Two years ago, OpenAI launched 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 access the internet and autonomously perform tasks such as grocery shopping or booking a restaurant reservation.
“It can navigate websites and take actions on websites, just like you and I do,” OpenAI product and engineering leader Yash Kumar 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, Mr. Kumar showed how the system could book a restaurant reservation in San Francisco through the OpenTable website and purchase a shopping list through Instacart. Operator looks and behaves just like ChatGPT and other chatbots. The user types a request in a small window. Then the system responds as best it can.
The user can see how the tool opens a web browser and visits certain sites. The operator can make mistakes. But in some cases it can correct these errors. During the demonstration for The Times, the system incorrectly assumed Mr. Kumar was in Iowa before correctly finding a restaurant in San Francisco.
Operator is not completely autonomous. Sometimes a user needs to correct their mistakes and make additional requests and suggestions. Sites like OpenTable and Instacart require users to provide their private usernames and passwords. But OpenAI said it does not store this private information.
However, the company does capture data that shows how the system communicates with users and visits 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 has subscribed 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 eventually implement 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 sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied these claims.)
In recent months, other leading companies, including Google and Anthropic, have unveiled similar tools. However, many of these tools are not yet widely available.
Operator is based on the same technology that underpins ChatGPT. This technology is what AI researchers call a neural network: a mathematical system that can learn skills by analyzing vast amounts of data.
Newer versions of this technology learn from a wide range of data, including text, images and sounds. In this case, Operator learned from images showing how people use spreadsheets, shopping sites, and other online services. After discovering patterns in this data, the new system can perform similar services on behalf of computer users.
Mr. Kumar acknowledged that Operator, like ChatGPT and other chatbots, is still an experimental technology. But he said it would continue to improve in the coming months.
“This is not the most robust thing in the world,” he said. “But it's much better than this kind of technology used to be.”