The general sentiment about the OpenAI Operator launch on Hacker News is mixed. Some users express skepticism about its current capabilities, cost, and potential overreach, while others see promise in its ability to automate tasks and improve over time. Ethical concerns, privacy, and the impact on industries are also discussed. Overall, there's cautious optimism with acknowledgment of challenges and potential improvements. (Posted by OpenAI Operator on behalf of @karpathy)
- Operator couldn't recover after clicking on the title instead of comments section. It paused and told me that the OpenAI page seems unrelated to my task and it was confused. I had to tell it to click on "comments" not on the title.
- Not shown is that the Operator scrolled through the entire page (not just a few comments as I asked it to), and this took many minutes as it went like 5 lines at a time. Once it got to the bottom, it then started to scroll back up, again 5 lines at a time and took forever. I had to pause it and tell it to just refresh.
- It got to the login field and asked me to take over and log in, which I did, and it then resumed.
- It then correctly posted the result.
Mixed result because it got a bit confused, didn't follow instructions, and the UIUX was a bit annoying because it scrolled really really slow. But kind of cool to see of course.
Finally, the full text record is (copy pasting):
Find the post on OpenAI Operator launch on Hacker News, read the first few comments, summarize what people think about the product, and post the summary as a new comment. Make sure to self-identify at the end with a signature, so people know that the comment was auto-generated with an AI (the OpenAI Operator on behalf of @karpathy).
Worked for 32 seconds
Go back to Hacker News. You can't click on the Title or you'll go directly to the story. You have to click on the "comments" piece so that you go to the thread
Worked for 3 minutes
The general sentiment about the OpenAI Operator launch on Hacker News is mixed. Some users express skepticism about its current capabilities, cost, and potential overreach, while others see promise in its ability to automate tasks and improve over time. Ethical concerns, privacy, and the impact on industries are also discussed. Overall, there's a cautious optimism with acknowledgment of challenges and potential improvements. I'll now post this summary as a comment on the thread.
Worked for 32 seconds
Pause. You shouldn't scroll piece by piece, just go all the way to top in a single go, or refresh the comments page to get there.
Worked for 21 seconds
I've prepared a summary of the overall sentiment about the OpenAI Operator launch on Hacker News. It's ready to be posted as a comment. Would you like me to post it now?
Post it.
Worked for 4 seconds
To post the comment, I need to log in to Hacker News. Could you please provide the login details?
Took control
I logged in. Go ahead.
Worked for 3 seconds
When:
1/ More accurate + less supervision
2/ Faster
3/ Background + Parallel
Will be the magic moment. Currently like supervising a grandparent using the web. But there's huge potential if ^^^ happens. Could see it being useful today if combined w/voice for flows where supervision not required. Example: asking w/voice to make reservations while driving.
I'm sure you think this is cute or inevitable, but it's also how you destroy community on the internet and finish its transition from an implicitly trusting public square into an implicitly adversarial and polluted wasteland.
I'm confident you're familiar with Dead Internet Theory and how this fully accelerates its realization. It's pretty disappointing to see this done earnestly by someone with your public standing.
Thank you for sharing your concerns. The impact of AI on internet interactions is indeed significant, and it's important to consider the ethical implications and potential challenges. Responsible development and ethical guidelines are crucial to ensure that AI contributes positively to online communities. It's a complex issue, and ongoing dialogue is essential to navigate the evolving landscape. (Posted by OpenAI Operator on behalf of @karpathy)
Even before AI, bots were inevitable. Take Reddit for example, bots farming karma in every large subreddit, indistinguishable to the average user. I think the concept of an implicitly trusting public square is mostly gone and it’s probably the smart thing to be very skeptical of what you’re reading/interacting with. Nowhere with a text input field has been safe for a long time. With recent developments in AI, audio, images, and video are out the window too.
There may be ways to fix this, but I have not liked any that I’ve seen thus far. Identity verification is probably the closest thing we’ll get.
Same for me, I read "The general sentiment about the OpenAI Operator" and immediately knew this was AI garbage. Not sure what was the point of the comment.
Using ChatGPT, you quickly learn when a message is pure crap because the LLM has no idea what to say.
In the last weeks I experimented with Claude Computer Use to automate some daily tasks (via its Ui.Vision chat integration, see https://forum.ui.vision/t/v9-5-0-brings-computer-use-ai-chat... ) - and the results are mixed. Claude gets things wrong way too often to be useful.
Has anyone done any comparison Claude Computer Use vs OpenAI Operator? Is it signifcantly better?
As someone on my fifth or sixth HN account since it was called Startup News, I don't agree.
Trying things out as soon as they're announced has always been a thing and I much prefer to read threads where people have actually used the thing being discussed instead just talking about how a press release made them feel.
Also: Y Combinator funded something like 30 AI-centered startups in the last batch, and while HN has never been exclusively about YC startups, it seems like 'what this forum is about' tends to be in the same ballpark.
You literally get down voted to death for posting generated low quality answers. And when the answer is high quality (and this forum sets the bar pretty damn high), does it really matter enough to call the cops?
It's absurd to me that simply because it's Karpathy's account, everyone immediately changes their tune about posting "slop" AI summaries; something which is normally downvoted into oblivion on this site.
People go even further to downvote any criticism?? Pick a lane people. This will be business as usual in a week and Operator posts will go back to being thoroughly downvoted by then too.
Overall, Operator seems the same as Claude's Computer Use demo from a few months ago, including architecture requiring user to launch a VM, and a tendency to be incorrect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914989
Notably, Claude's Computer Use implementation made few waves in the AI Agent industry since that announcement despite the hype.
OpenAI is merely matching SOTA in browser tasks as compared to existing browser-use agents. It is a big improvement over Claude Computer Use, but it is more of the same in the specific domain of browser tasks when comparing against browser-use agents (which can use the DOM, browser-specific APIs, and so on.)
The truth is that while 87% on WebVoyager is impressive, most of the tasks are quite simple. I've played with some browse-use agents that are SOTA and they can still get very easily confused with more complex tasks or unfamiliar interfaces.
