OpenAI's Operator, Meta's Fears, and China's Supermodel

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THEWHITEBOX

TLDR;

Product:

🧐 OpenAI Releases “Operator”

😎 Sam Altman Announces o3-mini

😟 Perplexity Fires Back

Technology:

👾 Finally, a 3D Generator That Works… And That You Can Use

☹️ Meta’s GenAI Teams Enter ‘Panic Mode’

Markets:

💰 Blackstone Invests $300 Million into Data Company

TREND OF THE WEEK: DeepSeek r1, Much More Than Good Looks

AGENTS

OpenAI Releases ‘Operator’

Two days ago, in our Premium news segment, we discussed OpenAI's potential release of its agent product, Operator.

And, well, the wait is over.

Yesterday, in a keynote, they showed the next step in their “journey to AGI.” Essentially, it’s a ChatGPT-style interface (the UI is almost identical), with the difference that you can choose the ‘plug-ins’ that the AI will use.

Of course, this AI is an agent, a large language model (LLM), because it’s based on GPT-4o, called CUA, and can perform several actions on your behalf. Under the hood, the LLM has access to a virtual environment where a remote browser interface is raised so the agent can interact with it. This is crucial to understanding how Operator works because the model doesn’t interact with websites via APIs, the traditional method for automating agents.

Instead, it’s a vision-language-action model that can read computer screens, understand them, and choose the next action based on the user’s goal, such as “book me a table in a vegan restaurant via Opentable in downtown LA at 7 pm”.

As you may have guessed, this isn’t new. It is OpenAI’s response to Anthropic’s Computer Use and Google Project Mariner computer agent features, all of which promise to automate most computer tasks humans perform.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

Although it’s a really cool demo, I can’t say I’m impressed.

Creating machines that interact with web interfaces is not new; we’ve seen it for years with Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Of course, this is more powerful than RPA, as the latter requires extensive rule-based coding to work (it cannot ‘understand’ things and thus follows pre-coded instructions).

But the real reason I’m not impressed is that Operator is pretty much useless in its current state. You must be extremely lazy to see Operator as a better option for searching a table in OpenTable than doing it yourself. This reminds me of OpenAI’s GPTs, released almost two years ago, which looked like they would transform the world.

Currently, I don’t know of a single person who uses them.

When would Operator be useful, if ever? Ask it to run Skyscanner for flights every few hours until it finds the best flight deal to Chicago. Then, it would elaborate and book a tourist plan that includes monuments, restaurants, and hotels that minimize commute time and consider a particular set of restrictions (low-carb dinners, 4-star hotels, etc.).

Now, that’s pretty powerful and really saves humans time.

However, as we discussed in our review a few weeks ago, agents suffer from a ‘many-steps’ illness. Because they are prone to errors, even if your agent has a 95% chance…

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