger43:00

        Mm-hmm

    14. DFDarin Fisher43:00

        ... to clean up those tabs because, and you just end up with a lot of clutter. So scrolling tabs was one of the innovations that we worked on to try to make tab management better, and it's like, it's not an AI feature.

    15. BGBen Goodger43:10

        Mm-hmm.

    16. DFDarin Fisher43:10

        But it's like when you have this opportunity to rethink browsers, um, it's an opportunity to rethink some of these primitives and try some different things.

    17. BGBen Goodger43:18

        I mean, it's a major productivity tool, so finding these wins, uh, can be, like, really, really exciting.

    18. DFDarin Fisher43:23

        Really.

    19. BGBen Goodger43:23

        Yeah.

    20. DFDarin Fisher43:24

        And we think about, um... One of the things that I came to realize and appreciate only later is that if you have a browser that more naturally scales to having tons and tons of tabs, it means that certain kinds of things get unlocked for you. So everybody's, or m- many people are probably familiar with the ability to search for a specific tab that you might have open. There's a Command-Shift-A or-

    21. BGBen Goodger43:44

        Mm-hmm

    22. DFDarin Fisher43:44

        ... a button for that in many browsers. Uh, what, with our, with, uh, with, uh, with our, with our system that a lo- with scrolling tabs, the fact that it can accu- allow for a lot of tabs to be accumulated without them all being in your face, you can still search across them and find these old tabs. So in a way, it's like this, this history of, uh, of things you've done in your browser is there for you to search in a very familiar way because it's your, it's Command-Shift-A, it's right there, and it-- you can have that capability without it being cluttered.

    23. BGBen Goodger44:15

        Darin's talking about tab search.

    24. DFDarin Fisher44:16

        Tab search.

    25. BGBen Goodger44:17

        So you can search over your tabs, you can just type, and it will find the tab that you want. But I think the most interesting thing about this feature is the fact that you don't need to close tabs.

    26. DFDarin Fisher44:24

        Right.

    27. BGBen Goodger44:25

        And so you can end up having... You know, my-- I think my browser, I've got, like, well over a thousand tabs open, and I just wouldn't think to, for that to be possible-

    28. DFDarin Fisher44:32

        Hmm

    29. BGBen Goodger44:32

        ... in another browser.

    30. DFDarin Fisher44:33

        Or you might think that that'd be a problem, right? But it's not.
14. 52:44 – 58:40

    Why Chromium (and its lineage): compatibility, extensions, and where innovation sits

    1. AMAndrew Mayne52:44

       Mm. Why Chromium?

    2. DFDarin Fisher52:47

       That's a fantastic question. I [chuckles] I answered this question on, on, on the f- site formerly known as Twitter, um, by saying that, uh, you know, uh, web compatibility.

    3. AMAndrew Mayne53:01

       Mm-hmm.

    4. DFDarin Fisher53:01

       So it turns out, unfortunately, or for better or worse, a lot of websites are only really designed to work with Chromium. [lips smack] Uh, there are f- features of major websites, which I, I won't get into the naming names, but that, that are just not present if you're not using Chromium-based browser.

    5. AMAndrew Mayne53:17

       Mm-hmm.

    6. DFDarin Fisher53:17

       And the other reason is, um, Chromi- Chrom- Chromium extensions. Extensions built on top of Chromium are very popular, and when you build your browser on top of Chromium, it means those extensions will just work. And so we wanted to make sure that we were building a browser that, first off, works for people-

    7. AMAndrew Mayne53:34

       Mm-hmm

    8. DFDarin Fisher53:34

       ... that all the websites they care about will be supported, and all the features of those websites will be supported. And we want to make sure that they could, uh, install any of the extensions that they care about and that they're used to using in their browser.

    9. AMAndrew Mayne53:44

       And it seems like there's also, you know, we, you know, kind of non-technical, when they hear Chrome, they hear Chromium, but not understand there's like a, a really deep lineage that even goes further back.

    10. BGBen Goodger53:54

        Oh, yeah.

    11. AMAndrew Mayne53:54

        You also have WebKit, and KDE, and whatnot.

    12. BGBen Goodger53:57

        So what I'd say is, and, you know, I think there's, like, a lot of excitement for, you know, from among the community for, for-- to see, like, new rendering engines come about.

    13. AMAndrew Mayne54:05

        Mm-hmm.

    14. BGBen Goodger54:05

        Uh, and that's certainly been part of the DNA of the web too, over, over the years. Um, at the same time, just like Darin said, um, you know, when you build a new browser and you don't have that many people using your product just yet, it's, it's-- you kind of just want the web to work-

    15. AMAndrew Mayne54:18

        Mm

    16. BGBen Goodger54:18

        ... as people know it today. And actually, back when we were starting working on Chrome, we had the same concern. Like, the, you know, Chromium today, you know, has Blink, which is sort of its own rendering engine that sort of diverged from, from that lineage.

    17. AMAndrew Mayne54:31

        Mm.

    18. BGBen Goodger54:31

        Um, but at that point, like, there wasn't much appetite for taking risks like that. Uh, and so that, uh, the Chromium rendering engine is based on WebKit-

    19. AMAndrew Mayne54:39

        Mm

    20. BGBen Goodger54:40

        ... uh, which is the Safari rendering engine, which is open source, and that itself was based on an earlier rendering engine from, from the Linux, Linux world-

    21. AMAndrew Mayne54:47

        Mm

    22. BGBen Goodger54:47

        ... uh, called, uh, KHTML. Uh, and so yeah, it's really interesting to go back in time, so you can see how these sort of open-source projects fork, and branch, and so on.

    23. DFDarin Fisher54:55

        Yeah.

    24. BGBen Goodger54:55

        Mm.