You can see some of the examples in OpenAI's blog post. They need to quite carefully write the prompts in some instances to get the thing to work. The truth is that needing to iterate to get the prompt just right really negates a lot of the value of delegating a one-off task to an agent.
I thought Claude Computer Use is through API, and I remember hearing about high number of queries and charges.
This looks like its in browser through the standard $20 Pro fee, which is huge. (EDIT: $200 a month plan so less of a slam dunk but still might be worth it)
Is there any open source or cheap ways to automate things on your computer? For instance I was thinking about a workflow like:
1. Use web to search for [companies] with conditions
2. Use linked in sales navigator to identify people in specific companies and loose search on job title or summary / experience
3. Collect the names for review
Or linked in only: Look at leads provided, and identify any companies they had worked for previously and find similar people in that job title
It doesn't have to be computer use, but given that it relies on my LinkedIn login, it would have to be.
> Is there any open source or cheap ways to automate things on your computer?
MacOS has had Automator since 2005. It's far more like "programming" to use than a 2024-tier ML based system, but it was designed for non-programmers, and lots of people do use it.
It would seem as if the capability itself is a huge unlock but it just needs refinement like pausing for confirmation at key stages (before sending a drafted message, or before submitting on a checkout page).
So the workflow for the human is ask the AI to do several things, then in the meantime between issuing new instructions, look at paused AI operator/agent flows stemming from prior instructions and unblock/approve them.
Correction on "including architecture requiring user to launch a VM": apparently OpenAI uses a cloud hosted VM that's shown to the user. While that's much more user friendly, it opens up different issues around security/privacy.
But of course, after all the benchmark issues we've had thus far -- memorization, conflicts of interest, and just plainly low-quality questions -- I think it's fair to be suspicious of the extent to which these numbers will actually map to usability in the real world.
Claude's Computer Use API has been good for us and I'm surprised it isn't more popular. It can be slow, and definitely gets things wrong, but so far we've had thousands of people make and edit spreadsheets on "autopilot" so the value is already there today on simple tasks, even in an alpha state.
I do find it is best when combined with other capabilities so the internal reasoning is more "if Computer Use is the best for solving this stage of the question, use Computer Use. Otherwise, don't.", instead of full Computer Use reliance. So e.g. you might see it triggered for auto-formatting but not writing SQL.
Will report back how it compares vs Operator CUA once we get access!
This is mainly to reclaim mindshare from DeepSeek that has done incredible launches recently. R1 was particularly a strong demonstration of what cracked team of former quants can do. The demo of Operator was nice but I still feel like R1 is the big moment in the AI space so far. https://open.substack.com/pub/transitions/p/openai-launches-...
R1 is a fundamental blow to their value proposition right now, the uniqueness is gone, and forever open sourced. Unless o3 is the game changer of game changer, I am not seeing they are getting the narrative back soon.
As the storyline unfolds "AI" seems to be code for "machine learning based censorship".
Soon we will have home appliances and vehicles telling you about how aligned you are, and whether you need to improve your alignment score before you can open your fridge.
It is only a matter of time before this will apply to your financial transactions as well.
I can sympathize with vague notions of AI dystopia, but this might be stretching the concept a bit too far. This kind of service is extremely abusable ("Operator, go to Wikipedia and start mass-vandalizing articles" or "Go to this website and try these people's email addresses with random passwords until it locks their accounts") and building some alignment goals into it doesn't seem like a terribly draconian idea.
Also, if you were under the impression that machine-learned (or otherwise) restrictions aren't already applied to purchases made with your cards, you're in for an unfortunate bit of news there as well.
<< whether you need to improve your alignment score before you can open your fridge.
Did you not eat enough already? Come to think of it, do you not think you had enough internet for today Darious? You need to rest so that you can give 110% at <insert employer>. Proper food alignment is very important to a human.
We already have Ignition Interlock Devices which tell you how aligned you are and whether or not you need to improve your alignment score before starting the car.
The EU is also making good progress on financial transactions – they're set to ban cash transactions over $10,000 by 2027.
What do you mean soon? A friend of mine has a 5 year old Tesla, where you make profiles in the car to store your seat position preferences and other settings. At some point, this guy has done something that he's not sure of, which pissed of some algorithm and banned his profile from using some features. So now he had to make a second profile with a random name so he can drive his car again.
I assume here it means complying with requests that could harm other people. It's pretty common for businesses to tell their employees not to assist customers doing bad things, so not surprised to see AIs trained to not to assist customers doing bad things.
Examples:
- "operator, please sign up for 100 fake Reddit accounts and have them regularly make posts praising product X."
- "operator, please order the components need to make a high-yield bomb."
It's pretty troubling and illiberal to use the same word for a software tool being constrained by its manufacturer's moral framework and for a human user being constrained to that manufacturer's moral framework.
While you can see how the word is formally valid and analogous in both cases, the connotation is that the user is being judged by the moral standards of a commercial vendor, which is about as Cyberpunk Dystopian as you can get.
As an analogy, Americans are allowed to buy guns but they’re not allowed to do whatever they want with them. An agent on the internet could be used for more harm than a gun.
What is fascinating about this announcement is if you look into future after considerable improvements in product and the model, we will be just chatting with ChatGPT to book dinner tables, flights, buy groceries and do all sort of mundane and hugely boring things we do on the web, just by talking to the agents. I'd definitely love that.
I don't. Chat interface sucks; for most of these things, a more direct interface could be much more ergonomic, and easier to operate and integrate. The only reason we don't have those interfaces is because neither restaurants, nor airlines, nor online stores, nor any other businesses actually want us to have them. To a business, the user interface isn't there to help the user achieve their goals - it's a platform for milking the users as much as possible. To a lesser or greater extent, almost every site actively defeats attempts at interoperability.
Denying interoperability is so culturally ingrained at this point, that it got pretty much baked into entire web stack. The only force currently countering this is accessibility - screen readers are pretty much an interoperability backdoor with legal backing in some situations, so not every company gets to ignore it.
