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Marketing Against The Grain
OpenAI Just Launched a Web Browser (and It’s Smarter Than Chrome)
00:20:52
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- [00:01]
A
Hey, everyone. I'm here today to talk to you about ChatGPT Atlas, the brand new web browser from OpenAI. And did it just kill Google Chrome, the biggest, most popular web browser on the planet? We're going to break that down. We're going to tell you how it actually works, what it's really good at, and then what it's actually really bad at, and we'll tell you. Have we actually switched our default browser over from Google Chrome to Atlas? Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book with most of the pages torn out or paying for a coffee. That's 1/5 full. Point is you miss a lot unless you use HubSpot. Their customer platform gives you access to the data you need to grow your business. The insights trapped inside emails, call logs and transcripts, all that unstructured data that makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. Visit HubSpot.com today. All right, Kieran, we have some news that OpenAI, they're on a tear. They keep releasing products and they're going head to head with Google and Perplexity by launching their own web browser and they've released ChatGPT Atlas. First of all, don't love Atlas as a name, but I also don't hate it. I think it's supposed to be intentionally ambiguous, but like, you know, it's fine, it's fine. But basically the big deal is that one, you have a web browser with ChatGPT native to it. This product, ChatGPT Atlas, is available for all Chat GPT users, including free.
- [01:49]
B
Wow, Huge.
- [01:51]
A
So anybody who's a Chat GPT user can use this product. And so you say, hey, what can it actually do? The biggest thing it can do is it has agent mode and that's where it can take over your screen and do a task for you. So you can put it into agent mode. You can have it do deep research, you can have it plan a weekend, outline a short story on a canvas. Here are some of the basic prompts it is giving you. This is literally Atlas after I just did basic signup. So you could import any passwords or bookmarks you have in Chrome or Safari and you can get those right into Atlas. And then all you do is sign in with ChatGPT. And that's where I'm at right here. And so this is what it looks like. Every new tab is a default ChatGPT window to go and add stuff in. Now, Kieran, I had to do a couple things before the show, do you want me to give you the rundown of some of the basics tasks I had to do?
- [02:51]
B
Yeah. Okay, let's take a look at it. I think for our listeners, this is really an extension of their operator product that they used to have. Well, they still do had within ChatGPT itself, where you have an autonomous agent kind of do things. It didn't really gain any popularity because it was not very consistent or reliable. But this is like a version of that that really is a true agentic browser.
- [03:12]
A
And the interesting thing about this browser, Kieran, that I saw online is that it's built on Chromium, the infrastructure for Google Chrome. So all the extensions for this browser are built on like the Chrome extension infrastructure.
- [03:24]
B
Yeah, I saw a really good tweet. It was hilarious. Like, the ChatGPT Atlas launched and Google stock tanked. And then people realized it was just Chrome with ChatGPT and went straight back up to where it was prior to the launch.
- [03:35]
A
Well, it went straight back up because of a rumored Google anthropic deal.
- [03:38]
B
But yeah, okay, I did not see that.
- [03:40]
A
But that's a whole nother different show. But the thing here is that if you're used to using Chrome, it's like Chrome with native Chat GPT.
- [03:47]
B
Nice. Okay.
- [03:48]
A
And it is to me more bare bones and more basic than Perplexity's Comet browser. Okay.
- [03:55]
B
Which you are a huge fan of.
- [03:56]
A
Which I'm a huge fan of. Use every day. I believe you use Comet pretty regularly as well, right?
- [04:01]
B
Yep. Done a good job.
- [04:02]
A
Okay, so I came out, I wanted to test Agent mode because this is so bare bones. The two reasons you would want to use the Chat GPT Atlas project is for Agent mode. And because it is the first to bring memory to the browser. So all of the memory and context of the conversations you've had in Chat GPT now come into your browser experience. Those are the two big upsides. Okay.
- [04:28]
B
Okay, so I did not catch that. So memory from your actual ChatGPT account gets ported into the browser. And OpenAI are also trying to convince sites to log in.
- [04:40]
A
Yes.
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B
With ChatGPT. So this is pretty interesting. Which means you have portable memory on the web.
