Limitless Podcast - OpenAI Launched its ChatGPT Atlas Browser. Is this the End of Google Chrome?

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

OpenAI's has a new browser. Atlas combines Google Chrome’s interface with ChatGPT's intelligence, and we discuss key features like browser memory and Agent Mode, allowing personalized experiences and task automation. Stick around for our live demo of Atlas's capabilities while debating its practicality for users. The conversation highlights Atlas's potential role in reshaping digital interactions, so let us know what you think!------🌌 LIMITLESS HQ: LISTEN & FOLLOW HERE ⬇️https://limitless.bankless.com/https://x.com/LimitlessFT------TIMESTAMPS0:00 OpenAI's New Browser1:25 Innovative Features of Atlas2:47 Initial Reactions and Comparisons3:42 Understanding Agent Mode6:33 Voice Control and User Experience8:28 Optimistic Outlook on AI Browsing10:33 Live Demo of Atlas14:03 Unique Use Cases for the New Browser16:40 Exploring Search Capabilities17:50 The Future of OpenAI's Browser25:14 Conclusion and User Feedback------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/Josh_KaleEjaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Open AI has got a browser, just like Chrome, just like Safari, just like complexity. OpenAI now officially has a web browser that you can use today. The download is available. EJAS and I, we have been playing around with it for the last hour or two. It just got announced. And we have a lot of thoughts and takes on this browser, what it means for AI, if it actually is valuable and what it means for the grand plan of open AI, this very much feels like a stepping stone for open AI in their attempt to gather more

information, get more familiar with your habits, and then eventually, roll out an operating system for you, for your human entire, your entire human experience. So this is a really exciting announcement. It's cool to see OpenAI jump into the browser game. EJazz, I know you were all over the live stream too. We just finished watching it. What were the first impressions? Walk us through exactly what they even announced today. So Open AI's new browser is called Atlas. And it's as if Google Chrome and chat GPT had a baby. And I mean it because chat GBTBT is at the center of this entire new browser. kind of looks like a browser. You have familiar things like tabs, history, you have a cursor that

you can scroll, you can type in URLs. But with some noticeable new features, Josh, you get browser memory. So this is something that I'm super excited about. In chat jbt, something that makes it super special is that chat jvt remembers everything about me and it results in a really personalized AI experience. That now comes over to your browsing experience in this new browser. It remembers everything, you can search for new specific things. If you're like, hey, I read something in a blog post the other week, but I can't remember, you can kind of like now search for it. And this other really cool feature called Agent Mode, which is currently only available to Pro and Plus users, but on this browser, you can now engage in Open AI's agent to do things for you. And if this

sounds like something that's kind of familiar, it's because other AI browsers have also pitched this kind of similar feature. But I think it's quite unique in OpenAI. sense because it gives you the ability to kind of do other stuff and you can watch it do things for you. It can book restaurants for you. You can book flights for you. We could research things for you. We could write code for you. Some really cool things. My initial take on this, Josh, which may be a little controversial, is it seems like a really cool new browsing experience, but I don't know how much it necessarily adds to my life. I get that it basically moves you. I get that it basically moves you from just using the chat GBT terminal to bringing chat GBT to everywhere you browse on the

internet. I get that. But I don't know if it's noticed to be different for me to kind of like jump all in. Do you have any initial reactions? I think mine are probably similar to yours where we've seen AI browsers before. And in fact, I almost feel like this could have been an extension, kind of like what Anthropic did. They just released a browser extension that lives as a companion. I understand why they didn't. But it feels like it is about that level of important. It's cool in the sense that it's a companion. I don't know how much I'll use it. I love the chat GPT app,

and I'm very stuck in my ways on how I use my browsers and the way I use Chrome and the way I use Safari, and I use a series of different browsers for different things. What I find interesting, though, is that there wasn't really anything new announced today. It's mostly just a wrapper of their existing technologies. So, EJAS, you mentioned Agent earlier as one of the key features. Well, we made an episode about agent from chat chbtee, like what, two or three months ago, like quite a while ago where they had announced the agent feature.