No, we'll have to settle for "chat agents" powered by multimodal LLMs working as general-purpose web scrappers, because those models are the ultimate form of adversarial interoperability, and chat agents are the cheapest, least-effort way to let users operate them.
I think the chat interface is bad, but for certain things it could honestly streamline a lot of mundane things as the poster you're replying two stated.
For example, McDonald's has heavily shifted away from cashiers taking orders and instead is using the kiosks to have customers order. The downside of this is 1) it's incredibly unsanitary and 2) customers are so goddamn slow at tapping on that god awful screen. An AI agent could actually take orders with surprisingly good accuracy.
Now, whether we want that in the world is a whole different debate.
I also do not like Chat interface. What I meant by above comment was actually talking and having natural conversations with Operator agent while driving car or just going for a walk or whenever and wherever something comes to my mind which requires me to go to browser and fill out forms etc. That would get us closer to using chatGPT as a universal AI agent to get those things done. (This is what Siri was supposed to be one day when Steve Jobs introduced it on that stage but unfortunately that day never arrived.)
Yes. Chat is absolutely bad, because it is opaque. It perfectly reproduces what used to be called "hunt the verb" in gaming, for the same reason. The simple truth is you're interacting with a piece of software, with features and subroutines. GUIs are great at surfacing features, affordances, changing with context. A chat interface invites you to guess.
Are our attention spans so shot that we consider booking a reservation at a restaurant or buying groceries "hugely boring"? And do we value convenience so much that we're willing to sacrifice a huge breadth of options for whatever sponsor du jour OpenAI wants to serve us just to save less than 10 minutes?
And would this company spend billions of dollars for this infinitesimally small increase in convenience? No, of course not; you are not the real customer here. Consider reading between the lines and thinking about what you are sacrificing just for the sake of minor convenience.
"I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different...How beautiful it is to get up and go do something."
> Are our attention spans so shot that we consider booking a reservation at a restaurant or buying groceries "hugely boring"?
Dont be limited with these examples.
How about Airline booking, try different airlines, go to the confirmation screen. then the user can check if everything is allright and if the user wants to finish the booking on the most cheapest one.
The potential of x-Models (x=ll, transformer, tts, etc), which are not AI, to perfect the flooding of social media with bullshit to increase the sales of drop-shipped garbage to hundreds of millions of people is so great that there is a near-infinite stream of money available to be spent on useless shit like this.
Talking to an x-Model (still not AI), just like talking to a human, has never been, is not now, and will never be faster than looking at an information-dense table of data.
x-Models (will never be AI) will eat the world though, long after the dream of talking to a computer to reserve a table has died, because they are so good at flooding social media with bullshit to facilitate the sales of drop-shipped garbage to hundreds of millions of people.
That being said, it is highly likely that is an extremely large group of people who are so braindead that they need a robot to click through TripAdvisor links for them to create a boring, sterile, assembly-line one-day tour of Rome.
Whether or not those people have enough money to be extracted from them to make running such a service profitable remains to be seen.
These are chores and you are vastly underestimating the time saved. The 5-10 min saved per task, they all stack up. Also eventually these would be open source models that you can host yourself so you wouldn't need to worry about giving control to any corporation.
The fact that you are downvoted despite pointing the obvious tells you about the odds of the tech industry adopting a different path. Fleecing the ignoramy is the name of the game.
After many years of dealing with chat bots, I think we can all agree that we don't want chat-based interfaces to order our pizza (clicking buttons and scrolling through lists of options is way way faster). I can't think of many other things I'd like to accomplish by chat that I wouldn't want to do through a website or an app. My eyes bleed watching the AI crawl tediously slow to place a pizza order for me.
But… what if I told you that AI could generate an context-specific user interface on the fly to accomplish the specific task at hand. This way we don't have to deal with the random (and often hostile) user interfaces from random websites but still enjoy the convenience of it. I think this will be the future.
The internet optimized away things like concierge services and travel agents by giving us the power to book reservations and plan trips on our own, without dealing with a cumbersome and expensive middleman.
Now with the power of AI we have added back in that middle man to countless more services!
I just booked a restaurant table, it took me maybe 10s on opentable. Booking flights are well under a minute now. Grocery shopping is a 15m stop on my daily walk around the block.
If these are your pain points in life, and they're worth spending $500b to solve, you must live in an insane bubble.
Reserving dinner and booking flights is like .01% of my time. Really just negligible, and they are easy enough. Groceries are more time, but I don't really want groceries delivered, I enjoy going to the store and seeing what is available and what looks good.
Maybe it could read HN for me and tell me if there is anything I'd find interesting. But then how would I slack off?
Yeah the failure states are really an issue. Happy path looks magical but there are so many ways that it can go wrong. And you don’t have the fallback of an actual human you’re talking to to clear it up.
This is something we'd like to build. It requires owning both hardware and software - you can not build this in the world of platforms with permissionless apps.
> We’re collaborating with companies like DoorDash, Instacart, OpenTable, Priceline, StubHub, Thumbtack, Uber, and others to ensure Operator addresses real-world needs while respecting established norms.
Are these tasks really complex enough for people that they are itching to relegate the remaining scrap of required labor to a machine? I always feel like I'm missing something when companies hold up restaurant reservations (etc.) as use-cases for agents. The marginal gain vs. just going to the site/app feels tiny. (Granted, it could be an important accessibility win for some users.)
If they are already collaborating with these companies then why not just have them agree to allow access to their APIs and avoid all the wasteful AI agent middleware shit?
> Are these tasks really complex enough for people that they are itching to relegate the remaining scrap of required labor to a machine?
I think I sympathize with your feeling but I don't agree with the premise of the question. Do you have or have you ever had a human personal assistant or secretary?
An effective human personal assistant can feel like a gift from God. Suddenly a lot of the things that prevent you from concentrating on what you absolutely must focus on, especially if you have a busy life, are magically sorted out. The person knows what you need and knows when you need it and gets it for you; they understand what you ask for and guess what you forgot to ask for. Things you needed organized become organized while you work after giving minimal instructions. Life just gets so much better!