- [04:46]
A
Correct. And what's interesting about it, Karen, is the first thing you do is you sign with ChatGPT. Then you import any passwords or bookmarks from Google Chrome or Safari. The third thing you do, you get a dialog in setup to turn on memory.
- [05:01]
B
Wow.
- [05:01]
A
So it's not just like, oh, there's memory, and you can go into Settings and configure it. It's like they want everybody to turn on memory.
- [05:07]
B
Right?
- [05:08]
A
Right. And this is a big part of the value prop.
- [05:10]
B
Can you maybe give the listeners why you think bringing your memory with you online is valuable?
- [05:15]
A
Yeah. So let me give you an example. I did the Zillow query. I'm going to talk to you about it in a second. But anytime you're asking an agent to do something in the web browser, if it has context of what you care about, where you live, who your family is, like, let's say you have the agent plan a trip for your family and it already knows that, hey, I'm married to Kimberly. I have Mari and Beau, and we really like, you know, beach vacations. Then we're way ahead of me having to write long in depth instructions. I can just ask it to plan a vacation for a certain date and it's going to give me options for our family and to destinations that it knows we like. Right?
- [05:57]
B
Exactly. Memory is huge. Like, it personalizes the web for you in a way that was never possible with just kind of like History of Ryzen, which is kind of how it was done in the past. Yes, it really personalizes. I want to see some other use cases, but actually brings into conversation. Do you have to rethink websites and apps for the age of memory?
- [06:19]
A
I think that is something that we really have to consider. So, like, for example, I want to show it in motion. So let's say search Zillow for single family homes under $200,000 in Vermont, which is going to be like hardly anything, right?
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B
In Vermont, under $200,000.
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A
Yeah, but it's like a whole state.
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B
It's going to give you a shed.
- [06:35]
A
What's interesting is I could use your browser to search Zillow and then it's going to go and use the browser to do that. So you can do that from chat GPT, just like I did. Or you can browse to Zillow, which is what I did. I went to Zillow.com and Kieran. All I did was go to Zillow. I didn't log in or anything. And I said search and browse Zillow for any land under $20,000. That would be good investment to turn into campsites to rent. So like basic land, I want to turn them into campsites and rent them out for like 40, $40 a night kind of deal.
- [07:09]
B
Okay.
- [07:10]
A
And it worked for four minutes and it explored rural land and it found a bunch of interesting listings. Like I actually might buy 12 acres of land for $5,000 seems like a pretty high return to my home state of West Virginia. Like probably payback on that's probably a year to 18 months, but with very little context. It gave me real results and it pulled some of them up in Zillow. What I don't know is can I say, show me this one and let's see if it will take over and. Oh, so it's going to take over my browser. The one thing I've noticed, and this is like sub 24 hours of using Atlas. Right. Is that Kieran. I do think that the browser agent in Atlas does seem to be more reliable than operator and smarter than the browser agent in perplexity. Comment.
- [08:02]
B
Oh, wow. Okay, so it's consistently doing the task and more accurate in terms of completing the task.
- [08:07]
A
Yes. So what I just walked you through with that property example. I literally typed in that sentence and walked away. I did nothing. And look, see, it's finding that exact land from the listing that it gave me. Right. And I did nothing. I just said, hey, can you show this to me and it's able to navigate Zillow and pull this up for me right now? It's not wicked fast. Like you could argue maybe I could have found it just as fast or faster myself. But if you're doing a lot of things at once and you want to do stuff like this in the background, like, it's pretty compelling.
- [08:40]
B
Yeah, I think there's kind of two really interesting things here. There is going to have to be the when chat is a good UX experience versus when just clicking it yourself is a good U experience. Like I don't think everything gets instrumented into a chat ux. But to your point where I think this is valuable is when you can just have 10 tabs open and have the browser agent go do things for you. But the other big thing is it turns everything into context. So in the old way you would have pulled up that property and then you might want to go and do some analysis on like a model to say, hey, if I, if I buy this, when can I get my money back? And I have to go like paste that data somewhere, put it into spreadsheets, all of these things. But now it's just context in a window. So you can just say to the AI, okay, like, take this and I build like a ROI model of how I can extract money from my investment. And so it turns the web into like context for your agent. I think that is a valuable new way that we can use the Internet I completely agree.