What they did here is they really just rolled up that agent feature and they placed it into a web interface. And then another thing is the improved search where they swapped out the Google search bar for a chat chpti search bar. And when you type things in, it will search using chat chpt. And that's kind of what a lot of users are doing already, is they're treating chat chvety like Google, and they're getting these like enhanced augmented answers through the browser experience. So the new thing for me as a user would be just the fact that it's more embedded

in everything. So a common problem with the chatGBT application that sits on my desktop and my mobile app is that it doesn't have access to all the accounts that I'm logged into. So I need to like log into a lot of accounts. It's kind of a pain. With this browser feature, it has access to everything. And what I found interesting is there's actually two modes. When you start to spin up the browser and you use the agentic feature, it'll ask you, it'll say, hey, do you want to use with logged in accounts or without login accounts? And part of that, it actually offers a warning saying, hey, this agent is actually going to take actions on your behalf. So be sure to monitor it if you give it access to all of your accounts, because there is a small chance that it does

something that you may not want it to do. So it's very much this like early experimental software, but I do see it as the stepping stone. I mean, as we talk about this all the time where Open AI wants the operating system for your life. They want to be this single AI subscription that powers everything from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep and thinking proactively while you are asleep. And I think this is very much just another attempt

to further embed themselves by getting into the browser experience and everything associated with that experience. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think I'm browsing through Fiji Simo, the CEO of Open AI applications here, her announcement post about this. And she goes over here, she goes,

the Apps SDK, which is something that Open Air released, I think two weeks ago now. And the whole point of the Apps SDK was to bring apps into the ChatGBT BT app that you and I and 800 million other weekly active users use every week into ChatGBT, so it enriches that experience. But the point she makes here is, but ChatGBTGPT should also be able to help you where you already are. And this kind of got me thinking about how I use other AI models.

So another AI model I use is GROC, right? The one from XAI, that Elon Musk's AI model. And I was talking to you about this before we started recording, Josh. But one thing that I keep coming back to when it comes to using GROC is it's because I'm browsing X and Twitter, GROC's already there. So I can just press a button and get a summary of something or have something explained to me that I don't quite understand that someone's talking about. and I find that really addictive and useful to me.

It improves my life. If I could do that with ChatGBTGPT, which is opened on another account in another tab, but requires more clicks for me to get there. I need to copy and paste the tweet. I need to give it a bit of context. That kind of annoys me, right? So I don't use it.

Now I potentially might, right? I log into X. ChatGPT gets access to all my X history, which is probably good and very bad, and is able to kind of build up a persona around me. So it already knows what I'm going to ask. Maybe it suggests things as I'm scrolling through X. And that integrated experience is really useful for me.

But on the other side, I don't know whether this is good enough for me to kind of use a completely new browser, right? You mentioned that you can import all your bookmarks and log into all your different accounts. Yeah, that's cool. But I don't know if that's good enough for me to stop using Chrome entirely. Yeah, there was a series of interesting things in this post from Fiji. Fiji CEO of product, not to be confused with CEO of the actual company. And there's a few things. One of the things in your key capability section was voice control, voice controlling your tabs.

I think this is particularly interesting. One of my obsessions is how you engage with AI. And being able to actually engage with the browser using voice is something that I believe is novel. And very interesting to me, where if I can just converse with my browser, if I could say, hey, open up this tab, find a post like this. and I could see it kind of visually doing that for me. I think that's an interesting unlock that I'm excited to play around with. And the other, she had a large section in here all about memory. And the memory thing I find interesting because this feels like the largest value prop for the user,

but also for open AI in understanding the user more. And one of the first bullet points here, it says, chat chip fatigue can remember your browsing patterns, preferences, and context. For example, gluten-free recipes. If you are resistant to gluten, it will search specifically for recipes. that have no gluten just because it understands that memory preference stack. So that seems like an interesting part of it where, okay, you can talk to it with your voice now. It remembers more and has more context of the actual browser functionality.

Seems kind of interesting. But again, to your point, EG is I'm kind of trying to, I'm trying to convince myself, give myself reasons why I would be excited to use this. And voice is one, because I do love, constantly when I use chatyptu, my, most frequent way of interfacing it is with voice. But is that enough? I don't know. I'm trying to find the killer use case, that killer feature. And I'm just falling short when I think about it. Okay. So I want to spin my most optimistic take on this new browser, Josh. And it is as follows. It's something you mentioned right at the start, which is, I think if we view this as an intermediary step towards what is ultimately going to be a brand new operating system for this AI technology,

I think that's an optimistic outlook, and this makes sense, right? Why does it make sense? Well, I think in a world where AI and AGI is used in everything that I do, it needs to be incredibly personal. So it needs to know everything about me, and it needs to know everything about you, Josh, and the difference between you and me will be vast and different and similar in many different ways, but it needs to be able to distinguish between that. I think a browser is a great step to do that.