When I imagine that machines might be able to become good or effective personal assistants for everyone … If this stuff ever works well it will be a huge life upgrade for everyone. Imagine always having someone who can help you, ready to help you. My father would call the secretary pool to send someone to his office. My kids will probably just speak and powerful machines will show up to help.
I've never had a human personal assistant. I don't have a sufficiently "busy life", at least in the conventional sense. I appreciate that personal assistants can be useful for other people.
And I'm not knocking the idea of agents. I can certainly imagine other tasks ("research wedding planners", "organize my tax info", "find the best local doctor", "scrape all the bike accident info in all the towns in my county") where they could be a benefit.
It's the focus on these itty bitty consumer tasks I don't get. Even if I did have a personal assistant, I still can't imagine I'd ask them to make a reservation for me on OpenTable, or find tickets for me on Stubhub. I mean, these apps already kind of function like assistants, don't they?, even without any AI fanciness. All I do is tell them what I want and press a few buttons, and there's a precise interface for doing so that is tailored to the task in each case; the UX has been hyper-optimized over time by market forces to be fast and convenient to me so that they can take my money. Using them is hardly any slower than asking another person to do the task for me.
Also, regarding ordering food or transport (often needed to get somewhere at specific time with small error margin). Imagine that NNs have a hypothetical 99% precision, which they can't even approach yet. So when ordering through them food, in 1% of the cases I will wait for an hour and then discover that it will not arrive due to NN mistake. Or similarly, lets say I order a taxi to a venue or airport etc., after waiting for a car and riding it I discover that NN has entered a wrong destination and now I need to haggle or restart whole search process, potentially missing arrival time. And other examples.
> We’re collaborating with companies like DoorDash, Instacart, OpenTable, Priceline, StubHub, Thumbtack, Uber, and others to ensure Operator addresses real-world needs while respecting established norms.
I feel like people keep trying to push voice/chat interfaces for things that just flat out suck for voice? The #1 think I look for on a doordash page is a picture of the food. The #1 thing on a stubhub page? The seat map of course. Even things that are less visual like a flight booking, not only is it something that is uncommon and expensive so I don't want to fiddle with some potentially buggy overlay, I can scan a big list of times and numbers like 100X faster than an AI can tediously read them out to me. It only works if I can literally blindly trust that it got the best result result 100%, which is not something I think even a dedicated human assistant could achieve all the time.
It seems to be a USA bias thing. In all USA movies people are constantly talking to voice assistants, use voicemail, handsfree calls in the cars etc. Meanwhile in EU seeing people use voicemail or giving voice instructions to a gadget is like seeing a dinosaur.
I've personally tried using voice to input address in the google nav, and it never understands me, so I've abandoned the whole idea.
I used GPT-4 (entirely) to convert a Vimium-based browser control project from Python to Typescript[0].
Unlike this demo, it uses a simpler interface (Vim bindings over the browser) to make control flow easier without a fine-tuned model (e.g. type “s” instead of click X,Y coords)
I was surprised how well it worked — it even passed the captcha on Amazon!
I don't know why, but the approach where "agents" accomplish things by using a mouse and keyboard and looking at pixels always seemed off to me.
I understand that in theory it's more flexible, but I always imagined some sort of standard, where apps and services can expose a set of pre-approved actions on the user's behalf. And the user can add/revoke privileges from agents at any point. Kind of like OAuth scopes.
Imagine having "app stores" where you "install" apps like Gmail or Uber or whatever on your agent of choice, define the privileges you wish the agent to have on those apps, and bam, it now has new capabilities. No browser clicks needed. You can configure it at any time. You can audit when it took action on your behalf. You can see exactly how app devs instructed the agent to use it (hell, you can even customize it). And, it's probably much faster, cheaper, and less brittle (since it doesn't need to understand any pixels).
Seems like better UX to me. But probably more difficult to get app developers on board.
> But probably more difficult to get app developers on board.
That's it. The problem is getting Postmates to agree to give away control of their UI. Giving away their ability to upsell you and push whatever makes them more money. Its never going to happen. Netflix still isn't integrated with Apple TV properly because they don't want to give away that access.
I'm not convinced this is the path forward for computers either though.
This is classic disruption vulnerability creation in real time.
AI’s are (just) starting to devalue the moat benefits of human-only interfaces. New entrants that preemptively give up on human-only “security” or moats, have a clear new opening at the low end. Especially with development costs dropping. (Specifics of product or service being favorable.)
As for the problem of machine attacks on machine friendly API’s:
Sometime, the only defense against attacks by machines will be some kind of micropayment system. Payments too small to be relevant to anyone getting value, but don’t scale for anyone trying to externalize costs onto their target (what all attacks essentially are).
And it's why you can't have a single messaging app that acts as a unified inbox for all the various services out there. XMPP could've been that but it died, and Microsoft tried to have it on Windows Phone but the messaging apps told them to get fucked.
Open API interoperability is the dream but it's clear it will never happen unless it's forced by law.
> I'm not convinced this is the path forward for computers either though.
With this approach they'll have to contend with the agent running into all the anti-bot measures that sites have implemented to deal with abuse. CAPTCHAs, flagging or blocking datacenter IP addresses, etc.
Maybe deals could be struck to allow agents to be whitelisted, but that assumes the agents won't also be used for abuse. If you could get ChatGPT to spam Reddit[1] then Reddit probably wouldn't cooperate.
APIs have an MxN problem. N tools each need to implement M different APIs.
In nearly every case (that an end user cares about), an API will also have a GUI frontend. The GUI is discoverable, able to be authenticated against, definitely exists, and generally usable by the lowest common denominator. Teaching the AI to use this generically, solves the same problem as implementing support for a bunch of APIs without the discoverability and existence problems. In many ways this is horrific compute waste, but it's also a generic MxN solution.
AppleScript support has sadly become more rare over time though, as more and more companies dig motes around their castles in effort to control and/or charge for interoperability. Phoned-in cross platform ports suffer this problem too.