- [09:41]
A
We just dropped 10 powerful prompts that you can use with Atlas. Right now. You can run deep dives on competitive intelligence, conduct gap analyses, auditing your messaging and more. These prompts are your complete toolkit for marketing research with atlas. Get it right now. Scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now let's get back to the show. So you can do a lot of things. One of the things I love to do with browser based agents is turn them into a website auditor. And so one of the things, Kieran, I think you and I should do for probably next week or the week after is, is we should do a synthetic audience and detailed website audit prompt and use that in Atlas and give everybody basically a professional website auditor for free.
- [10:26]
B
So actually, it's funny you said the thing that I immediately went to as well when you brought this page, which is what you're describing for our listeners, is there is a way now that you can create a quote unquote AI version of your customer. So you basically train the AI to react to things in the way that your customer would and you give the AI some internal information and some external information about your customer. And what you're saying is I can basically come in and have the browser agent act like my customer.
- [10:55]
A
Yes.
- [10:56]
B
Go through our website and provide a bunch of feedback which is like a user review. And that is actually a great, great use case because now you can have a bunch of these agents reviewing things for you and providing you feedback like your customer. And we can do that tutorial for you in an upcoming episode.
- [11:13]
A
Yeah, if you want that, leave a comment. Like the video on YouTube. If we get a bunch of interest, we will do that. Because I do think it's a really good use case because even without that, Kieran, it's able to do a very good audit. And I just had it be like, hey, I'm Kip Bodner, I'm CMO of HubSpot. Like, help me do a draft of an audit for my team. It's pretty good. Value prop, conversion, rate optimization, technical speed and performance.
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B
It's pretty great. It's like a website grader.
- [11:39]
A
Yeah, it's like a full website audit, but much faster content and SEO strategy, social proof. It's pretty good. And that's with like a very bare bones, like nothing prompt. You have it act like your customer and you give it real instructions of what you want. It will be very good.
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B
Right.
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A
The other thing, Kieran, I had to go to ramp.com and just be like, hey, our Friends over at Ramp, they use a bunch of cool marketing tech. Like, what's all the marketing technology they use? And it broke down all of the different infrastructure they use to do their marketing, which is really cool.
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B
That is really cool.
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A
Like, that's dope.
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B
That's great for people trying to do outreach and vendors trying to figure out, like, are you using a competitor?
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A
Yeah. But even if you're like, hey, I really like what that company's doing, if you have this and you have a summary of their strategy, you can really reverse engineer it really well.
- [12:26]
B
Right. When you think about your use so far of Atlas, do you think it's a replacement for your current price or like a new thing? Right. You're not going to change using Chrome day to day for Atlas. You'll just use Atlas for specific AI agentic use cases.
- [12:43]
A
So this is what I would tell everybody watching the show today. I believe that we are in the AI Sprawl era in that all these AI companies are doing lots of things and they're doing them kind of good. None of them are like super deep. Like, oh, my gosh, this is the best way ever to do this thing. It's like, oh, this is a better way. And so what that means is you have to be a more advanced user and know which specific use cases different products are better at. Right. And so for me, who's a more advanced user, I will use Atlas anytime I want to do something agentic to take over my browser, because I do think it's better than Comet. Wow. For that purpose, it's pretty huge. What it's not as good at is it doesn't have some of the other features that I have in Comet. Comet has shortcuts that I like a lot. I think the Perplexity Pro Max Assistant is just as good as the assistant in the browser that I've seen. Here come. It also has a voice mode and a summarization mode, which is really valuable. So this is definitely much lighter weight than Comet. What's interesting is Google Chrome's still my default browser, same as me. And part of that is compatibility. Like, we're recording this on Riverside. Riverside only works on Google Chrome. Like, there are some things that only work on Google Chrome and these new browsers, it's going to be a while before they really take over. But what I will tell you, and if you're watching the show, you've got some cool marketing hacks that we've kind of alluded to, and we're going to show you in more in depth in future episodes. But if you have like documents you want taken over, forms you want filled, research you want done, Atlas is going to be a very interesting tool for that, especially if you're already on ChatGPT and you already have some context and memory inside of ChatGPT. I don't know, Kieran, if I was not a ChatGPT user just coming into this cold, if I would use Atlas.
