
Two years ago, OpenAI kicked off the chatbot craze with the release of ChatGPT. Now it hopes to spark interest in a new wave of AI technology.
On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled a tool called Operator that can go on the Internet and perform tasks autonomously, such as grocery shopping or restaurant reservations.
“It can navigate websites and perform actions on websites, just like you and I do,” Yash Kumar, OpenAI head of product and engineering, said in an interview.
Artificial intelligence researchers call this type of technology an AI agent. While chatbots can answer questions, write poems and generate images, agents can use other software on the Internet.
During a briefing with The New York Times, Kumar showed how the system could make reservations at a San Francisco restaurant through the OpenTable website and purchase a list of groceries through Instacart. The operator looks and behaves very similar to ChatGPT and other chatbots. The user types a request in a small window. Then the system responds in the best possible way.
The user can observe how the tool opens a web browser and visits certain sites. The operator may make mistakes. But in some cases, it can fix these errors. During the demonstration for the Times, the system incorrectly assumed that Mr. Kumar was in Iowa, before correctly finding a restaurant in San Francisco.
The operator is not entirely autonomous. Sometimes, a user needs to correct their mistakes and provide additional requests and suggestions. For sites like OpenTable and Instacart, users must provide their private usernames and passwords. But OpenAI said it does not store this private information.
However, the company captures data that shows how the system interacts with users and accesses sites on their behalf. It can use this data to train future versions of Operator.
OpenAI said that, starting Thursday, Operator will be available to anyone who subscribes to ChatGPT Pro, a $200-per-month service that provides access to all of the company’s latest tools. It plans to offer the tool through other paid services and possibly include it in the free version of ChatGPT. Users in the United States will be the first to receive the new tool.
(The New York Times is suing OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to artificial intelligence systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those allegations.)
In recent months, other leading companies, including Google and Anthropic, have unveiled similar tools. However, many of these tools are not yet widely available.
The operator is based on the same technology that ChatGPT is based on. This technology is what AI researchers call a neural network, a mathematical system that can learn skills by analyzing huge amounts of data.
The latest versions of this technology learn from a wide range of data, including text, images and sounds. In this case, Operator learned from images that show how people use spreadsheets, shopping sites and other online services. After identifying patterns in this data, the new system can use similar services on behalf of computer users.
Kumar acknowledged that, like ChatGPT and other chatbots, Operator is still an experimental technology. But he said it will continue to improve in the coming months.
“This is not the sturdiest thing in the world,” he said. “But it’s a lot better than this kind of technology used to be.”