Latest news with #ComputerUse
Indian Express
4 days ago
- Business
- Indian Express
OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be a personalised super assistant by mid-2025, reveals leaked internal document
OpenAI seems to be having some grand visions for ChatGPT essentially making it an everyday essential for users. This is all part of a larger strategy that has been detailed in a recently leaked internal document. The document, which is a confidential roadmap related to the antitrust case between Google and the US Department of Justice in 2025, suggests that the AI startup aims to build ChatGPT as an 'intuitive AI super assistant' that can manage tasks and take actions on behalf of the user. In simple words, OpenAI plans to make ChatGPT an ubiquitous super assistant that can move seamlessly between channels, acting as a personalised gateway to the internet. The leaked document envisions ChatGPT, powered by the o3 model, becoming a full-spectrum operator, meaning it manages calendars, does travel booking, navigates software, and even contacts professionals on the user's behalf. The Sam Altman-led AI startup has reportedly described its plan as an intelligent entity with T-shaped skills. 'It's an entity because it's personalised to you and available anywhere you go – including our native apps, phones, email, or third-party surfaces like Siri. It's T-shaped because it has broad skills for daily tasks that are tedious and deep expertise for tasks that most people find impossible (starting with coding). The broad part is all about making life easier: answering a question, finding a home, contacting a lawyer, joining a gym, planning vacations, buying gifts, managing calendars, keeping track of to-dos, and sending emails,' an excerpt from the document. When it comes to the technical side, OpenAI is relying on next-generation models like o3, which, according to the document, are finally smart enough to reliably perform agentic tasks. Moreover, it has plans to deploy tools like Computer Use which will expand ChatGPT's ability to take direct actions. Another key part of the strategy seems to be the development of a dedicated search index. 'To fully be that interface, we need a search index and the ability to take actions on the web.' OpenAI may roll out this feature in the second half of 2025; however, there are not many details. OpenAI seems to be treading carefully, as it does not want ChatGPT to be seen as a product such as a search engine, operating system or even a browser. Based on the document, the company aims to establish a new category of personal AI agent that guides users through their digital needs. The company wants ChatGPT to be the main entry point for daily digital life. 'Now we're up against search engines, browsers, even interactions with real people. This one isn't a head-on match. It's about solving more and more use cases and gradually pulling users in. That's why we don't call our product a search engine, a browser, or an OS – it's just ChatGPT,' read the document. In the document, the company also breaks down its competition into two groups. In the short term, its rivals include other popular chatbots such as Claude, Gemini, or Copilot. However, in the broader sense, it considers traditional search engines, browsers, and even interactions with real people as its competitors. The company also describes one of its competitors, which is redacted from the document, as especially threatening, as it can embed its own AI systems into products without worrying about business model manipulation. Reportedly, this is a reference to Elon Musk's Grok, which is integrated into X and other platforms. On the other hand, OpenAI has also listed several strategic advantages it has over its peers. The company believes it has got everything it needs to win, such as one of the fastest-growing products of all time, a category-defining brand, a research lead, a compute lead, a world-class research team, and an increasing number of effective people with agency who are motivated. 'We don't rely on ads, giving us flexibility on what to build. Our culture values speed, bold moves, and self-disruption. Maintaining these advantages is hard work, but, if we do, they will last for a while.'