I kind of view my browser as my home page, my welcome page to the internet, the doormat, if you like. I like that when I type in a URL on Google Chrome, it already knows which website I'm trying to go to, which tab I already have opened, and it just takes me there directly. But I feel like a next leap in that is an AI that's reading my mind that maybe does some work for me,

or that maybe preempts a bunch of things, maybe it books the restaurant that it knows I need to go to in two weeks time without me needing to kind of open up a tab and do it for myself. So what this end goal eventually ends up being is this new operating system with whatever form factor we end up using, whether it's AI glasses that we've mentioned a lot on the show before or whether it's a brand new one that open AI is cooking behind the scenes. I don't know. I don't think we're quite there,

but I think this is an intermediary step before that, and therefore it's worth a shot. So like we mentioned earlier in the episode, this actually is available for download right now. It's for Mac only, but we both downloaded it, Ejaz and I, and we've been playing around with it. In fact, we want to give a demo right now. So EJAS, you have the browser open on the screen. Show us how it works. The one thing that I'm kind of taken back by, a first impression when I open this browser,

is how similar it looks to other browsers. This really doesn't look any different from a Chrome, a Safari, any popular browser that you're used to. I guess that's probably because we've been trained to use it, but show us some of the cool new features. Maybe the agent feature and how we use that. Okay, cool. Well, yeah, there's a bit of a magic wand that you can wave here, which is this agent mode button right over here. And you might notice that there is a new cursor that has appeared that is asking me,

what should we do today? And this is basically Open AI's agent that can do a bunch of things autonomously for you as you browse or you can watch it, right? So I have a specific prompt that I want to demo here, which is I'm asking it to find the limitless podcast on YouTube, subscribe to the channel and leave a comment about how great they are under their most recent episode. Excellent. A little, a little bitistic, but, you know, I have to give it a go. And I'm going to click the button here to set the prompt. And my initial reaction is, oh, this is just chat GPT, right? Like, there's nothing new here. And then suddenly this new window appears before me. And it is my YouTube channel and it is sparkly and I can see a cursor moving but it's not me Josh I'm not moving this

at all and what I'm realizing is this is chat GPT's agent doing exactly what we're requested of it autonomously in front of us this is just so cool I wonder how it's going to do it seems like it's located the podcast and what I like about this is you could kind of see the chain of thought on that right tab over here so it's it's opening the search results it says I found a link for a limitless podcast that leads to a YouTube channel so it's as it's clicking through these things, it's walking through the steps. And it's just entered our channel. So we're here.

Oh, and I just click the subscribe button. Okay. Okay, that's great. Okay. We are not subscribed. Subscribing to Limitless is this easy. And it's opened up. It's opened up on most recent video.

Oh, this is kind of cool. Okay, it's doing it. Let's see. So as it's running a comment. Okay. It's selected the comment, the text field. It's going to come up. with hopefully something nice and generous.

Wow, this is the latest episode was fantastic. Limitless is truly pushing the boundaries, and will it click publish? Let's see, come on. This is actually very impressive. How well it's working. Listen, if you want to give a demo, this is an excellent demo to do.

Oh, so I'm seeing on... Just going to pause it. I'm seeing on the right side, it said, I found the Limitless podcast channel, subscribe to it, and drafted a positive comment. Would you like me to put it? post this comment now. Now, what I like about this, Josh, is it's asking for my review before it posted because this is something that might affect how people perceive me on the internet.

And so, therefore, it understands that this is a point where I need to interact with the human to check that if it's cool. So if I respond, yes, go ahead. It should post that comment. Let's have a look. Okay, we're back at the sparkly screen, which is assembling it's doing something. And it's click comment. Boom. It's done. Sent. Done. Okay, that's pretty cool. That's fun. It's a fun demo. It's fun to use. Now, granted, EGESA, could you do this in the previous agent functionality of chat chit? Is that something you think would work? No, because you would have to integrate YouTube directly into the chat chvety terminal, and that's not available.

Okay, so this is a novel use case. That is exciting. Okay, so EJAS, more demos. What else can this thing do? I know you, you yourself are a bit of a restaurant connoisseur. Do you have anything that we can test against that. I am. So this is a real life use case that I need resolved ASAP, which is I'm booking a dinner for four somewhere in New York on Friday and I haven't got a single reservation. So I am booking a dinner with my friends on Friday. Pick a restaurant in Williamsburg, Josh. let's see Williamsburg and reserve it

and so the agent as we've just demonstrated is going to find a way to figure out what the best restaurant is in Williamsburg or something that might be suited

towards my taste and hopefully book it now notice a few things I haven't given it my preference of time and I haven't kind of like logged into any reservation platform

so it's a little more challenging than the previous prompt where I'd already logged into my YouTube. Now, typically, you could log into your resi, and it could just do this swiftly for you, so I'm interested to see how it starts to tackle this. Okay, so it's asked me a follow-up because I didn't give it enough information, which is number of guests and preferred time. So four guests and around 7 p.m. And so it says, let's do this, it's starting to find reservations.

