OpenAI has launched Atlas, your first browserand Alphabet has seen $150 billion in market capitalization evaporate in a matter of hours. Shares fell 4.8% shortly after the announcement, recovering slightly to close down 2.4%.
The market reaction was no coincidence: Atlas is not (just) Chrome with a chatbot stuck on top, it is a browser designed from scratch around ChatGPT.
Why is it important. For two decades, Google has controlled how we access the Internet through a lethal combination: Chrome as a gateway and Google Search as a mandatory destination. Atlas breaks that logic.
- If your browser has an AI assistant with memory that remembers your preferences, performs complex tasks for you, and directly answers your questions, the traditional search bar no longer makes sense.
- It is therefore not an incremental improvement, but rather a paradigm shift in the way we navigate.
In detail. Atlas eliminates the address bar as the nerve center of the browser and replaces it with ChatGPT. Users can open a side panel in any window to summarize content, compare products, or analyze data without switching tabs.
But the star functionality is the “agent mode“, currently reserved for paying subscribers: ChatGPT literally takes control of the mouse and keyboard, surf the web on your behalf, fill out forms, research travel options, add ingredients to the shopping cart.
In yesterday’s demo, an OpenAI developer showed how the agent found a recipe and automatically purchased all the ingredients, a process that took several minutes but required no human intervention.
- “Browser memory” is another key piece. Atlas can remember what you’ve searched for before, what sites you’ve visited, and what projects you have in hand, using that data to suggest actions or automate routines it detects in your behavior.
- Everything is optional, but the message is clear: OpenAI wants Atlas to know you better than you know yourself. Nothing new with AI.
The figures. OpenAI has 800 million weekly active ChatGPT users, double the number in February. Chrome has 3 billion and 71.9% global share. Google controls 90% of the search advertising market.
Atlas sounds like a prelude to advertising coming to ChatGPT. Somehow they have to monetize the free users, who not only don’t pay OpenAI, but cost them money. And if OpenAI enters advertising, Google has the most to lose: it could be revenue that stops coming to them.
Yes, but. Initial tests of ChatGPT agents have shown slow and imprecise results, where it is very effective to see the browser do tasks for us, but also much slower than if we take care of a few clicks. Plus, the hallucinations are still there.
- Google has a structural problem– Your business depends on people clicking on ads.
- If Atlas delivers direct answers without visiting web pages, Google loses.
- It has integrated Gemini into Chrome and added AI summaries to the results, but the basis of its model remains the same.
Internet Explorer seemed invincible in 2007. Within five years, Chrome had surpassed it by offering something substantially better. The 150 billion drop in Alphabet’s capitalization is a sign that investors believe there is a chance that history could repeat itself.
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Featured image | Xataka with Mockuuups Studio
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