OpenAI is taking its ChatGPT chatbot to the next level, adding a feature to automate tasks such as planning vacations, filling out forms, making restaurant reservations and ordering groceries.
The tool, announced on Thursday, is called Operator. OpenAI describes it as “an agent that can go to the web to perform tasks for you,” and added that it is trained to interact with “the buttons, menus, and text fields that people use daily” on the web.
It can also ask follow-up questions to further personalize the tasks it completes, such as login information for other websites. Users can take control of the screen at any time.
“Operator is one of our first agents, which are AIs capable of doing work for you independently,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “You give it a task and it will execute it.”
For now, Operator is only available to ChatGPT Pro users in the U.S. It can be accessed at Operator.ChatGPT.com. OpenAI said it eventually plans to expand to Plus, Team and Enterprise users and to integrate Operator into ChatGPT. The company also said it currently has trouble with some tasks, such as managing calendars and creating slideshows.
OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, said users can opt out of some of the company’s training data collection by turning off the “improve the model for everyone” setting in ChatGPT, meaning data in Operator will not be used to train its models. The company also said users can delete all browsing data and log out of all sites “with one click” in the privacy section.
Operator directly competes with an earlier release from Anthropic, the Amazon-backed artificial intelligence startup behind the Claude chatbot that was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives.
In October, Anthropic introduced “Computer Use,” a capability that allowed its AI agents to use computers like humans to complete complex tasks. Anthropic said it can interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing.
The tool can “use computers in basically the same way that we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview at the time. He said it can do tasks with “tens or even hundreds of steps.”
The generative AI market, which includes OpenAI and Anthropic as well as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
Google recently agreed to a new investment of more than $1 billion in Anthropic, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to CNBC this week. Anthropic is in late-stage talks to raise a funding round of $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, CNBC reported earlier this month.
OpenAI’s latest announcement comes as the company pushes toward a potential future of artificial general intelligence. AGI is a vaguely defined benchmark referring to AI that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks. Experts are split on whether it is attainable and how long it could take.
Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, whose company provides training data to key AI players, said Thursday in an interview with CNBC that he defines AGI as “powerful AI systems that are able to use a computer just like you or I could.” He said it will likely take two to four years to reach that level of the technology.
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