And what we should see soon is a site window. pop up where it's going to start browsing and using search to basically find a really cool restaurant. Now, and there we go. Right now, it's looking at infatuation. It's looking at Eater. These are all popular food review sites that are in New York. And it's going to find me something.

But whilst that's cooking, Josh, I kind of want to show some similar, not as loud, but quiet features from this new browser that I think is pretty cool. So why don't you give me something to search? I want to know more about the new M5 version of the Apple Vision Pro. They just released it last week. I was interested in getting it. I want to know more about that. Okay, so let's go with Apple Vision Pro M5.

So this is typical to any search browser where you press enter, except you might notice a few different things here. So immediately, rather than being faced with a Google ranking page where you could see a bunch of hyperlinks and you kind of figure out which is the right website to click to get your information on, you're given a chat GPT page where it summarizes it says, okay, Josh, I kind of kind of. figure that you want to know what's good about this M5 chip, here's like the new features from

that chip and why it's going to be so useful for you. Here's what hasn't changed from the previous chip and here's who this chip is mainly aimed for. Maybe it's for a slightly more technical audience or someone that's looking for a little bit more kick out of their computer than they're expecting. So this is already more helpful for me than an average Google search where I have to then go into the Apple website. I need to navigate to the new M5 chip, Apple Vision pros, and read about the new M5 thing. What I'm noticing, is it hasn't told me about the Vision Pro specifically. It has given me some general takeaways here, but what I think is really interesting here, Josh, is if I don't want to look at a chat GPT response,

I have the option up here, and you might notice a few tabs, to click search. And suddenly I have my Google search interface that I missed and that I wanted to engage with and select a link for myself. But it also gives you the image option as well, which is, again, very typical of Google, or I can look at any videos of people who have done reviews of headsets for me. So it's not straying too far from things that I'm comfortable with if I find myself wanting to use those things again. Do you have any immediate reactions to this, Josh? Yeah, well, my first reaction was, oh my God, imagine 800 million people using this product. That is 800 million people less using Google search. So that felt like a big deal. But now seeing

that you can actually kind of invoke Google search results, which I'm assuming popular be like three of those four small tabs, it softens the blow slightly. But I imagine that's got to be transitory, right? Like, surely they don't want to continue to funnel all traffic through Google if they don't need to. To me, like this whole thing, it just feels kind of like one of the oldest players in the books, right? Like, you have products market fit with a single killer use case. You have the best AI. And then you just kind of like vertically integrate and then horizontally expand until you control the interface layer itself. So it's like open AI again, we saw this with chat, GPT, first, then we saw it with, recently with, what is the, oh my gosh, with SORA and the image generation.

And now it's another example where they're turning an app into a platform. And it's only a matter of time to me until this platform grows into the life OS that we mentioned before. And then displaces a lot of the services like Google. I mean, the demo that you just did with a search, it's pretty closely replicable through the desktop application, but you're already here. And this is how you're used to using the internet. So the fact that it could just inject itself right into it is, is really cool. And we're checking back in on this demo for getting a reservation. It looks like it's going pretty well. I know this restaurant. I have a massive grin on my face right now, because although it didn't know this about me, this is one of my favorite spots in the neighborhood.

Aurora Williamsburg, great Italian food for anyone who happens to find themselves in Brooklyn. And it is reviewing another great restaurant as well. And what I'm noticing is it's at the stage where it's condensed a bunch of the top restaurants in my neighborhood and it's checking out reservation availability right now. This is something I despise when I'm looking for food, Josh. I love eating the food. I love ordering the food. I don't really like doing all the reservations. It's going on the open table. It's finding out whether there's a time slot for me. It's going on Rezi. It's doing the same kind of thing. And I like that I can actively see its thinking in real time. That's awesome. Okay, so I guess while that thinks, are there any final thoughts on

Chachyipatea? Maybe, maybe we'll ask you, J. Because this is a question I'm asking myself is, Do you see yourself actually using this product? No, not beyond a week. And I'm just going to be honest because I had a similar experience when I was using Perplexities's AI browser that they released not too long ago

called Comet. We also reviewed that on the show here. I used it pretty actively, but I realized that the thing that it was lacking the most was they didn't know enough about me. And maybe Open AIs browser changes that for me, right?

