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OpenAI launches Operator—an agent that can use a computer for you

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After weeks of buzz, OpenAI has released Operator, its first AI agent. Operator is a web app that can carry out simple online tasks in a browser, such as booking concert tickets or filling an online grocery order. The app is powered by a new model called Computer-Using Agent—CUA (“coo-ah”), for short—built on top of OpenAI’s multimodal large language model GPT-4o.

Operator is available today at operator.chatgpt.com to people in the US signed up with ChatGPT Pro, OpenAI’s premium $200-a-month service. The company says it plans to roll the tool out to other users in the future.

OpenAI claims that Operator outperforms similar rival tools, including Anthropic’s Computer Use (a version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet that can carry out simple tasks on a computer) and Google DeepMind’s Mariner (a web-browsing agent built on top of Gemini 2.0).

The fact that three of the world’s top AI firms have converged on the same vision of what agent-based models could be makes one thing clear. The battle for AI supremacy has a new frontier—and it’s our computer screens.

“Moving from generating text and images to doing things is the right direction,” says Ali Farhadi, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). “It unlocks business, solves new problems.”

Farhadi thinks that doing things on a computer screen is a natural first step for agents: “It is constrained enough that the current state of the technology can actually work,” he says. “At the same time, it’s impactful enough that people might use it.” (AI2 is working on its own computer-using agent, says Farhadi.)

Don’t believe the hype

OpenAI’s announcement also confirms one of two rumors that circled the internet this week. One predicted that OpenAI was about to reveal an agent-based app, after details about Operator were leaked on social media ahead of its release. The other predicted that OpenAI was about to reveal a new superintelligence—and that officials for newly inaugurated President Trump would be briefed on it.

Could the two rumors be linked? OpenAI superfans wanted to know.

Nope. OpenAI gave MIT Technology Review a preview of Operator in action yesterday. The tool is an exciting glimpse of large language models’ potential to do a lot more than answer questions. But Operator is an experimental work in progress. “It’s still early, it still makes mistakes,” says Yash Kumar, a researcher at OpenAI.

(As for the wild superintelligence rumors, let’s leave that to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to address: “twitter hype is out of control again,” he posted on January 20. “pls chill and cut your expectations 100x!”)

Like Anthropic’s Computer Use and Google DeepMind’s Mariner, Operator takes screenshots of a computer screen and scans the pixels to figure out what actions it can take. CUA, the model behind it, is trained to interact with the same graphical user interfaces—buttons, text boxes, menus—that people use when they do things online. It scans the screen, takes an action, scans the screen again, takes another action, and so on. That lets the model carry out tasks on most websites that a person can use.

“Traditionally the way models have used software is through specialized APIs,” says Reiichiro Nakano, a scientist at OpenAI. (An API, or application programming interface, is a piece of code that acts as a kind of connector, allowing different bits of software to be hooked up to one another.) That puts a lot of apps and most websites off limits, he says: “But if you create a model that can use the same interface that humans use on a daily basis, it opens up a whole new range of software that was previously inaccessible.”

CUA also breaks tasks down into smaller steps and tries to work through them one by one, backtracking when it gets stuck. OpenAI says CUA was trained with techniques similar to those used for its so-called reasoning models, o1 and o3. 

Operator can be instructed to search for campsites in Yosemite with good picnic tables.
OPENAI

OpenAI has tested CUA against a number of industry benchmarks designed to assess the ability of an agent to carry out tasks on a computer. The company claims that its model beats Computer Use and Mariner in all of them.

For example, on OSWorld, which tests how well an agent performs tasks such as merging PDF files or manipulating an image, CUA scores 38.1% to Computer Use’s 22.0%  In comparison, humans score 72.4%. On a benchmark called WebVoyager, which tests how well an agent performs tasks in a browser, CUA scores 87%, Mariner 83.5%, and Computer Use 56%. (Mariner can only carry out tasks in a browser and therefore does not score on OSWorld.)

For now, Operator can also only carry out tasks in a browser. OpenAI plans to make CUA’s wider abilities available in the future via an API that other developers can use to build their own apps. This is how Anthropic released Computer Use in December.

OpenAI says it has tested CUA’s safety, using red teams to explore what happens when users ask it to do unacceptable tasks (such as research how to make a bioweapon), when websites contain hidden instructions designed to derail it, and when the model itself breaks down. “We’ve trained the model to stop and ask the user for information before doing anything with external side effects,” says Casey Chu, another researcher on the team.