- [14:33]
B
Yeah, I think my main takeaway is this is the portability of memory. And I think that is a different way that we're going to use the web. And it makes ChatGPT stickier because if they build products that get better because of memory, then you're going to continually want to use that AI assistant. So their browser is a great extension of ChatGPT, but it's way more valuable than any other browser because it has memory. You're going to be able to log into apps, those apps are going to be able to personalize that experience for you because it will have memory and so you'll be able to bring your memory with you. I still think Google are releasing agentic features into Chrome and they have the distribution. I think it's very, very, very, very hard for someone to be that.
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A
Chrome.
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B
Chrome, yes. But to your point, it's a good add on if I want to bring ChatGPT with me plus memory to the web.
- [15:25]
A
So I think what's interesting and what I would conclude, we've got a lot of awesome founders and marketers and leaders watching the show. What's interesting, right, Kieran, is Google has Chrome and its distribution as well as Google Apps. And if you're on Google Apps and you're already on Chrome, like is that better than like having just memory and chat GPT? And in many ways it is. Then you have ChatGPT, which is kind of the primary adoption, like assistant copilot use case and it has memory and now it has Atlas. Then you have Perplexity, which uses a bunch of different AI models in its assistant versus just a small set like OpenAI. And it's got its own browser that's more advanced, but doesn't have the distribution, but does have deep integration to your Google products and everything else. It's going to be very interesting to see which of those in the long term wins out. History would tell us that Google has the biggest opportunity and if they do not win out, it's because they will have not innovated fast enough to what the market needs and wants. Right?
- [16:27]
B
Yeah. Google's to lose when you have distribution and you're already entrenched into user habits. It really is yours to lose. And I think they are releasing a really good product and so I have a lot of faith that their agents integrated into Chrome are going to be very, very good. Yeah, I think that's a good synopsis.
- [16:44]
A
Right.
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B
Each of these have their different use cases, but for the average user, you're going to see a lot of YouTube videos that are telling you this is the death of everything.
- [16:51]
A
Those people are lying to you.
- [16:52]
B
They've launched a browser. All browsers are dead. I would say this is cool, it's interesting. It is 100% not a Chrome killer.
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A
What it is right now, it is a great way to have AI use your web browser for you. That's what Atlas is.
- [17:07]
B
It's an extension of Operator.
- [17:08]
A
Atlas is currently best at that. And so yes, they used to have this product called Operator. It's basically a new version of that that actually works and is much faster and much smarter. And if you have dumb repeatable tasks that you need to do in a web browser, I would use Atlas. That's what I'm telling you. Or if you have these special hacks that you want to do and we're going to do follow up shows with either Atlas or Perplexity Comment where we use more of these AI browsers to do cool marketing and sales and growth hacks, I still don't think that that means it should be your primary browser yet.
- [17:43]
B
Yeah, use, have fun. Don't replace your Chrome.
- [17:47]
A
I mean, I think that's our take. I would definitely experiment with it and find some of the use cases in your day to day work that you want to outsource to a browser agent to do that. And I do think that the Atlas browser agent is going to be better because of all the memory and context it has about you. The tricky thing is OpenAI hasn't blended work and personal chatgpt account memory at all. So like they're still very separate. It's going to be clunky for a while. Yeah, you know, AI is awesome, but it's going to take a while to really work the way that we ideally want it to work. But go try Atlas. It's available to anybody, it's for free. Try that website audit hack. That's really cool. We'll come back with a more detailed version of that, but we'd love to hear drop us comments of what your take of Atlas is and we'll see you real soon. On marking against the grain. I want to tell you about a podcast I love called Creators are Brands. Hosted by Tom Boyd. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Creators are Brands Explore how storytellers are building brands online. From the mindsets to the tactics to the business side. They break down what's working so you can apply that to your own mission. They just did a great episode called why your perfect content isn't Working. Do this instead with Courtney Johnson. It's a great show. Listen to Creators Are Brands wherever you get your podcast.