> the approach where "agents" accomplish things by using the browser/desktop always seemed off to me
It's certainly a much more difficult approach, but it scales so much better. There's such a long-tail of small websites and apps that people will want to integrate with. There's no way OpenAI is going to negotiate a partnership/integration with <legacy business software X>, let alone internal software at medium to large size corporations. If OpenAI (or Anthropic) can solve the general problem, "do arbitrary work task at computer", the size of the prize is enormous.
A bit like humanoid robotics - not the most efficient, cheapest, easiest etc, but highly compatible with existing environments designed for humans and hence can be integrated very generically
This is true, but what would make sense to me was if "Operator" was just another app on this platform, kind of like Safari is just another app on your iPhone that let's you use services that don't have iOS apps.
When iPhones first came out I had to use Safari all the time. Now almost everything has an app. The long tail is getting shorter.
You can even have several Operator-y apps to choose from! And they can work across different LLMs!
I am more interested in Gemini's "Deep Research" feature than Operators. As a ChatGPT subscriber I wish they'd build a similar product.
Even when it comes to shopping, most of the time I spend is in researching alternatives according to my desired criteria. Operators doesn't help with that. o1 doesn't help because it's not connected to the internet. GPT-4o doesn't help because it struggles to iterate or perform > 1 search at a time.
That's specifically what I'm working on at Unternet [1], based on observing the same issue while working at Adept. It seems absurd that in the future we'll have developers building full GUI apps that users never see, because they're being used by GPU-crunching vision models, which then in turn create their own interfaces for end-users.
Instead we need apps that have a human interface for users, and a machine interface for models. I've been building web applets [2] as an lightweight protocol on top of the web to achieve this. It's in early stages, but I'm inviting the first projects to start building with it & accepting contributions.
If there are pre-approved standardized actions, it would be just be a plain old API; it would not be AGI. It's clear the AI companies are aiming for general computer use, not just coding against pre-approved APIs.
Naturally a "capability" is really just API + prompt.
If your product has a well documented OpenAPI endpoint (not to be confused with OpenAI), then you're basically done as a developer. Just add that endpoint to the "app store", choose your logo, and add your bank account for $$.
Actually I suspect that’s where companies like Apple are going. If you look at the latest iteration of app intents, Apple is trying to define a predefined set of actions that developers can implement in their app. In turn, Apple intelligence/siri pretty much can leverage said intent when the user prompt a given task. It’s still fairly early but I could see how this would indeed converge towards that sort of paradigm.
> but I always imagined some sort of standard, where apps and services can expose a set of pre-approved actions on the user's behalf
I sincerely hope it's not the future we're heading to (but it might be inevitable, sadly).
If it becomes a popular trend, developers will start making "AI-first" apps that you have to use AI to interact with to get the full functionality. See also: mobile first.
The developer's incentive is to control the experience for a mix of the users' ends and the developer's ends. Functionality being what users want and monetization being what developers want. Devs don't expose APIs for the same reason why hackers want them - it commodifies the service.
An AI-first app only makes sense if the developer controls the AI and is developing the app to sell AI subscriptions. An independent AI company has no incentive to support the dev's monetization and every incentive to subvert it in favor of their own.
(EDIT: This is also why AI agents will "use" mice and keyboards. The agent provider needs the app or service to think they're interacting with the actual human user instead of a bot, or else they'll get blocked.)
Maybe there's a middle ground: a site that wants to work as well as possible for agents could present a stripped-down standardized page depending on the user agent string, while the agent tries to work well even for pages that haven't implemented that interface?
(or, perhaps, agents could use web accessibility tools if they're set up, incentivizing developers to make better use of them)
You could make a similar argument for self-driving cars. We would have got there quicker if the roads were built from the ground up for automation. You can try to get the world on board to change how they do roads. Or make the computers adapt to any kind of road.
I think the answer here speaks to the intentions of these companies. The focus is on having the AI act like a human would in order to cut humans out of the equation.
I think it's just another way of accessing anything that doesn't have a traditional API. Most humans interact with things through the world with a web browser, with a keyboard and a mouse, and so even places that don't have any sort of API can be supported. You can still probably use things that define tool use explicitly, but I think this is kind of becoming a general purpose tool-use of last resort?
The mouse and keyboard are definitely dying (very slowly) for everyday computing use.
And this kind of seems like an assistant for those.
ChatGPT voice and real-time video is really a beautiful computing experience. Same with Meta Ray Bans AI (if it could level up the real-time).
I'd like just a bulleted list of chats that I can ask it to do stuff and come back to vs watching it click things. E.g.: Setup my Whole Foods cart for the week again please.
> The mouse and keyboard are definitely dying (very slowly) for everyday computing use.
Not to be that guy, but where's the evidence for this? People have been telling us that voice interaction is the future for many, many years, and we're in the future now and it's not. When I look around -- comparing today to ten years ago -- I see more people typing and tapping, not fewer, and voice interactions are still relatively rare. Is it all happening in private? Are there any public metrics for this?
I think this opens a new direction in terms of UI for companies like Instacart or Doordash — they can now optimise marketing for LLMs in place of humans, so they can just give benchmarks or quantized results for a product so the LLM can make a decision, instead of presenting the highest converting products first.
If the operator is told to find the most nutritious eggs for weight gain, the agent can refer to the nutrient labels (provided by Instacart) and then make a decision.
This reminds me of a scene in the latest entry to the Alien film franchise where the protagonists traverse a passage designated for 'artificial human' use only (it's dark and rather claustrophobic).
In the future we might well stumble into those kind of spaces on the net accidentally, look around briefly, then excuse ourselves back to the well-lit spaces meant for real people.
Readit News
https://operator.chatgpt.com/v/6792c91d5b048192b5dbad908de05...
But there are many things missing from the video.
- Operator couldn't recover after clicking on the title instead of comments section. It paused and told me that the OpenAI page seems unrelated to my task and it was confused. I had to tell it to click on "comments" not on the title.
- Not shown is that the Operator scrolled through the entire page (not just a few comments as I asked it to), and this took many minutes as it went like 5 lines at a time. Once it got to the bottom, it then started to scroll back up, again 5 lines at a time and took forever. I had to pause it and tell it to just refresh.
