OpenAI has launched Operator, a largely autonomous AI agent designed to take your simple text prompts and turn them into real-world tasks completed via the internet.
In theory, you can ask it to do almost anything that's possible via a web browser. In practice, early users seem to be finding the results rather hit and miss.
Examples of the sorts of things Operator can do are booking travel, making restaurant reservations for a certain time, or perhaps buying concert tickets for a specific band within a given price range.
Currently released as a research preview only available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers rather than a fully baked product, Operator is based on OpenAI's Computer-Using Agent (CUA) model, which combines the computer vision capabilities from GPT-4o's with specific graphical user interfaces (GUIs) training and advanced reasoning to create a tool capable of browsing the web, formulating multi-step tasks from a text prompt and executing the whole shebang.
Arguably, Operator is not unique, what with ByteDance's UI-TARS and Anthropic’s Computer Use having a somewhat similar remit.