OpenAI’s next project is a browser to beat Google Chrome

The cycle of AI slop is a self-eating organism, and the next meal looks like it’s coming from OpenAI.

After Google embraced generative AI, calling for a new era of content where YouTubers make it part of their creative production pipeline, YouTube was flooded (and continues to be flooded) with generated slop. It became a new business, with gurus advertising courses on how fellow creators could (supposedly) make millions of AdSense dollars by churning out “faceless” content with ChatGPT-made scripts and voiceovers from apps like ElevenLabs and Speechify.

Now, YouTube seems to be trying for a rein-in with new Partner Program policies that will cut monetization to videos that are “mass-produced and repetitious” and prioritize “original, authentic” videos. (Note that YouTube still won’t remove AI-generated slop; it just won’t pay people to create it.)

But, thanks in part to Google/YouTube’s relentless promotion of AI as an essential component of the digital creative future, we are fully in the gen AI era. Creators are using and endorsing AI products.

And the AI companies building their fortunes off selling those products are coming for other areas of Google’s business.

OpenAI, as it turns out, isn’t content with just taking Google’s search traffic and challenging X. In the coming weeks, it’ll launch an AI web browser as competition for Google Chrome.

Per Reuters, OpenAI views the browser as a vehicle that’ll allow it to do two things:

• First, “fundamentally change how consumers browse the web”
• and second, access the vast trove of personal user data Google currently scrapes from people utilizing Search and Chrome

OpenAI also plans to make what Google’s done with Search a core part of this browser: In some cases, users who search or try to go to websites will be kept to a ChatGPT-esque interface instead of actually clicking through to the site. This will, of course, further contribute to the gutting of individual website traffic already kick-started by things like Google’s AI Search Overviews

As Reuters notes, if this project is successful in pulling over even a fraction of ChatGPT’s 500 million weekly active users, it could put a serious dent in Google’s traffic. Chrome is built to get data from users, and that data is an essential part of Google’s core business which contributes to 75% of the company’s annual revenue: advertising. (More on this in a second.)

People using OpenAI’s new browser will likely be directed away from using Google Search, and might be urged to give Sam Altman‘s company more data through tools like Operator, which OpenAI unveiled this past January.

Just like Google, OpenAI works on an ever-growing suite of products. With a proprietary browser, it could simply inject these products and make them a core part of the user experience, giving anything it develops an instant user base.

OK, now for the “more on this in a second” part: OpenAI’s development comes as Google is facing antitrust pressure over the role Chrome plays in its sprawling advertising biz. U.S. lawmakers are calling for divestment, and if that happens, OpenAI’s browser–which, btw, was made after OpenAI hired two former Google VPs who were part of Chrome’s OG development team–could become the web’s new frontrunner.

And, to be fair, this is all speculation. We don’t know how OpenAI’s browser will look or feel. It may not hit the right note for internet users. Or maybe it will.

Either way, we’ll find out soon.