Can’t Keep Up With the AI Browser Wars? Here’s What Businesses Need to Know

In the nearly three years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, artificial intelligence has become a daily fact of life. Millions of people pay monthly subscriptions for access to AI assistants, social media is flooded with AI-generated content, and CEOs are telling their employees to start using AI or start looking for a new job. For the largest AI companies, this disruption is just the beginning of their plans to radically transform the internet. The next phase begins now. The primary way most people interact with AI is by using it to learn about things. Maybe you ask ChatGPT how old Tom Cruise was when he filmed “Top Gun,” or ask Grok if Elon Musk’s latest X post is true. There are some other notable use cases, particularly in using AI to program software applications, but by and large, people have been using AI to learn stuff. But now, artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI and Perplexity are unleashing more capable AI tools that can go beyond knowledge work and actually accomplish digital tasks for you. In the past few weeks, we’ve gotten early looks at two differing visions for the future of the internet in an AI-powered world. On one end is OpenAI, which this week released ChatGPT agent, a new feature that enables ChatGPT to operate its own virtual computer (and, using that computer, do stuff for you like book plane tickets or schedule meetings). On the other end is AI search startup Perplexity, which has recently released Comet, a Google Chrome-like internet browser with an AI-powered assistant. Both products have the same goal of navigating the internet on your behalf, but go about it in very different ways. Here’s an example of how OpenAI’s ChatGPT agent works. Say you wanted to plan a trip to the beach. You could tell ChatGPT “find some nice beaches near me and register for any fun events coming up.” By selecting the “Agent” option from the toolbar, you enable ChatGPT to use a virtual computer, in which it can open its own web browser to navigate local beach websites and click through their calendars to check for events. If it finds an event that it thinks you’ll be interested in (based on your past conversation history) it might offer to help you purchase tickets by entering your payment information. The tool allows people to offload the work of navigating the internet to not just learn things, but also buy things. Perplexity’s Comet, on the other hand, is very much a web browser. At first glance, you might even think it’s just an updated version of Google Chrome. That’s because it’s built on Chromium, the open-source framework originally developed by Google. The main difference between Comet and Chrome is the addition of an “Assistant” button in the toolbar, which when clicked brings up a chatbot interface similar to ChatGPT. This assistant can see what users are looking at on their browsers, take control of a user’s browser, and even open up its own personal browsers. You could ask the assistant to find a confirmation email from a recent job application you submitted, ask it to categorize your messy inbox, or ask it to order you a specific book on Amazon. Both OpenAI and Perplexity are competing to win market share from Google, which is in a weakened state after losing an antitrust case against the Department of Justice in 2024. The government could force Google to spin off Chrome as part of a larger effort to de-monopolize the internet search industry. (Chrome is the dominant browser worldwide, capturing a 68 percent share; Safari is a distant second at 16 percent.) Perplexity head of communications Jesse Dwyer jokingly describes this race to define the next era of Internet usage as “Browser War 3.” Dwyer says that if Browser War 1 was Netscape vs Internet Explorer in the ‘90s, with Internet Explorer winning due to its superior distribution, and Browser War 2 was Internet Explorer vs Chrome with Chrome winning because of its superior speed, then Browser War 3 is everyone vs Google. The winner will be determined by the product with superior answers. But when it’s primarily bots, not humans, navigating through websites, how will that work for companies that rely on web traffic, such as publishers, and, ahem, news websites? To Dwyer, the future is clear: “Some of the internet will be for agents, some of the internet will be for people, and that’s just going to have to be two different business models, it’s that simple.” BY BEN SHERRY @BENLUCASSHERRY