Short answer: Jordan Metzner says Atlas feels lighter and faster than Chrome, sends searches it can't match to a domain into a ChatGPT conversation instead of Google results, integrates shopping and adds a ChatGPT side panel for page summaries.
Watch this answer from Episode 18 (starts at 20:02) · Episode 18 notes and transcript
From Episode 18: TrickOrTreat!, starting at 20:02.
Sam Nadler [20:02]: The next news that we're gonna cover today is OpenAI launched Atlas yesterday. I downloaded today, poked around a little bit. Haven't really had too much time using the Atlas browser. I think what's more interesting is kind of the overarching strategy. I think Google took a couple percent hit yesterday just on the news alone. I know you've downloaded it and started using it. But, really, it makes sense that OpenAI is going to have its own web browser, but does it you know, how significantly does it threaten Google's business? And, yeah, what's your take? And how much time have you had using it? I've only used it for about twenty minutes, so I don't have too much of a usability opinion yet.
Jordan Metzner [20:52]: Five to seven years of experience. Yeah. I downloaded it yesterday. After it came out, there was kinda like a pop up in ChatGPT to download it, so I downloaded it. I've used it a little bit kind of side by side with Chrome. I have used only a few of the AI features. I think there's a few kind of key points that make the browser interesting and competitive. The first thing is that it's very fast, And, Chrome has historically taken up a lot of resources. It is the best browser on the market. You kind of everybody uses Chrome. However, it's incredibly heavy and taking up, like, system resources. So one thing I'd first noticed is that it's very lightweight, is in it feels very fast to run. So that that was like kind of a cool thing. The next is, know, when you're searching or you type in kind of a search or a website or something like that, you're immediately brought into like a ChatGPT conversation. And obviously, that's like kind of the first major threat to kinda Google because like, rather than like searching on Google to find a website and then linking to that website, you're brought into like a ChatGPT conversation if they can't figure out the domain you're typing in.
Jordan Metzner [22:01]: So, if you type in something like Gmail and hit enter, you're gonna go to gmail.com directly. But if you type in something like, built this week podcast, you're actually instead of getting like a Google search result, you're getting a ChatGPT search result, which, as we mentioned, is obviously a, pretty big threat to Google. And, as we mentioned in previous episode, I think it was last week we talked about shopping, you can start to see how shopping starts to get into this. Right? So, you're on your new browser, you're searching for iPhone cases. Right? They have shopping integrated. You check out, and you never even leave, like, the chat experience. And then the last piece is just the integration of ChatGPT as like a side panel, and you can kinda see it here in the video as it runs through. It does a good job of doing like page summaries. It looks here like they showed, what's the best thing here on the page. Also, it looks like they show some examples of it doing some analysis of the page. I found it to be like pretty like rudimentary right now, but you know, I do believe it'll just get better and better with like future versions to the point that almost like you never really touch the page, you just talk to the bot and say like, okay, I need this, and this, like, just go check it out, and like, maybe even use your voice to do it. And the bot says like, okay, like, I'll do that and let you know when I'm done. But, yeah, it's definitely an exciting day.
Jordan Metzner [23:23]: And, I do wanna talk about Atlas before we talk about the final story, but I do think they're tied hand in hand. And I think that, OpenAI's decision to launch Atlas, yesterday was purposeful, especially for the impact of Google's announcement as well. So, yeah, curious, any other last comments on Atlas, I guess, before we move on?