Look! No hands

To use Operator, you simply type instructions into a text box. But instead of calling up the browser on your computer, Operator sends your instructions to a remote browser running on an OpenAI server. OpenAI claims that this makes the system more efficient. It’s another key difference between Operator, Computer Use and Mariner (which runs inside Google’s Chrome browser on your own computer).

Because it’s running in the cloud, Operator can carry out multiple tasks at once, says Kumar. In the live demo, he asked Operator to use OpenTable to book him a table for two at 6.30 p.m. at a restaurant called Octavia in San Francisco. Straight away, Operator opened up OpenTable and started clicking through options. “As you can see, my hands are off the keyboard,” he said.

OpenAI is collaborating with a number of businesses, including OpenTable, StubHub, Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber. The nature of those collaborations is not exactly clear, but Operator appears to suggest preset websites to use for certain tasks.

While the tool navigated dropdowns on OpenTable, Kumar sent Operator off to find four tickets for a Kendrick Lamar show on StubHub. While it did that, he pasted a photo of a handwritten shopping list and asked Operator to add the items to his Instacart.

He waited, flicking between Operator’s tabs. “If it needs help or if it needs confirmations, it’ll come back to you with questions and you can answer it,” he said.

Kumar says he has been using Operator at home. It helps him stay on top of grocery shopping: “I can just quickly click a photo of a list and send it to work,” he says.

It’s also become a sidekick in his personal life. “I have a date night every Thursday,” says Kumar. So every Thursday morning, he instructs Operator to send him a list of five restaurants that have a table for two that evening. “Of course, I could do that, but it takes me 10 minutes,” he says. “And I often forget to do it. With Operator, I can run the task with one click. There’s no burden of booking.”

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The Download: US WHO exit risks, and underground hydrogen

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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

This is what might happen if the US withdraws from the WHO

On January 20, his first day in office, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization.

The US is the biggest donor to the WHO, and the loss of this income is likely to have a significant impact on the organization, which develops international health guidelines, investigates disease outbreaks, and acts as an information-sharing hub for member states. But the US will also lose out. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

Why the next energy race is for underground hydrogen

It might sound like something straight out of the 19th century, but one of the most cutting-edge areas in energy today involves drilling deep underground to hunt for materials that can be burned for energy. The difference is that this time, instead of looking for fossil fuels, the race is on to find natural deposits of hydrogen.

In an age of lab-produced breakthroughs, it feels like something of a regression to go digging for resources. But looking underground could help meet energy demand while also addressing climate change. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Cattle burping remedies: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025

Companies are finally making real progress on one of the trickiest problems for climate change: cow burps.

The world’s herds of cattle belch out methane as a by-product of digestion, as do sheep and goats. That powerful greenhouse gas makes up the single biggest source of livestock emissions, which together contribute 11% to 20% of the world’s total climate pollution, depending on the analysis.

Enter the cattle burping supplement. DSM-Firmenich, a Netherlands-based conglomerate, says its Bovaer food supplement significantly reduces the amount of methane that cattle belch—and it’s now available in dozens of countries. Read the full story.

—James Temple

Cattle burping remedies is one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2025, MIT Technology Review’s annual list of tech to watch. Check out the rest of the list, and cast your vote for the honorary 11th breakthrough.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Tech leaders are squabbling over Trump’s new Stargate AI project
Musk says its backers don’t have enough money. Satya Nadella and Sam Altman disagree. (The Guardian)+ It’s far from the first time Musk and Altman have clashed. (Insider $)
+ The scrap could threaten Musk’s cordial relationship with Donald Trump. (FT $)

2 Trump has threatened to withhold aid from California
He falsely claimed the state’s officials have been refusing to fight the fires with water. (WP $)
+ A new fire broke out along the Ventura County border last night. (LA Times $)

3 Redditors are weighing up banning links to X
In response to Elon Musk’s salute. (404 Media)
+ Not everyone agrees that the boycott will have the desired effect, though. (NYT $)

4 How right-leaning male YouTubers helped to elect Trump
Young men are responding favorably to content painting them as powerless. (Bloomberg $)