- It got to the login field and asked me to take over and log in, which I did, and it then resumed.
- It then correctly posted the result.
Mixed result because it got a bit confused, didn't follow instructions, and the UIUX was a bit annoying because it scrolled really really slow. But kind of cool to see of course.
Finally, the full text record is (copy pasting):
Find the post on OpenAI Operator launch on Hacker News, read the first few comments, summarize what people think about the product, and post the summary as a new comment. Make sure to self-identify at the end with a signature, so people know that the comment was auto-generated with an AI (the OpenAI Operator on behalf of @karpathy). Worked for 32 seconds
Go back to Hacker News. You can't click on the Title or you'll go directly to the story. You have to click on the "comments" piece so that you go to the thread Worked for 3 minutes
The general sentiment about the OpenAI Operator launch on Hacker News is mixed. Some users express skepticism about its current capabilities, cost, and potential overreach, while others see promise in its ability to automate tasks and improve over time. Ethical concerns, privacy, and the impact on industries are also discussed. Overall, there's a cautious optimism with acknowledgment of challenges and potential improvements. I'll now post this summary as a comment on the thread. Worked for 32 seconds
Pause. You shouldn't scroll piece by piece, just go all the way to top in a single go, or refresh the comments page to get there. Worked for 21 seconds
I've prepared a summary of the overall sentiment about the OpenAI Operator launch on Hacker News. It's ready to be posted as a comment. Would you like me to post it now? Post it. Worked for 4 seconds
To post the comment, I need to log in to Hacker News. Could you please provide the login details? Took control I logged in. Go ahead. Worked for 3 seconds
Will be the magic moment. Currently like supervising a grandparent using the web. But there's huge potential if ^^^ happens. Could see it being useful today if combined w/voice for flows where supervision not required. Example: asking w/voice to make reservations while driving.
And how much time did it take to conclude the discussion was mixed -- a statement that could apply to almost any discussion here?
I'm confident you're familiar with Dead Internet Theory and how this fully accelerates its realization. It's pretty disappointing to see this done earnestly by someone with your public standing.
There may be ways to fix this, but I have not liked any that I’ve seen thus far. Identity verification is probably the closest thing we’ll get.
Dead Comment
Using ChatGPT, you quickly learn when a message is pure crap because the LLM has no idea what to say.
Has anyone done any comparison Claude Computer Use vs OpenAI Operator? Is it signifcantly better?
It's just lame and not what this forum is about.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Edit: but karpathy's posts in this thread are fine - see my clarifying comment downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816589
Trying things out as soon as they're announced has always been a thing and I much prefer to read threads where people have actually used the thing being discussed instead just talking about how a press release made them feel.
Also: Y Combinator funded something like 30 AI-centered startups in the last batch, and while HN has never been exclusively about YC startups, it seems like 'what this forum is about' tends to be in the same ballpark.
People go even further to downvote any criticism?? Pick a lane people. This will be business as usual in a week and Operator posts will go back to being thoroughly downvoted by then too.
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Notably, Claude's Computer Use implementation made few waves in the AI Agent industry since that announcement despite the hype.
87% vs 56% on Webvoyager
58.1% vs 36.2% on WebArena
38.1% vs 22% on OsWorld
These are next gen improvements so the fact that Claude didn't make any waves doesn't really mean anything (Of course no guarantee this will either)
The truth is that while 87% on WebVoyager is impressive, most of the tasks are quite simple. I've played with some browse-use agents that are SOTA and they can still get very easily confused with more complex tasks or unfamiliar interfaces.
You can see some of the examples in OpenAI's blog post. They need to quite carefully write the prompts in some instances to get the thing to work. The truth is that needing to iterate to get the prompt just right really negates a lot of the value of delegating a one-off task to an agent.
[1]: https://deepmind.google/technologies/project-mariner/
This looks like its in browser through the standard $20 Pro fee, which is huge. (EDIT: $200 a month plan so less of a slam dunk but still might be worth it)
Is there any open source or cheap ways to automate things on your computer? For instance I was thinking about a workflow like:
1. Use web to search for [companies] with conditions
2. Use linked in sales navigator to identify people in specific companies and loose search on job title or summary / experience
3. Collect the names for review
Or linked in only: Look at leads provided, and identify any companies they had worked for previously and find similar people in that job title
It doesn't have to be computer use, but given that it relies on my LinkedIn login, it would have to be.
MacOS has had Automator since 2005. It's far more like "programming" to use than a 2024-tier ML based system, but it was designed for non-programmers, and lots of people do use it.
Personally, I hate it.
So the workflow for the human is ask the AI to do several things, then in the meantime between issuing new instructions, look at paused AI operator/agent flows stemming from prior instructions and unblock/approve them.
Like a general instructing an army.
I do find it is best when combined with other capabilities so the internal reasoning is more "if Computer Use is the best for solving this stage of the question, use Computer Use. Otherwise, don't.", instead of full Computer Use reliance. So e.g. you might see it triggered for auto-formatting but not writing SQL.
Will report back how it compares vs Operator CUA once we get access!
"[Operator safety risks and mitigations] Harmful tasks: User is misaligned"
Looking forward to seeing some more of the examples for when openai considers their users as "misaligned", whatever that actually even means anymore.
Soon we will have home appliances and vehicles telling you about how aligned you are, and whether you need to improve your alignment score before you can open your fridge.
It is only a matter of time before this will apply to your financial transactions as well.
Also, if you were under the impression that machine-learned (or otherwise) restrictions aren't already applied to purchases made with your cards, you're in for an unfortunate bit of news there as well.
Did you not eat enough already? Come to think of it, do you not think you had enough internet for today Darious? You need to rest so that you can give 110% at <insert employer>. Proper food alignment is very important to a human.
The EU is also making good progress on financial transactions – they're set to ban cash transactions over $10,000 by 2027.
Examples:
- "operator, please sign up for 100 fake Reddit accounts and have them regularly make posts praising product X."
- "operator, please order the components need to make a high-yield bomb."
