Thoughts, Observations, and Links Regarding ChatGPT Atlas
While reading this article, I found myself returning to my writing on the platform shift of AI. More specifically, the question, what will the UI of AI be? I don't think we know yet. I am writing this in Dia which feels...close? Yet as Gruber points out:
While reading this article, I found myself returning to my writing on the platform shift of AI. More specifically, the question, what will the UI of AI be? I don't think we know yet. I am writing this in Dia which feels...close? Yet as Gruber points out:
After giving it a try over the last week, to me Atlas feels like … Chrome with a chat button bolted on.
Dia is the same. Atlas seems to be Dia + it can do things for you. Which I don't really want? I don't have much to do these days outside of sending emails to friends, which I prefer to do myself. Further, Similar to Gruber, I do not find myself using my web browser for all of the things (this is probably a minority view). That seems to be the requirement for a useful agentic experience. I'm much closer to using my phone for all of the things and I really wish Apple would get their shit together there so I could have Siri do things like schedule meetings.
Browser Are Probably Not the UI for AI
There are a couple of real problems here that I'm still iffy about as well. First, "computer use" mode is God awful. I resonate with Simon Williams thoughts here:
I tried out agent mode and it was like watching a first-time computer user painstakingly learn to use a mouse for the first time. I have yet to find my own use-cases for when this kind of interaction feels useful to me, though I’m not ruling that out.
I would say that this is going to get better, but I'm not sure web 2.0 companies want that to be the case. Amazon is suing Perplexity for evening try to buy anything on behalf of their clients and that feels like a trend that will continue. Benedict Evans put it well in his weekly column:
Amazon sent a cease and desist to Perplexity, telling it not to configure its ‘Comet’ browser to make automated purchases on the Amazon website. Amazon sold $65bn of ads in the last 12 months, much of it on its core e-commerce site (there’s Prime TV as well), and it does upsells and recommendations, and it doesn’t want someone else to control or disintermediate that experience. This is a systemic issue with consumer agents using the web ‘for you’, which I pointed out last year when people first suggested this model: companies want to own and control their own user experience.
So we are in a weird place with these "agentic" browsers and agentic AI in general. They are slow and not good at things (yet). But they may not be allowed to get better at things because it threatens powerful incumbents. In Personal AI in the Rugpull Economy, Don Marti explains why this is not the most promising path for agentic AI UI:
Doc Searls writes, in Personal Agentic AI,
Wouldn’t it be good for corporate AI agents to have customer hands to shake that are also equipped with agentic AI? Wouldn’t those customers be better than ones whose agency is merely human, and limited to only what corporate AI agents allow?
The obvious answer for business decision-makers today is: lol, no, a locked-in customer is worth more. If, as a person who likes to watch TV, you had an AI agent, then the agent could keep track of sports seasons and the availability of movies and TV shows, and turn your streaming subscriptions on and off. In the streaming business, like many others, the management consensus is to make things as hard and manual as possible on the customer side, and save the automation for the company side.
So it is unclear how well AI agents can get, even if the technology improves. It will require partnerships between entities that are fundamentally at odds, which seems...unlikely?
The scarier issue here is privacy. You can see this live in real time as I try out Dia. It is living in the uncanny valley where it knows both too much and too little about me... Very weird feelings. To be honest, the example in my video (it knowing what car I drive) is not that big of a deal. The real problem is:
- it is not hard to steal knowledge about me from the AI model
- it is not hard to get the model to take actions that aren't good for me
Simon Williams sums it up well:
The security and privacy risks involved here still feel insurmountably high to me — I certainly won’t be trusting any of these products until a bunch of security researchers have given them a very thorough beating. [...]
It was 5-10 years before people trusted payments on the web. I don't yet see an equivalent to the protections we have in web 2.0 for agentic AI. And I'm not sure what the UI for this would look like. I am not sure I trust an AI to go buy all my groceries for me, nor do I want to be consulted every time it wants to buy something for me. Where is the line there? I have no clue.
So there are 2 clear things that need to be addressed:
- the automation war between existing platforms and agents
- the privacy issue
One of the things we are missing in the hype is that many existing UIs are already very good. DoorDash is incredible. Google is an amazing way to find a quick answer (though it's gotten worse). We've got some great UIs out there for many important tasks. The hardest work in AI might be finding new ones. They've got their work cut out for them.
One area that has not seen much impact is in tasks that already have specialized apps. I'll focus on two examples with abundant MCP implementations: email and food ordering. AI Doordash agents and AI movie producers face the same challenge: the bar for a new product to make an impact is already very high:
https://elroy.bot/blog/2025/07/29/ai-is-a-floor-raiser-not-a-ceiling-raiser.html#creative-works-not-coming-to-a-theater-near-you