5 Why the US isn’t handing out bird flu vaccines right now
It’s not currently being treated as a priority. (Wired $)
+ How the US is preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Why you might be inadvertently following Trump on social media
And why it may take a while for Meta to honor requests to unfollow. (NYT $)
+ The company has denied secretly adding users to Trump’s followers list. (Insider $)+ Handily enough, Trump has ordered the US government to stop pressuring social media firms. (WP $)

7 Investors’ interest in weight-loss drugs is waning
A disappointing trial and falling sales spell bad news for the sector. (FT $)
+ Drugs like Ozempic now make up 5% of prescriptions in the US. (MIT Technology Review)

8 A software engineer is trolling OpenAI with a new domain name
Ananay Arora registered OGOpenAI.com to redirect to a Chinese AI lab. (TechCrunch)

9 Macbeth is being turned into an interactive video game
The Scottish play is being given a 21st century makeover. (The Verge)

10 Why measuring the quality of your sleep is so tough 💤
Not everyone agrees on what counts as good sleep, for a start. (New Scientist $)

Quote of the day

“I acknowledge that this action is largely just virtue signalling. But if somebody starts popping off Nazi salutes at the presidential inauguration of a purported ‘first world’ country, then virtue signalling is the least I can do.”

—A Reddit moderator explains their decision to ban links to X in their forum after Elon Musk’s gestures at a post-inauguration rally this week, NBC News reports.

The big story

Welcome to Chula Vista, where police drones respond to 911 calls

February 2023

In the skies above Chula Vista, California, where the police department runs a drone program, it’s not uncommon to see an unmanned aerial vehicle darting across the sky.

Chula Vista is one of a dozen departments in the US that operate what are called drone-as-first-responder programs, where drones are dispatched by pilots, who are listening to live 911 calls, and often arrive first at the scenes of accidents, emergencies, and crimes, cameras in tow.

But many argue that police forces’ adoption of drones is happening too quickly, without a well-informed public debate around privacy regulations, tactics, and limits. There’s also little evidence that drone policing reduces crime. Read the full story.

—Patrick Sisson

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)

+ If you were struck by the beautiful scenery in The Brutalist, check out where it was filmed.
+ This newly-unearthed, previously unreleased Tina Turner track is a banger.
+ What to expect from the art world in the next 12 months.
+ Let’s take a look at this year’s potential runners and riders for the Oscars.

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This is what might happen if the US withdraws from the WHO

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On January 20, his first day in office, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization. “Ooh, that’s a big one,” he said as he was handed the document.

The US is the biggest donor to the WHO, and the loss of this income is likely to have a significant impact on the organization, which develops international health guidelines, investigates disease outbreaks, and acts as an information-sharing hub for member states.

But the US will also lose out. “It’s a very tragic and sad event that could only hurt the United States in the long run,” says William Moss, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

A little unfair?

Trump appears to take issue with the amount the US donates to the WHO. He points out that it makes a much bigger contribution than China, a country with a population four times that of the US. “It seems a little unfair to me,” he said as he prepared to sign the executive order.

It is true that the US is far and away the biggest financial supporter of the WHO. The US contributed $1.28 billion over the two-year period covering 2022 and 2023. By comparison, the second-largest donor, Germany, contributed $856 million in the same period. The US currently contributes 14.5% of the WHO’s total budget.

But it’s not as though the WHO sends a billion-dollar bill to the US. All member states are required to pay membership dues, which are calculated as a percentage of a country’s gross domestic product. For the US, this figure comes to $130 million. China pays $87.6 million. But the vast majority of the US’s contributions to the WHO are made on a voluntary basis—in recent years, the donations have been part of multibillion-dollar spending on global health by the US government. (Separately, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributed $830 million over 2022 and 2023.)

There’s a possibility that other member nations will increase their donations to help cover the shortfall left by the US’s withdrawal. But it is not clear who will step up—or what implications changing the structure of donations will have.

Martin McKee, a professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, thinks it is unlikely that European members will increase their contributions by much. The Gulf states, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, on the other hand, may be more likely to pay more. But again, it isn’t clear how this will pan out, or whether any of these countries will expect greater influence over global health policy decisions as a result of increasing their donations.

Deep impacts

WHO funds are spent on a range of global health projects—programs to eradicate polio, rapidly respond to health emergencies, improve access to vaccines and medicines, develop pandemic prevention strategies, and more. The loss of US funding is likely to have a significant impact on at least some of these programs.

