Atlas Ascending

For those of us who’ve spent far too many hours poking at the latest AI toys, the arrival of ChatGPT’s new browser, Atlas, feels a bit like Christmas morning for the tech-obsessed. I’ll admit, I’ve been waiting for this one with the sort of anticipation usually reserved for Ipswich Town’s first game of the season. And now it’s here – albeit only for Mac users at present – and, frankly, it’s a bit of a revelation.

Let’s start with the basics. Atlas is OpenAI’s first proper foray into the browser market, and it’s not just a Chrome clone with a bit of AI sprinkled on top. No, this is a browser built from the ground up to be deeply integrated with your Mac. It hoovers up those pesky text message codes for two-factor authentication, sits comfortably within your operating system, and – crucially – bakes ChatGPT right into your browsing experience.

The result? You’re no longer just searching the web; you’re conversing with it. Anything you’re looking at, you can simply ask Atlas to explain, summarise, or expand upon. It remembers your previous questions, understands your preferences, and can even draft emails in your style while you’re glancing through your inbox. It’s the sort of seamless, context-aware assistance that we’ve all been promised for years, but never quite received – until now.

Of course, there are caveats. Atlas is Mac-only for the moment, which will irk the PC faithful (including co-host Matt on The Property AI Report Podcast this week), but it’s understandable given the level of integration on offer. And while rivals like Google’s Gemini are starting to nudge their way into Chrome, Atlas feels like a proper leap forward rather than a tentative step.

The real magic, though, lies in the way Atlas personalises itself to you. Large language models have always been trained on the vast sprawl of the public internet, but now, with Atlas, they’re starting to learn from your own browsing history, your habits, your quirks. This isn’t just a smarter search – it’s a search that knows you. For estate agents and property professionals, the implications are significant: imagine a browser that understands your patch, your clients, your workflow, and can surface the right information or draft the perfect response, all in context.

It’s easy to see how this could become sticky – in the best possible sense. Once you’ve experienced a browser that genuinely saves you time and effort, the thought of going back to the old ways feels a bit like swapping your iPhone for a Nokia 3310 (or going back to Rightmove after searching on an AI portal …). Yes, there are other options, but why bother?

(A word on security - the CTO here at ModelProp, Alex, has concerns around 'prompt injections'. These are instructions that only AIs can see that are placed into websites by bad actors so that, when your AI browser reads the page, it is instructed to (eg) steal all of your passwords. A lot of work is being done to mitigate this but it's not foolproof, so I feel the need to at least advise that this is a possibility - I stick to known websites with Atlas in the main and fall back to Google Chrome for banking and stuff like that for now.)

Atlas isn’t perfect – nothing ever is, at launch – but it’s a glimpse of where things are heading. For those in property and proptech, it’s another reminder: the tools we use to do our jobs are changing, fast. And we need to be across them to maximise market share, lower costs and increase revenue before our competitors do.

(As a late-week adjunct to this – Microsoft launched Copilot into its ‘Edge’ browser on Thursday, so anyone using Windows can have a play around with that. It’s powered by ChatGPT so the intelligence will be just as sharp. I haven’t used it but imagine that it will broadly as good as Atlas, particularly if you use Copilot anyway and it knows you.)