    25. DFDarin Fisher54:55

        There's code in Chromium that comes from the Mozilla project, too.

    26. AMAndrew Mayne54:58

        Mm-hmm.

    27. BGBen Goodger54:59

        You're going back to the 1990s, uh, you can find this- [chuckles]

    28. DFDarin Fisher55:02

        Yeah

    29. BGBen Goodger55:02

        ... uh.

    30. DFDarin Fisher55:03

        This is true.
15. 58:40 – 1:13:46

    Long-term bet and what’s next: platforms, mobile UX, and the agentic web in 5–10 years

    1. AMAndrew Mayne58:40

       When you look at this from the outside, a lot of people draw comparisons. They go, "Well, you know, there was Operator, now they're doing ChatGPT Atlas. You know, is this gonna be a real thing for them, or is this just another experiment?"

    2. BGBen Goodger58:54

       So a browser, um, you know, I think it's a, it's a super, um, core tool for productivity, um, and it's something that you need to be able to count on.

    3. AMAndrew Mayne59:05

       Mm-hmm.

    4. BGBen Goodger59:06

       And so my view for this has always been that this is like a long-term investment, and so that's the way that we're approaching it. Um, there's a set of functionality that we've launched, which is sort of like the first phase. If I come back to browser history, I sort of say it's the, you know, Netscape 1.0, if you like-

    5. AMAndrew Mayne59:20

       Mm-hmm

    6. BGBen Goodger59:20

       ... of this new era of, of web browsing. Um, [lips smack] so there's gonna be a lot of imp- future improvements to come, features that we're building because people have told us about it from the initial set of feedback, things that we come up with, you know, through our partnership with research, a whole host of new functionality, uh, that will come out over the course of time. The other thing that we hear from folks is they wanna see this across different platforms.

    7. DFDarin Fisher59:43

       Different platforms. [chuckles]

    8. BGBen Goodger59:43

       Yeah, basically, "This browser isn't available for my Windows device or on my phone," or that sort of thing. So these are things that we're, we're thinking about and, and, and working on. So there's, like a, a long roadmap of enhancements, and so we want people to, um, both feel confidence that this will get better over the course of time. Uh, actually, it gets better every week when we push an update. Um, and they will see it increasingly on more of the surfaces, uh, where they are, so definitely a, a long-term investment for us.

    9. DFDarin Fisher1:00:10

       Yeah, we got this a- app to the point where, um, internally, uh, the users at OpenAI were, um... We were seeing them, uh, enjoy this product, and, you know, and we wanted to- We were at a point where, uh, the kind of feedback we were getting was, uh, was, was, was, uh, you know, uh-

    10. BGBen Goodger1:00:30

        Why haven't you shipped it yet? [chuckles]

    11. DFDarin Fisher1:00:31

        Yeah, why haven't you shipped it yet? [chuckles] That's exactly what I was thinking, 'cause it's like, we weren't getting new feedback.

    12. BGBen Goodger1:00:36

        Yeah. Mm.

    13. DFDarin Fisher1:00:36

        We, we were, we... And we realized we're ready to ship this. We wanna share this with the world. We wanna, we wanna hear how other people are experiencing it. Um, and I think that, you know, this feedback's been all kinds of amazing. Uh, you know, obviously, there's been, uh, you know, people who have their pet feature that's missing, or like when Ben said-

    14. BGBen Goodger1:00:53

        Reader mode. Reader mode

    15. DFDarin Fisher1:00:53

        ... "How come I can't-"

    16. BGBen Goodger1:00:54

        The same. [chuckles]

    17. DFDarin Fisher1:00:54

        ... You know, "Where's Wind- Windows When?"

    18. BGBen Goodger1:00:56

        Mm-hmm.

    19. DFDarin Fisher1:00:57

        Uh, but, you know, the other day, my, my 14-year-old son came back, and he's like: "Oh, man, my friends at s- school, they love this browser," you know, kind of a thing. And, and I was asking, like, "Really? What do they love about it?" And he's... And then they- this- he just was, like, talking about all the different AI features that they were checking out. I think it's really interesting to see, um, that sort of spark of fascination from people, um, whether it's kids or, or, uh, you know, people we work with, or friends as, as they sort of share their experiences with this thing, and-... I don't know, I just love to see how people, um... My w- my wife was so giddy when she f- first got to try Atlas when, uh, when we did the friends and family testing.

    20. AMAndrew Mayne1:01:34

        Wow!

    21. DFDarin Fisher1:01:34

        And just to be able to go and explore, researching some task and asking, uh, um, the Side Chat about, uh, what she was looking at, and just she had so much fun with it.

    22. AMAndrew Mayne1:01:43

        My wife loves it. This is not a lie, an exaggeration. The night that it came out, we're sitting in bed, I'm reading, and I look over, "How are you doing?" She says, I swear to you, I swear to you, she goes, "I can't stop thinking about ChatGPT Atlas." [laughing]

    23. DFDarin Fisher1:01:55

        [chuckles]

    24. BGBen Goodger1:01:55

        [chuckles]

    25. AMAndrew Mayne1:01:55

        Because for her, it was her first use of an agentic system like this, and to be able to go do these things was a huge unlock. Was her favorite tool is-

    26. DFDarin Fisher1:02:02

        Yeah

    27. AMAndrew Mayne1:02:02

        ... ChatGPT-

    28. DFDarin Fisher1:02:03

        Yep

    29. AMAndrew Mayne1:02:03

        -now connected to the browser.

    30. DFDarin Fisher1:02:05

        Yep, exactly, because, um, just the tediousness that it takes away when you- you're-- I'm looking at this website, or I'm doing some research, and I can just, uh, ask it now-

Episode duration: 1:14:21