OpenAI releases new ‘Operator’ tool

Two years ago, OpenAI kicked off the chatbot craze with the release of ChatGPT. Now it hopes to generate interest in the new wave of AI technology.

On Thursday, OpenAI released a tool called Operator that can go online and perform autonomous tasks, such as shopping for groceries or making restaurant reservations.

“It can navigate the web and perform actions on the web, just like you and me,” Yash Kumar, OpenAI’s product lead and engineer, said in an interview.

Artificial intelligence researchers call this type of technology agent AI. While chatbots can answer questions, write poems and create images, workers can use other software on the Internet.

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Kumar demonstrated how the system can book restaurant reservations in San Francisco through the OpenTable website and buy grocery lists from Instacart. Agents look and behave similarly to ChatGPT and other chatbots. The user writes a request in a small window. Then the system responds as much as possible.

Users can see if the device opens a web browser and visits specific websites. Entrepreneurs can make mistakes. But in some cases, these mistakes can be corrected. During the protest to The Times, the system mistakenly believed that Mr. was in Iowa. Kumar, before he found a restaurant in San Francisco.

The operator is completely independent. Sometimes a user needs to correct errors and provide additional requests and suggestions. For sites like OpenTable and Instacart, users must provide their own username and password. But OpenAI says it doesn’t store that personal information.

However, the company collects data showing how the system interacts with the user and access the website on their behalf. It can use this data to train future versions of Operator.

OpenAI said that, starting Thursday, Operator will be available to anyone who subscribes to ChatGPT Pro, a $200-a-month service that provides access to the company’s latest tools. He plans to offer the tool through other paid services and eventually roll it out to a free version of ChatGPT.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement for new content related to AI systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied the claims.)

In recent months, other major companies, including Google and Anthropic, have released similar devices. However, many of these tools are not widely used yet.

The operator is based on the same technology that supports ChatGPT. This technology is what AI researchers call a neural network — a mathematical system that can learn skills by analyzing large amounts of data.

The new version of this technology learns from a large amount of data, including text, images and audio. In this case, the Operator learned from the images that show how people use tablets, shopping sites and other online services. After identifying patterns in this data, the new system can use similar services on behalf of computer users.

Mr. Kumar acknowledged that, like ChatGPT and other chatbots, Operator is still an experimental technology. But he said that it will improve in the coming months.

“This is not the most powerful thing in the world,” he said. “But it’s better than that kind of old technology.”