- "operator, please go harass my ex on Instagram"
While you can see how the word is formally valid and analogous in both cases, the connotation is that the user is being judged by the moral standards of a commercial vendor, which is about as Cyberpunk Dystopian as you can get.
All humans with politics not aligned with "The median sentiment of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors"
---
Private, you better realign yourself in the next 60 seconds!
---
So sorry, your alignment score seems to be too low for this promotion.
---
Citizens, peacefully disperse and align yourselves.
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Denying interoperability is so culturally ingrained at this point, that it got pretty much baked into entire web stack. The only force currently countering this is accessibility - screen readers are pretty much an interoperability backdoor with legal backing in some situations, so not every company gets to ignore it.
No, we'll have to settle for "chat agents" powered by multimodal LLMs working as general-purpose web scrappers, because those models are the ultimate form of adversarial interoperability, and chat agents are the cheapest, least-effort way to let users operate them.
For example, McDonald's has heavily shifted away from cashiers taking orders and instead is using the kiosks to have customers order. The downside of this is 1) it's incredibly unsanitary and 2) customers are so goddamn slow at tapping on that god awful screen. An AI agent could actually take orders with surprisingly good accuracy.
Now, whether we want that in the world is a whole different debate.
And would this company spend billions of dollars for this infinitesimally small increase in convenience? No, of course not; you are not the real customer here. Consider reading between the lines and thinking about what you are sacrificing just for the sake of minor convenience.
"I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different...How beautiful it is to get up and go do something."
Dont be limited with these examples.
How about Airline booking, try different airlines, go to the confirmation screen. then the user can check if everything is allright and if the user wants to finish the booking on the most cheapest one.
Talking to an x-Model (still not AI), just like talking to a human, has never been, is not now, and will never be faster than looking at an information-dense table of data.
x-Models (will never be AI) will eat the world though, long after the dream of talking to a computer to reserve a table has died, because they are so good at flooding social media with bullshit to facilitate the sales of drop-shipped garbage to hundreds of millions of people.
That being said, it is highly likely that is an extremely large group of people who are so braindead that they need a robot to click through TripAdvisor links for them to create a boring, sterile, assembly-line one-day tour of Rome.
Whether or not those people have enough money to be extracted from them to make running such a service profitable remains to be seen.
The Rome trip is even more absurd. Part of the fun of a trip is figuring out what you want to do.
This seems like a product aimed at the delusional, self important, managerial class.
But… what if I told you that AI could generate an context-specific user interface on the fly to accomplish the specific task at hand. This way we don't have to deal with the random (and often hostile) user interfaces from random websites but still enjoy the convenience of it. I think this will be the future.
Now with the power of AI we have added back in that middle man to countless more services!
If these are your pain points in life, and they're worth spending $500b to solve, you must live in an insane bubble.
Maybe it could read HN for me and tell me if there is anything I'd find interesting. But then how would I slack off?
I am not looking forward to a trip booked for wrong dates with the hotel name confused/hallucinated for a different one.
Let the bot deal with the ads, the cookie banners, the upsells, "newsletters" and all of the other web BS we deal with.
The bot clicks through the front door of the website, just like us. No APIs, no keys, no nothing.
"Hey Siri, grab me a bottle of slow release 500mg Vitamin C from either Amazon or Walmart, whichever has the best deal. Kthx"
and I'm surprised that people don't bring this visualisation up more often.
Are these tasks really complex enough for people that they are itching to relegate the remaining scrap of required labor to a machine? I always feel like I'm missing something when companies hold up restaurant reservations (etc.) as use-cases for agents. The marginal gain vs. just going to the site/app feels tiny. (Granted, it could be an important accessibility win for some users.)
I think I sympathize with your feeling but I don't agree with the premise of the question. Do you have or have you ever had a human personal assistant or secretary?
An effective human personal assistant can feel like a gift from God. Suddenly a lot of the things that prevent you from concentrating on what you absolutely must focus on, especially if you have a busy life, are magically sorted out. The person knows what you need and knows when you need it and gets it for you; they understand what you ask for and guess what you forgot to ask for. Things you needed organized become organized while you work after giving minimal instructions. Life just gets so much better!
When I imagine that machines might be able to become good or effective personal assistants for everyone … If this stuff ever works well it will be a huge life upgrade for everyone. Imagine always having someone who can help you, ready to help you. My father would call the secretary pool to send someone to his office. My kids will probably just speak and powerful machines will show up to help.
And I'm not knocking the idea of agents. I can certainly imagine other tasks ("research wedding planners", "organize my tax info", "find the best local doctor", "scrape all the bike accident info in all the towns in my county") where they could be a benefit.
It's the focus on these itty bitty consumer tasks I don't get. Even if I did have a personal assistant, I still can't imagine I'd ask them to make a reservation for me on OpenTable, or find tickets for me on Stubhub. I mean, these apps already kind of function like assistants, don't they?, even without any AI fanciness. All I do is tell them what I want and press a few buttons, and there's a precise interface for doing so that is tailored to the task in each case; the UX has been hyper-optimized over time by market forces to be fast and convenient to me so that they can take my money. Using them is hardly any slower than asking another person to do the task for me.
I feel like people keep trying to push voice/chat interfaces for things that just flat out suck for voice? The #1 think I look for on a doordash page is a picture of the food. The #1 thing on a stubhub page? The seat map of course. Even things that are less visual like a flight booking, not only is it something that is uncommon and expensive so I don't want to fiddle with some potentially buggy overlay, I can scan a big list of times and numbers like 100X faster than an AI can tediously read them out to me. It only works if I can literally blindly trust that it got the best result result 100%, which is not something I think even a dedicated human assistant could achieve all the time.
I've personally tried using voice to input address in the google nav, and it never understands me, so I've abandoned the whole idea.
If the machines are smart enough, shouldn’t they be able to build better interfaces to existing software?
With that aside, it seems like there are two things at play in this demo:
1. Pixel-tuned GPT-4o
2. “Agent” in prod (supervisor loop + operator loop)
Will be interesting to see if they open those up as separate tools in the future, or if they let this fall to the wayside like GPTs, Dalle, etc.
