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Posted by AndrewDucker 10/25/2025

ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web(www.anildash.com)
803 points | 351 commentspage 4
r_singh 10/29/2025||
At this point, my adoption of AI tools is motivated by fear of missing out or being left behind. I’m a self-taught programmer running my own SaaS.

I have memory and training enabled. What I can objectively say about Atlas is that I’ve been using it and I’m hooked. It’s made me roughly twice as productive — I solved a particular problem in half the time because Atlas made it easy to discover relevant information and make it actionable. That said, affording so much control to a single company does make me uneasy.

r_singh 10/29/2025|
Not sure why this got downvoted, but to clarify what I meant:

With my repo connected via the GitHub app, I asked Atlas about a problem I was facing. After a few back-and-forth messages, it pointed me to a fork I might eventually have found myself — but only after a lot more time and trial-and-error. Maybe it was luck, but being able to attach files, link context from connected apps, and search across notes and docs in one place has cut a lot of friction for me.

oldestofsports 10/29/2025||
”why even all the Linux users reading this right now are doing so in a graphical user interface.”

I read this in my TUI RSS reader lol

Ethan312 10/29/2025||
Atlas feels more like a task tool than a browser. It’s fast, but we might lose the open web experience for convenience.
rich_sasha 10/29/2025||
The SV playbook is to create a product, make it indispensable and monopolise it. Microsoft did it with office software. Payment companies want to be monopolies. Social media are of course the ultimate monopolies - network effects mean there is only one winner.

So I guess the only logical next step for Big AI is to destroy the web, once they have squeezed every last bit out of it. Or at least make it dependent on them. Who needs news sites when OpenAI can do it? Why blog - just prompt your BlogLLM with an idea. Why comment on blogs - your agent will do it for you. All while avoid child porn with 97% accuracy - somerhing human curated content surely cannot be trusted to do.

So I am 0% surprised.

bazmattaz 10/29/2025|
I’m not sure. I think we’ll live through a few years of AI slop before human created content becomes very popular again.

I imagine a future where websites (like news outlets or blogs) will have something like a “100% human created” label on it. It will be a mark of pride for them to show off and they’ll attract users because of it

Levitating 10/29/2025||
I am still confused in what way this is "anti-web". Is it actually harming the current web, or just providing a bad interface to it?

> The amount of data they're gathering is unfathomable.

The author suggests that GPT continuously reads information like typed keystrokes etc, I don't see why that's implied. And it wouldn't be new either, with tools like Windows Replay.

soiltype 10/29/2025|
> I don't see why that's implied

Because "it wouldn't be new either, with tools like Windows Replay".

Genuinely, why would they leave any data on the table if they don't have to? That's the entire purpose of the browser.

Levitating 10/30/2025||
> Genuinely, why would they leave any data on the table if they don't have to? That's the entire purpose of the browser.

Because extracting and using that data may not be trivial, practically and legally speaking.

I am sure they use the chat input you send them for training. But to say that they transfer all the websites you visit to their servers, or that they can monitor your keyboard input either by continuously streaming your window or your keyboard events to their servers. All of that would be a small technical feat and noticeable in the created traffic.

My belief is that they simply hacked together an AI web-browser in the least amount of time with the least amount of effort, so that they can showcase another use for AI.

That would be a much simpler explanation than them building a personal surveillance tool that wants to know what you've typed and keeps track of the time you've spent looking for shoes.

jwpapi 10/29/2025||
I normally dont waste a lot of energy on politics.

But this feels truly dystopian. We here on HN are all in our bubble, we know that AI responses are very prone to error and just great in mimicking. We can differentiate when to use and when not (more or less), but when I talk to non-tech people in a normal city not close to a tech hub, most of them treat ChatGPT as the all-knowing factual instance.

They have no idea of the concious and unconcious bias on the responses, based on how we ask the questions.

Unfortunately I think these are the majority of the people.

If you combine all that with a shady Silicon Valley CEO under historical pressure to make OpenAI profitable after 64 billion in funding, regularly flirting with the US president, it seems always consequential to me that exactly what the author described is the goal. No matter the cost.

As we all feel like AI progress is stagnating and mainly the production cost to get AI responses is going down, this almost seems like the only out for OpenAI to win.

dangoodmanUT 10/29/2025||
I think the idea of "we're returning to the command line" is astute tbh, I've felt that subconciously and I think the author put it into words for me.

The article does taste a bit "conspiracy theory" for me though

chartered_stack 10/29/2025||
I think we're returning to CLIs mostly because typing remains one of the fastest ways we can communicate with our computers. The traditional limitation was that CLIs required users to know exactly what they wanted the computer to do. This meant learning all commands, flags etc.

GUIs emerged to make things easier for users to tell their computers what to do. You could just look at the screen and know that File > Save would save the file instead of remembering :w or :wq. They minimized friction and were polished to no end by companies like MSFT and AAPL.

Now that technology has got to a point where our computers now can bridge the gap between what we said and what we meant reasonably well, we can go back to CLIs. We keep the speed and expressiveness of typing but without the old rigidity. I honestly can't wait for the future where we evolve interfaces to things we previously only dreamt of before.

ewoodrich 10/29/2025||
It’s less rigid than a command line but much less predictable than either a CLI or a GUI, with the slightest variation in phrasing sometimes producing very different results even on the same model.

Particularly when you throw in agentic capabilities where it can feel like a roll of the dice if the LLM decides to use a special purpose tool or just wings it and spits out its probabilistic best guess.

chartered_stack 10/29/2025||
True the unpredictability sucks right now. We're in a transition stage where the models can understand intent but cannot constrain the output within some executable space reliably.

The bridge would come from layering natural languages interfaces on top of deterministic backends that actually do the tool calling. We already have models fine-tuned to generate JSON schemas. MCP is a good example of this kind of stuff. It discovers tools and how to use them.

Of course, the real bottle neck would be running a model capable of this locally. I can't run any of models actually capable of this on a typical machine. Till then, we're effectively digital serfs.

dangoodmanUT 10/29/2025|||
that being said, asking chatgpt to do research in 30 seconds for me that might require me to set aside an hour or two is causing me to make decisions about where to tinker and ideas to chase down much faster

can never go back

h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 10/30/2025||
That's great, you're already addicted. The perfect regular user.
pimlottc 10/29/2025||
It’s not so much a conspiracy theory as it is a perfect alignment of market forces. Which is to say, you don’t need a cackling evil mastermind to get conspiracy-like outcomes, just the proper set of deleterious incentives.
visarga 10/29/2025||
One deal breaker for me - TTS (select and speak) is broken. It does not read the selected text.
ValveFan6969 10/29/2025|
>I had typed "Taylor Swift" in a browser, and the response had literally zero links to Taylor Swift's actual website. If you stayed within what Atlas generated, you would have no way of knowing that Taylor Swift has a website at all.

Sounds like the browser did you a favor. Wonder if she'll be suing.

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