It has all the history that I need to know. But I don't think it's good enough. Like typically they say if you want to introduce a new product that competes with an old version of it, it needs to be at least 10 times better than it. I don't think this is 10 times better. Do you, Josh? I don't. I don't think it is. But I'm torn on whether or not I will use it. And I'm actually leaning more towards yes than no this time. And as one of the biggest perplexity haters, I really think that this is different.

purely due to memory. Like chat chitpc really knows a lot about me. And what I, what was interesting is during the onboarding flow, when you first download the browser and you get set up, is they give you a really easy option to click, to transfer your Chrome history over to this new browser. So in one click, you've kind of transferred all of your history, all of your tabs, all your favorites, your bookmarks, your reading list, which is what I did. And then you kind of have to re-sign into the accounts again. But suddenly you do have this companion that kind of knows everything about you, it's just always there. And I want to say I don't know. Like, I think the answer, you know what, if I'm being honest with myself, I think the answer is also no, I think one month from now, there's no way I'm using this browser. But I want to give this a shot.

And I think it's too early to tell for sure. But I think you're right in the sense that I'm very happy with Google Chrome and I'm very happy with my chat, GPT desktop application and my web app and my mobile app. So it's going to take a lot to replace that. So here's the thing, right? We probably use the web browser for two types of activities. One is work, right? Editing docs, coming up with agendas, researching a bunch of things on X, YouTube,

and then, you know, recording a video, doing all these different types of things. The other side is the leisure side of things, right? Where you kind of want to be browsing and searching for your own things. You're kind of like a discoverer on YouTube or like finding the right video to watch while. to read, right? I don't know how much Atlas as an AI browser can add towards the leisure side of things. I kind of want to do that myself. Now, where I can see it actually being active here is,

to your point, if it knows everything about my browser history, but it can do something with it, aka, imagine me opening up this browser and it has a bunch of tabs opened for me for things that I want to read on my Reddit account for a particular post or on X, it's kind of opened up a post that it knows I'm going to like and want to start my day off with. That could be quite cool. And I could see that being pretty sticky, but that's just me being hopeful. On the work side of things, I would love if I could just wake up in the morning and I have like a neat, concise summary of all the latest AI things that have happened overnight whilst I've been asleep. That's probably a simple thing that I can ask the agent to do. But again, I'm being hopeful. I want it to be proactive

for me before I can like kind of commit to saying yeah I'm going to use this as my new browser. Yeah, the leisure reverse productivity thing actually brought up with Arvind on an episode that we did talking about perplexity. And I would recommend everyone goes and watch it because it gives some context on the thesis for the browser. And I think you're right in a lot of cases, EJZ. And also, I very strongly believe this is just a stepping stone because the way that they're going about it, it feels like open AI is kind of going for the life OS, whereas perplexity is kind of going for the browser. And the browser very much feels like an incremental stepping stone where the reason right now the browser is better that we were talking about is because your accounts are logged in, because it has

the history, because it has the context. And if all that, if all those hurdles went away, I think the most interesting and compelling part about this product is the agent feature, the fact that it can go and do things without you. And that's what we just saw here. It looks like you do actually have a reservation. You have two minutes to complete it. Are you going to do that? I am. Yeah, yeah. So my agent came back to me and said, hey, I found a good restaurant, Suraki, which is a great Greek spot near me. I'm holding the reservation for you for four people. Do you want me to go ahead and book it? And it is basically going ahead and doing that. So all and all, useful. Okay, well, I'm going to remove the screenshot before it shows your phone number because we don't want everyone calling the line. But I think that probably concludes the chat chip-chip T browser episode, right? Like, it's, it is cool. It is impressive. It is an incremental stepping stone. But maybe not the killer product that some people would imagine.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious to hear what others have to say about this. I mean, you've just seen everything. We've given you the entire breakdown of all the cool features. We've shown you all the demos about how it actually looks, how it works. It's available to anyone who's on Mac OS right now. Windows coming soon right after.

Let us know what you think. Are we wrong? Like, is there something useful that is cool for you guys to use? and we're not seeing, let us know in the comments. Let us know, give us some feedback, and maybe we can kind of give a review on it later on. Yeah, just looking for killer use cases, if there's anything we're missing.

There's also a funny thing on the availability of this EJAS where it's available to free plus and premium users, but if you are a free user and you allow the Atlas browser to become your default browser, they will unlock seven days of extended limits on messaging, file, uploads, data analysis, and image generation on chat, APTC Atlas. So there's a lot of growth hacks embedded in this.

It's very clear they're doing this to just kind of get as many people into the platform as possible and get more of that platform lock. And it's doing a good job. I mean, this is by all means a good product. It is in line with, I think, everything else that's on the market. And we'll just follow along and see how things go from here. But that has been another episode of The Limitless podcast. Thank you so much for watching. And we'll be back in a couple of days for the roundup of the week.

I'll see you guys on.