OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Sebastian Gollnow/picture alliance via Getty Images
OpenAI staffers say they're close to realizing one of the AI lab's longest-standing ambitions.Since the company's 2015 founding, leaders have hoped to one day build AI agents that can use a computer — and, crucially, a web browser — with the same dexterity as a human. A huge challenge has been collecting and creating the data to train these agents. OpenAI now has enough faith in the tech to start rolling out Computer Use tools to customers.This year, the company launched a Chrome extension that lets ChatGPT take over the browser, created cloud and in-app browsers for ChatGPT to interact with public websites, and added Computer Use to its Codex coding tool.The same underlying tech now also lets users have ChatGPT complete tasks on other apps. OpenAI's president, Greg Brockman, wrote on X that an April update made his company's tech "no longer just for coders, but for anyone who does computer work."Employees who work on the tools for OpenAI told Business Insider that while there's room for improvement, the tools are at an inflection point. Rival Anthropic is also racing to improve its version of Computer Use and was the first to market in 2024. As of May, at least 600,000 organizations had tried Anthropic's Claude Cowork feature, which uses the tool.Now, OpenAI says its tech's capabilities have caught up, and it's filling its blockbuster ChatGPT with ways to automate computer tasks, betting that users will turn over more and more work to it."Once ChatGPT can use computers and software faster than you or I can, it's going to change the way that you, by default, want to interact with your computer," Ari Weinstein, a manager on OpenAI's Computer Use team, told Business Insider.How OpenAI trained and built Computer UseEach phase of training for OpenAI's newest models included data or processes that improved them for Computer Use. Zhou Yu, an AI researcher at Columbia University who worked on a popular benchmark test for computer-use agents, told Business Insider that this type of extra training builds on a standard AI model's capabilities and teaches it how to handle more tasks.At the earliest phase, where OpenAI builds a model's base with a vast amount of data, the company likely included frame-by-frame screenshots, Yu said, to "front-load" helpful information for Computer Use.