It is not clear which programs will lose funding, or when they will be affected. The US is required to give 12 months’ notice to withdraw its membership, but voluntary contributions might stop before that time is up. 

For the last few years, WHO member states have been negotiating a pandemic agreement designed to improve collaboration on preparing for future pandemics. The agreement is set to be finalized in 2025. But these discussions will be disrupted by the US withdrawal, says McKee. It will “create confusion about how effective any agreement will be and what it will look like,” he says.

The agreement itself won’t make as big an impact without the US as a signatory, either, says Moss, who is also a member of a WHO vaccine advisory committee. The US would not be held to information-sharing standards that other countries could benefit from, and it might not be privy to important health information from other member nations. The global community might also lose out on the US’s resources and expertise. “Having a major country like the United States not be a part of that really undermines the value of any pandemic agreement,” he says.

McKee thinks that the loss of funding will also affect efforts to eradicate polio, and to control outbreaks of mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and Burundi, which continue to report hundreds of cases per week. The virus “has the potential to spread, including to the US,” he points out.

“Diseases don’t stick to national boundaries, hence this decision is not only concerning for the US, but in fact for every country in the world,” says Pauline Scheelbeek at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “With the US no longer reporting to the WHO nor funding part of this process, the evidence on which public health interventions and solutions should be based is incomplete.”

Moss is concerned about the potential for outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is a prominent antivaccine advocate, and Moss worries about potential changes to vaccination-based health policies in the US. That, combined with a weakening of the WHO’s ability to control outbreaks, could be a “double whammy,” he says: “We’re setting ourselves up for large measles disease outbreaks in the United States.”

At the same time, the US is up against another growing threat to public health: the circulation of bird flu on poultry and dairy farms. The US has seen outbreaks of the H5N1 virus on poultry farms in all states, and the virus has been detected in 928 dairy herds across 16 states, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There have been 67 reported human cases in the US, and one person has died. While we don’t yet have evidence that the virus can spread between people, the US and other countries are already preparing for potential outbreaks.

But this preparation relies on a thorough and clear understanding of what is happening on the ground. The WHO provides an important role in information sharing—countries report early signs of outbreaks to the agency, which then shares the information with its members. This kind of information not only allows countries to develop strategies to limit the spread of disease but can also allow them to share genetic sequences of viruses and develop vaccines. Member nations need to know what’s happening in the US, and the US needs to know what’s happening globally. “Both of those channels of communication would be hindered by this,” says Moss.

As if all of that weren’t enough, the US also stands to suffer in terms of its reputation as a leader in global public health. “By saying to the world ‘We don’t care about your health,’ it sends a message that is likely to reflect badly on it,” says McKee. “It’s a classic lose-lose situation.”

“It’s going to hurt global health,” says Moss. “It’s going to come back to bite us.”

Update: this article was amended to include commentary from Pauline Scheelbeek.

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Why the next energy race is for underground hydrogen

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It might sound like something straight out of the 19th century, but one of the most cutting-edge areas in energy today involves drilling deep underground to hunt for materials that can be burned for energy. The difference is that this time, instead of looking for fossil fuels, the race is on to find natural deposits of hydrogen.

Hydrogen is already a key ingredient in the chemical industry and could be used as a greener fuel in industries from aviation and transoceanic shipping to steelmaking. Today, the gas needs to be manufactured, but there’s some evidence that there are vast deposits underground.

I’ve been thinking about underground resources a lot this week, since I’ve been reporting a story about a new startup, Addis Energy. The company is looking to use subsurface rocks, and the conditions down there, to produce another useful chemical: ammonia. In an age of lab-produced breakthroughs, it feels like something of a regression to go digging for resources, but looking underground could help meet energy demand while also addressing climate change.

It’s rare that hydrogen turns up in oil and gas operations, and for decades, the conventional wisdom has been that there aren’t large deposits of the gas underground. Hydrogen molecules are tiny, after all, so even if the gas was forming there, the assumption was that it would just leak out.

However, there have been somewhat accidental discoveries of hydrogen over the decades, in abandoned mines or new well sites. There are reports of wells that spewed colorless gas, or flames that burned gold. And as people have looked more intentionally for hydrogen, they’ve started to find it.

