OpenAI’s ChatGPT ‘agent’ is ready to assist you

Looking for a wedding dress? Let AI order it for you.

That’s the promise of OpenAI’s new “agent,” which the company debuted in a livestream Thursday.

“Agent represents a new level of capability for AI systems and can accomplish some remarkable, complex tasks for you using its own computer,” OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman said in an X post.

The announcement adds OpenAI to a growing list of tech companies seeking to move AI beyond text and image generation and into the realm of personal digital assistants. Other companies are pushing AI into web browsers with the promise of helping people complete tasks like making a restaurant reservation.

In a livestream broadcast on its website, OpenAI executives gave a demonstration showing how its “ChatGPT agent” software could perform specific tasks, like ordering a dress that would be appropriate for a warm-weather destination wedding. It was also able to design laptop stickers featuring their team mascot and create a slide deck of ChatGPT agent’s performance, pulling data from Google Drive.

The debut comes as tech companies invest heavily in AI talent and infrastructure, with almost every major player having already made sizable investments. Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook parent Meta, announced his company would spend “hundreds of billions of dollars” on artificial intelligence compute infrastructure. Meta also poached a senior Apple engineer with a pay package reportedly valued at some $200 million.

OpenAI was most recently valued at $300 billion, making it one of the most valuable privately held startups in the world.

The presentation revealed ChatGPT agent to be not entirely free from making errors. Altman cautioned in his X post that he would “explain this to my own family as cutting edge and experimental; a chance to try the future, but not something I’d yet use for high-stakes uses or with a lot of personal information until we have a chance to study and improve it in the wild.”

The technology prompts users for when logins or permissions are needed while giving human users the ability to intervene or take over at any point. For now, its access is limited to ChatGPT Pro, Plus, and Team users.

In a followup X post, Altman indicated he believes that despite its current limits, the product represents a breakthrough.

“Watching chatgpt agent use a computer to do complex tasks has been a real ‘feel the agi’ moment for me; something about seeing the computer think, plan, and execute hits different,” he wrote, using the acronym for Artificial General Intelligence, seen as the holy grail of AI development.

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