Two years ago, OpenAI launched Chatbot Release ChatGPT. Now it hopes to spark interest in a new wave of artificial intelligence technology.
OpenAI on Thursday unveiled a tool called Operator that can go online and perform tasks autonomously, such as shopping for groceries or making a restaurant reservation.
“It can navigate through websites and take actions on websites, just like you and I do,” Yash Kumar, head of product and engineering at OpenAI, said in an interview.
Researchers in the field of artificial intelligence call this type of technology Amnesty International agent. While chatbots can Answer questions, write poems and generate images,Agents can use other programming On the internet.
During a briefing with The New York Times, Mr. Kumar demonstrated how the system can book a restaurant reservation in San Francisco through the OpenTable website and purchase a grocery list through Instacart. The launcher looks and acts like ChatGPT and other chatbots. The user types a request in a small window. Then the system responds as best it can.
The user can watch as the tool opens the web browser and visits certain sites. The operator may make errors. But in some cases, these errors can be corrected. During a demonstration to The Times, the system incorrectly assumed that Mr. Kumar was in Iowa, before correctly finding a restaurant in San Francisco.
The operator is not completely independent. Sometimes, the user needs to correct his mistakes and make additional requests and suggestions. For sites like OpenTable and Instacart, users must provide their usernames and passwords. But OpenAI said it does not store this private information.
However, the company does capture data that shows how the system interacts with users and accesses sites on their behalf. It can use this data to train future versions of the operator.
OpenAI said that starting Thursday, the launcher will be available to anyone who has signed up for ChatGPT Pro, a $200-per-month service that provides access to all of the company’s latest tools. It plans to offer the tool across other paid services and eventually roll it out in the free version of ChatGPT.
(The New York Times has File a lawsuit against OpenAI and its partner Microsoft are accusing them of copyright infringement on news content related to artificial intelligence systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied these claims.)
In recent months, other leading companies, including Google and Antropik, have unveiled similar tools. However, many of these tools are not yet widely available.
The player is based on the same technology that supports ChatGPT. This technology is what artificial intelligence researchers call A Neural network – A mathematical system that can learn skills by analyzing huge amounts of data.
Newer versions of this technology learn from a wide range of data, including text, images, and sounds. In this case, the operator learned from images showing how people use spreadsheets, shopping sites and other online services. After identifying patterns in this data, the new system can use similar services on behalf of computer users.
Mr. Kumar acknowledged that, like ChatGPT and other chatbots, Operator is still an experimental technology. But he said the situation would continue to improve in the coming months.
“This is not the strongest thing in the world,” he added. “But it’s much better than what this kind of technology was before.”