As it turns out, hydrogen tends to build up in very different rocks from those that host oil and gas deposits. While fossil-fuel prospecting tends to focus on softer rocks, like organic-rich shale, hydrogen seems most plentiful in iron-rich rocks like olivine. The gas forms when chemical reactions at elevated temperature and pressure underground pull water apart. (There’s also likely another mechanism that forms hydrogen underground, called radiolysis, where radioactive elements emit radiation that can split water.)

Some research has put the potential amount of hydrogen available at around a trillion tons—plenty to feed our demand for centuries, even if we ramp up use of the gas.

The past few years have seen companies spring up around the world to try to locate and tap these resources. There’s an influx in Australia, especially the southern part of the country, which seems to have conditions that are good for making hydrogen. One startup, Koloma, has raised over $350 million to aid its geologic hydrogen exploration.

There are so many open questions for this industry, including how much hydrogen is actually going to be accessible and economical to extract. It’s not even clear how best to look for the gas today; researchers and companies are borrowing techniques and tools from the oil and gas industry, but there could be better ways.

It’s also unknown how this could affect climate change. Hydrogen itself may not warm the planet, but it can contribute indirectly to global warming by extending the lifetime of other greenhouse gases. It’s also often found with methane, a super-powerful greenhouse gas that could do major harm if it leaks out of operations at a significant level.

There’s also the issue of transportation: Hydrogen isn’t very dense, and it can be difficult to store and move around. Deposits that are far away from the final customers could face high costs that might make the whole endeavor uneconomical.  

But this whole area is incredibly exciting, and researchers are working to better understand it. Some are looking to expand the potential pool of resources by pumping water underground to stimulate hydrogen production from rocks that wouldn’t naturally produce the gas.

There’s something fascinating to me about using the playbook of the oil and gas industry to develop an energy source that could actually help humanity combat climate change. It could be a strategic move to address energy demand, since a lot of expertise has accumulated over the roughly 150 years that we’ve been digging up fossil fuels.

After all, it’s not digging that’s the problem—it’s emissions.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

This story from Science, published in 2023, is a great deep dive into the world of so-called “gold hydrogen.” Give it a read for more on the history and geology here.

For more on commercial efforts, specifically Koloma, give this piece from Canary Media a read.   

And for all the details on geologic ammonia and Addis Energy, check out my latest story here.

Another thing

Donald Trump officially took office on Monday and signed a flurry of executive orders. Here are a few of the most significant ones for climate:  

Trump announced his intention to once again withdraw from the Paris agreement. After a one-year waiting period, the world’s largest economy will officially leave the major international climate treaty. (New York Times)

The president also signed an order that pauses lease sales for offshore wind power projects in federal waters. It’s not clear how much the office will be able to slow projects that already have their federal permits. (Associated Press)

Another executive order, titled “Unleashing American Energy,” broadly signals a wide range of climate and energy moves. 
→ One section ends the “EV mandate.” The US government doesn’t have any mandates around EVs, but this bit is a signal of the administration’s intent to roll back policies and funding that support adoption of these vehicles. There will almost certainly be court battles. (Wired)
→ Another section pauses the disbursement of tens of billions of dollars for climate and energy. The spending was designated by Congress in two of the landmark laws from the Biden administration, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Again, experts say we can likely expect legal fights. (Canary Media)

Keeping up with climate

The Chinese automaker BYD built more electric vehicles in 2024 than Tesla did. The data signals a global shift to cheaper EVs and the continued dominance of China in the EV market. (Washington Post)

A pair of nuclear reactors in South Carolina could get a second chance at life. Construction halted at the VC Summer plant in 2017, $9 billion into the project. Now the site’s owner wants to sell. (Wall Street Journal)

→ Existing reactors are more in-demand than ever, as I covered in this story about what’s next for nuclear power. (MIT Technology Review)

In California, charging depots for electric trucks are increasingly choosing to cobble together their own power rather than waiting years to connect to the grid. These solar- and wind-powered microgrids could help handle broader electricity demand. (Canary Media)

Wildfires in Southern California are challenging even wildlife that have adapted to frequent blazes. As fires become more frequent and intense, biologists worry about animals like mountain lions. (Inside Climate News)

Experts warn that ash from the California wildfires could be toxic, containing materials like lead and arsenic. (Associated Press)

Burning wood for power isn’t necessary to help the UK meet its decarbonization goals, according to a new analysis. Biomass is a controversial green power source that critics say contributes to air pollution and harms forests. (The Guardian) 

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