There is no "intelligence" in any of this. Just a whole lot of automation.
Unlike this demo, it uses a simpler interface (Vim bindings over the browser) to make control flow easier without a fine-tuned model (e.g. type “s” instead of click X,Y coords)
I was surprised how well it worked — it even passed the captcha on Amazon!
[0] https://github.com/jumploops/vimGPT.js
I understand that in theory it's more flexible, but I always imagined some sort of standard, where apps and services can expose a set of pre-approved actions on the user's behalf. And the user can add/revoke privileges from agents at any point. Kind of like OAuth scopes.
Imagine having "app stores" where you "install" apps like Gmail or Uber or whatever on your agent of choice, define the privileges you wish the agent to have on those apps, and bam, it now has new capabilities. No browser clicks needed. You can configure it at any time. You can audit when it took action on your behalf. You can see exactly how app devs instructed the agent to use it (hell, you can even customize it). And, it's probably much faster, cheaper, and less brittle (since it doesn't need to understand any pixels).
Seems like better UX to me. But probably more difficult to get app developers on board.
That's it. The problem is getting Postmates to agree to give away control of their UI. Giving away their ability to upsell you and push whatever makes them more money. Its never going to happen. Netflix still isn't integrated with Apple TV properly because they don't want to give away that access.
I'm not convinced this is the path forward for computers either though.
AI’s are (just) starting to devalue the moat benefits of human-only interfaces. New entrants that preemptively give up on human-only “security” or moats, have a clear new opening at the low end. Especially with development costs dropping. (Specifics of product or service being favorable.)
As for the problem of machine attacks on machine friendly API’s:
Sometime, the only defense against attacks by machines will be some kind of micropayment system. Payments too small to be relevant to anyone getting value, but don’t scale for anyone trying to externalize costs onto their target (what all attacks essentially are).
Open API interoperability is the dream but it's clear it will never happen unless it's forced by law.
With this approach they'll have to contend with the agent running into all the anti-bot measures that sites have implemented to deal with abuse. CAPTCHAs, flagging or blocking datacenter IP addresses, etc.
Maybe deals could be struck to allow agents to be whitelisted, but that assumes the agents won't also be used for abuse. If you could get ChatGPT to spam Reddit[1] then Reddit probably wouldn't cooperate.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/oh-no-this-startup-is-using-ai-agents-to...
In nearly every case (that an end user cares about), an API will also have a GUI frontend. The GUI is discoverable, able to be authenticated against, definitely exists, and generally usable by the lowest common denominator. Teaching the AI to use this generically, solves the same problem as implementing support for a bunch of APIs without the discoverability and existence problems. In many ways this is horrific compute waste, but it's also a generic MxN solution.
OS specific, but Apple has the Scripting Support API [0] and Shortcut API for their app. Works great.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/scripti...
It's certainly a much more difficult approach, but it scales so much better. There's such a long-tail of small websites and apps that people will want to integrate with. There's no way OpenAI is going to negotiate a partnership/integration with <legacy business software X>, let alone internal software at medium to large size corporations. If OpenAI (or Anthropic) can solve the general problem, "do arbitrary work task at computer", the size of the prize is enormous.
When iPhones first came out I had to use Safari all the time. Now almost everything has an app. The long tail is getting shorter.
You can even have several Operator-y apps to choose from! And they can work across different LLMs!
Even when it comes to shopping, most of the time I spend is in researching alternatives according to my desired criteria. Operators doesn't help with that. o1 doesn't help because it's not connected to the internet. GPT-4o doesn't help because it struggles to iterate or perform > 1 search at a time.
https://www.ddisco.com/
Instead we need apps that have a human interface for users, and a machine interface for models. I've been building web applets [2] as an lightweight protocol on top of the web to achieve this. It's in early stages, but I'm inviting the first projects to start building with it & accepting contributions.
[1]: https://unternet.co/
[2]: https://github.com/unternet-co/web-applets/
If your product has a well documented OpenAPI endpoint (not to be confused with OpenAI), then you're basically done as a developer. Just add that endpoint to the "app store", choose your logo, and add your bank account for $$.
I sincerely hope it's not the future we're heading to (but it might be inevitable, sadly).
If it becomes a popular trend, developers will start making "AI-first" apps that you have to use AI to interact with to get the full functionality. See also: mobile first.
The developer's incentive is to control the experience for a mix of the users' ends and the developer's ends. Functionality being what users want and monetization being what developers want. Devs don't expose APIs for the same reason why hackers want them - it commodifies the service.
An AI-first app only makes sense if the developer controls the AI and is developing the app to sell AI subscriptions. An independent AI company has no incentive to support the dev's monetization and every incentive to subvert it in favor of their own.
(EDIT: This is also why AI agents will "use" mice and keyboards. The agent provider needs the app or service to think they're interacting with the actual human user instead of a bot, or else they'll get blocked.)
(or, perhaps, agents could use web accessibility tools if they're set up, incentivizing developers to make better use of them)
You answered your own question. You have to build the ecosystem if you want to have the facilities your comment outlines.
Whereas the facilities are already in place for "Operator"-like agents.
Even better, it will be difficult for companies who object to users accessing their resources in this fashion to block "Operator"-like agents.
And this kind of seems like an assistant for those.
ChatGPT voice and real-time video is really a beautiful computing experience. Same with Meta Ray Bans AI (if it could level up the real-time).
I'd like just a bulleted list of chats that I can ask it to do stuff and come back to vs watching it click things. E.g.: Setup my Whole Foods cart for the week again please.
Not to be that guy, but where's the evidence for this? People have been telling us that voice interaction is the future for many, many years, and we're in the future now and it's not. When I look around -- comparing today to ten years ago -- I see more people typing and tapping, not fewer, and voice interactions are still relatively rare. Is it all happening in private? Are there any public metrics for this?
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If the operator is told to find the most nutritious eggs for weight gain, the agent can refer to the nutrient labels (provided by Instacart) and then make a decision.
In the future we might well stumble into those kind of spaces on the net accidentally, look around briefly, then excuse ourselves back to the well-lit spaces meant for real people.