Darin Fisher is a little older than the fresh-faced, newly minted PhD types you see roaming the well-appointed floors at OpenAI’s second location in San Francisco’s Mission Bay district.
Before arriving at the AI super-startup, he spent 25 years working on some of the most important web browsers in the history of the web: He worked on Netscape Navigator, which helped define the early consumer internet. He worked on the popular Firefox browser at Mozilla, then went to Google, where he was a member of the Chrome team. After Google, he wanted to explore alternative browsers; he did so first at Neeva (which offered an ad-free experience), then at the Browser Company, which built the influential Arc browser. “The opportunity to come to OpenAI and infuse the AI model into all of this and to think about how that can really transform the experience was all kinds of super interesting to me,” Fisher says.
In OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Atlas browser, all tasks start with a prompt to the AI models working in the background. As the user accesses the web, the chatbot, which rides along at the right of the screen, can see the content of each webpage, answer questions about it, or take actions on it. An agent mode allows the AI to perform complex, multi-step tasks like filling out forms or shopping on the user’s behalf.
We asked Fisher about the choices, trade-offs, and innovations that went into designing OpenAI’s AI-first browser. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the core philosophy behind Atlas?
