Another article

OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Agent can control an entire computer and do tasks for you

Kumar said that since ChatGPT Agent has access to “an entire computer” instead of just a browser, they’ve “enhanced the toolset quite a bit.”

---

Wired is pro this tool and has zero skepticism which I think is pretty funny.

I pictured myself in five years, potentially speed-scrubbing through replays of my AI agent’s actions more often than clicking around the internet myself. If the era of AI agents sticks around, which is far from guaranteed, the way we use the web will fundamentally change.

What could go wrong after you give AI your credit card number? Etc.

An agent, in this context, refers to an AI tool that is able to—or at least attempts to—navigate third-party software and websites and make decisions on its journey to complete digital tasks, following an initial set of instructions from the user. “Agent” is the buzziest of buzzwords right now for companies looking to sell generative AI tools, especially those with an eye on enterprise customers.

[...]

The rollout of the ChatGPT agent is coming first to Pro, Plus, and Team subscribers, starting today for Pro users. Enterprise and Education subs will likely receive access to the feature later in the summer. At launch, Pro users are generally capped at 400 agent prompts a month, with 40 prompts allowed for the other tiers of paying users. It’s unclear when this feature will roll out for free users of ChatGPT.

[...]

In a prelaunch demo for WIRED, Kumar used the ChatGPT agent to automate a range of tasks, from consumer uses like planning a date night, to enterprise-focused examples like parsing Excel sheets for a financial analyst and making a slide deck that unpacks Nvidia's Q1 earnings.

Whereas planning a night out with the ChatGPT agent—going through your calendar, finding a restaurant with availability—may take five minutes, generating an earnings-based slide deck is more research-intensive and may take around 25 minutes. “You can do as many things as you want in parallel,” Kumar says. According to him, an average task with the ChatGPT agent takes around 10 or 15 minutes.

From potentially knowing the types of cuisine my partner prefers, based on past chats, to building a slide deck with formatting that’s aligned with what I may usually request, many of these potential tasks could benefit from accessing ChatGPT’s memory feature. Even though OpenAI wants to integrate memory with the ChatGPT agent eventually, it won’t be part of the initial launch.

“It’s not that we don’t think it’s safe,” Kumar says. “We’re just taking an extra precaution.” He mentions the potential for prompt injection attacks as one example of why OpenAI wants to learn more before hooking up the ChatGPT agent to stored user memories.

Both of the OpenAI staff members emphasized that having the user still feel like they are in control, even as the agent automates tasks, is critical. “We have a list of websites where we think it's risky to go. These include things like social media or financial transactions,” Kumar says.

Building upon the “watch mode” rolled out with Operator earlier this year, the agent has a similar setting where software tasks deemed to involve a high level of personal risk require the user to watch the AI tool actively and not swipe away from the web page.