Vox
14-03-2025
- Business
- Vox
China's new AI agent Manus calls its own shots
is a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox's effective altruism-inspired section on the world's biggest challenges. She explores wide-ranging topics like climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccine development, and factory farms, and also writes the Future Perfect newsletter. Modern large language models are really good at a lot of tasks, like coding, essay writing, translation, and research. But there are still a lot of basic tasks, especially in the 'personal assistant' realm, that the most highly trained AIs in the world remain hopeless at. You can't ask ChatGPT or Claude 'order me a burrito from Chipotle' and get one, let alone 'book me a train from New York to Philadelphia.' OpenAI and Anthropic both offer AIs that can view your screen, move your cursor, and do some things on your computer as if they were a person (through their 'Operator' and 'Computer Use' functions, respectively). This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. That such 'AI agents' sometimes work, sort of, is about the strongest thing you can say for them right now. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. One of Anthropic's early investors is James McClave, whose BEMC Foundation helps fund Future Perfect. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) This week, China launched a competitor: the AI agent Manus. It produced a blizzard of glowing posts and testimonials from highly selected influencers, along with some impressive website demos. Manus is invite-only (and while I submitted a request for the tool, it hasn't been granted), so it's hard to tell from the outside how representative these highly selected examples are. After a few days of Manus fervor, though, the bubble popped a little and some more moderate reviews started coming out. Manus, the growing consensus holds, is worse than OpenAI's DeepResearch at research tasks; but better than Operator or Computer Use at personal assistant tasks. It's a step forward toward something important — AIs that can take action beyond the chatbot window — but it's not a shocking out-of-nowhere advance. Perhaps most importantly, Manus's usefulness for you will be sharply limited if you don't trust a Chinese company you've never heard of with your payment information so it can book things on your behalf. And you probably shouldn't. The agents are arriving When I first wrote about the risks of powerful AI systems displacing or destroying humanity, one very reasonable question was this: How could an AI act against humanity, when they really don't act at all? This reasoning is right, as far as current technology goes. Claude or ChatGPT, which just respond to user prompts and don't act independently in the world, can't execute on a long-term plan; everything they do is in response to a prompt, and almost all that action takes place within the chat window. But AI was never going to remain as a purely responsive tool simply because there is so much potential for profit in agents. People have been trying for years to create AIs that are built out of language models, but which make decisions independently, so that people can relate to them more like an employee or an assistant than like a chatbot. Generally, this works by creating a small internal hierarchy of language models, like a little AI company. One of the models is carefully prompted and in some cases fine-tuned to do large-scale planning. It comes up with a long-term plan, which it delegates to other language models. Various sub-agents check their results and change approaches when one sub-agent fails or reports problems. The concept is simple, and Manus is far from the first to try it. You may remember that last year we had Devin, which was marketed as a junior software engineering employee. It was an AI agent that you interacted with via Slack to give tasks, and which it would then work on achieving without further human input except, ideally, of the kind a human employee might occasionally need. The economic incentives to build something like Manus or Devin are overwhelming. Tech companies pay junior software engineers as much as $100,000 a year or more. An AI that could actually provide that value would be stunningly profitable. Travel agents, curriculum developers, personal assistants — these are all fairly well-paid jobs, and an AI agent could in principle be able to do the work at a fraction of the cost, without needing breaks, benefits or vacations. But Devin turned out to be overhyped, and didn't work well enough for the market it was aiming at. It's too soon to say whether Manus represents enough of an advance to have real commercial staying power, or whether, like Devin, its reach will exceed its grasp. I'll say that it appears Manus works better than anything that has come before. But just working better isn't enough — to trust an AI to spend your money or plan your vacation, you'll need extremely high reliability. As long as Manus remains tightly limited in availability, it's hard to say if it will be able to offer that. My best guess is that AI agents that seamlessly work are still a year or two away — but only a year or two. The China angle Manus isn't just the latest and greatest attempt at an AI agent. It is also the product of a Chinese company, and much of the coverage has dwelled on the Chinese angle. Manus is clearly proof that Chinese companies aren't just imitating what's being built here in America, as they've often been accused of doing, but improving on it. That conclusion shouldn't be shocking to anyone who is aware of China's intense interest in AI. It also raises questions about whether we will be thoughtful about exporting all of our personal and financial data to Chinese companies that are not meaningfully accountable to US regulators or US law. Installing Manus on your computer gives it a lot of access to your computer — it's hard for me to figure out the exact limits on its access or the security of its sandbox when I can't install it myself. One thing we've learned in digital privacy debates is that a lot of people will do this without thinking about the implications if they feel Manus offers them enough convenience. And as the TikTok fight made clear, once millions of Americans love an app, the government will face a steep uphill battle in trying to restrict it or oblige it to follow data privacy rules. But there are also clear reasons Manus came out of a Chinese company and not out of, say, Meta — and they're the very reasons we might prefer to use AI agents from Meta. Meta is subject to US liability law. If its agent makes a mistake and spends all your money on website hosting, or if it steals your Bitcoin or uploads your private photos, Meta will probably be liable. For all of these reasons, Meta (and its US competitors) are being cautious in this realm. I think caution is appropriate, even as it may be insufficient. Building agents that act independently on the internet is a big deal, one that poses major safety questions, and I'd like us to have a robust legal framework about what they can do and who is ultimately accountable. But the worst of all possible worlds is a state of uncertainty that punishes caution and encourages everyone to run agents that have no accountability at all. We have a year or two to figure out how to do better. Let's hope Manus prompts us to get to work on not just building those agents, but building the legal framework that will keep them safe. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
