New Battle in AI field
Hi there!After weeks of buzz, OpenAI has released Operator, its first AI agent. Operator is a web app that can carry out simple online tasks in a browser, such as booking concert tickets or filling an online grocery order. The app is powered by a new model called Computer-Using Agent—CUA (“coo-ah”), for short—built on top of OpenAI’s multimodal large language model GPT-4o.Operator is available today atoperator.chatgpt.comto people in the US signed up with ChatGPT Pro, OpenAI’s premium $200-a-month service. The company says it plans to roll the tool out to other users in the future.OpenAI claims that Operator outperforms similar rival tools, including Anthropic’s Computer Use (a version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet that can carry out simple tasks on a computer) and Google DeepMind’s Mariner (a web-browsing agent built on top of Gemini 2.0).The fact that three of the world’s top AI firms have converged on the same vision of what agent-based models could be makes one thing clear. The battle for AI supremacy has a new frontier—and it’s our computer screens.“Moving from generating text and images to doing things is the right direction,” says Ali Farhadi, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). “It unlocks business, solves new problems.”OpenAI has tested CUA against a number of industry benchmarks designed to assess the ability of an agent to carry out tasks on a computer. The company claims that its model beats Computer Use and Mariner in all of them.For example, on OSWorld, which tests how well an agent performs tasks such as merging PDF files or manipulating an image, CUA scores 38.1% to Computer Use’s 22.0% In comparison, humans score 72.4%. On a benchmark called WebVoyager, which tests how well an agent performs tasks in a browser, CUA scores 87%, Mariner 83.5%, and Computer Use 56%. (Mariner can only carry out tasks in a browser and therefore does not score on OSWorld.)For now, Operator can also only carry out tasks in a browser. OpenAI plans to make CUA’s wider abilities available in the future via an API that other developers can use to build their own apps. This is how Anthropic released Computer Use in December.OpenAI says it has tested CUA’s safety, usingred teamsto explore what happens when users ask it to do unacceptable tasks (such as research how to make a bioweapon), when websites contain hidden instructions designed to derail it, and when the model itself breaks down. “We’ve trained the model to stop and ask the user for information before doing anything with external side effects,” says Casey Chu, another researcher on the team.Look! No handsTo use Operator, you simply type instructions into a text box. But instead of calling up the browser on your computer, Operator sends your instructions to a remote browser running on an OpenAI server. OpenAI claims that this makes the system more efficient. It’s another key difference between Operator, Computer Use and Mariner (which runs inside Google’s Chrome browser on your own computer).Because it’s running in the cloud, Operator can carry out multiple tasks at once, says Kumar. In the live demo, he asked Operator to use OpenTable to book him a table for two at 6.30 p.m. at a restaurant called Octavia in San Francisco. Straight away, Operator opened up OpenTable and started clicking through options. “As you can see, my hands are off the keyboard,” he said.OpenAI is collaborating with a number of businesses, including OpenTable, StubHub, Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber. The nature of those collaborations is not exactly clear, but Operator appears to suggest preset websites to use for certain tasks.While the tool navigated dropdowns on OpenTable, Kumar sent Operator off to find four tickets for a Kendrick Lamar show on StubHub. While it did that, he pasted a photo of a handwritten shopping list and asked Operator to add the items to his Instacart.He waited, flicking between Operator’s tabs. “If it needs help or if it needs confirmations, it’ll come back to you with questions and you can answer it,” he said.Kumar says he has been using Operator at home. It helps him stay on top of grocery shopping: “I can just quickly click a photo of a list and send it to work,” he says.It’s also become a sidekick in his personal life. “I have a date night every Thursday,” says Kumar. So every Thursday morning, he instructs Operator to send him a list of five restaurants that have a table for two that evening. “Of course, I could do that, but it takes me 10 minutes,” he says. “And I often forget to do it. With Operator, I can run the task with one click. There’s no burden of booking.”