THIS WEEK: A CHROMIUM FORK IN A GPT WRAPPER

🌟 Editor's Note

Thanks for reading H4CKER, where I share my hot takes on cool new technology, marketing strategies, and how to make the money printer go BRRRRRR. Share your feedback and thoughts with me at [email protected] or on X at @nathanabinford.

🌎 Atlas Dropped, And The Internet Shrugged

A few days ago OpenAI released their new agentic browser Atlas in an announcement that felt rushed, and for some reason, forced. This, along with some notable bumps and hiccups in the first 24 hours, caused the AI hype community to draw negative conclusions very quickly.

I didn’t even download it for 24 hours. I typically find new releases to be immediately buggy and a waiting a day or two delay can give the developer a chance to fix the low-hanging fruit before I have to suffer.

But while I was waiting my typical new tech cooling off period, the internet was losing its collective shit —especially on X, where the hottest of hot takes get their 15 seconds of fame.

The complaints were valid but not terribly insightful. It’s as if everyone forgot (again) that big tech companies just beta test things publicly now and this is “the worst this product is ever going to be.”

OpenAI is especially notorious for releasing a crappy version first as a bellwether for estimating the potential (eventual) public response to a product.

So it’s unlikely to be perfect, or even a complete representation of the eventual product; but what can we glean from this new OpenAI release about what it means for the agentic web and OpenAI’s future direction?

🪦 The World Wide Web Is A Dead Mall

Been in a mall recently? Was it for shopping? Was it a good experience?

There’s something uncanny about a trip to the mall these days. They’re empty, deserted, and genuinely pointless (low stock, no people). It’s like the mall now serves some other purpose incomprehensible to the average shopper.

Like it’s not for you anymore…

This is where the World Wide Web, or “open web”, is headed. The idea of visiting a website to discover something, learn something, or buy something will feel increasingly outmoded and awkward in the near future.

The web is for bots. Our interface to the web will be through them.

Voice bots. Chat bots. AI “agents” that browse, summarize, and interact with content on our behalf and translate what we want into whatever steps and actions are required to produce our desired end result.

Perplexity AI’s Comet was the first agentic browser to be released to the general public, that works as an assistant for handling basic browser-based tasks.

It has much of the same basic capabilities and tooling that OpenAI’s Atlas browser also has. The difference is that OpenAI has memory features that “remember” your interactions, and other integrations into the OpenAI ecosystem. And, we can assume, more of those types of integrations will be coming soon.

Perplexity has 22M weekly active users that could adopt Comet.

OpenAI has (reportedly) 800M weekly active users that might use Atlas.

And, the as-of-yet-unseen heavyweight in this competition will, naturally, be Chrome; leveraging Gemini for agentic browsing (surely this is coming soon).

When bots consume the web, web developers and marketers will have to start catering to them, and this implies some pretty radical changes are on the way.

🤔 If The Web Is Different, Then Browsing Is Different Too

The biggest complaint about Atlas has been that it’s not a replacement for Chrome.

Well, should it be?

What if the experience of loading static text and media and clunky embeds to interact with the web has peaked as a modus operandi?

What if what’s coming next will be run on mostly snippets of JSON flying around at the speed of light being rendered into a scripted application framework like React?

Would the web even benefit from another visual surface?

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
-Henry Ford

So apparently Henry didn’t actually say that, but the vibes are really what matters here.

The point is that people who expect one thing and get another are quick to condemn the experience for precisely what’s going to be the best thing about it, eventually.

We didn’t get the browser we wanted, they gave us the browsing assistant that we didn’t know we needed.

Atlas isn’t going to replace Chrome as long as traditional web browsing is necessary. But, agentic browsing (browsing via an assistant) will rapidly start eroding the dominance of the (purely) visual web.

And OpenAI (and Google) are just fundamentally better positioned for this than the upstart Perplexity. It’s their ballgame to lose.

If you’re still trying to wrap your head around current use cases for agentic browsing, check out this week’s video in The Laboratory (below).

⚙️ The Laboratory: Prompts & Automations

Last week OpenAI rolled out a new web browser called Atlas, and in this week’s Laboratory, I explore potential use cases for its agentic features.

The browser is imperfect. It’s even a little buggy still. But even so there are some real reasons to get excited about this new browser and what it means for the agentic web.

But, for the moment, it’s still very experimental and will mostly be appreciated by the super nerds. Still, if this is you, there’s real opportunity in practicing with these early agentic releases, so the habits are well-formed when the tech improves and you have an advantage over everyone who’s still adjusting.

Here’s what I show in the video:

✅ How Atlas Handles Multi-Tab Tasks: See how searches move from a chat interface to a web interface, to multiple tabs operating at once.

✅  How To Scrape Data From Web Pages: Watch as I use Atlas to gather data marketing tasks quickly and semi-autonomously.

✅ The Best Use Case For Agentic Browsing Right Now: How to use Atlas (or Perplexity Comet) most effectively given the technical limits they’re still facing.

Nathan Binford
AI & Marketing Strategist

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. Please, tell me what you like and what you don’t, and how to make this newsletter more valuable to you.

And if you need help with AI, marketing, or automation, grab time on my calendar for a quick chat and I’ll do my best to help!

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