Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

— Niels Bohr

What happens in the near future?

  1. Lesser eyeballs and the Ad ecosystem

    Deep Research’s release overshadowed Operator because it was launched within 2 weeks and Operator use is limited to US only at the moment. Makes it seem almost intentional.

    OpenAI recently launched two tools in quick succession: Deep Research, aimed at accelerating scientific discovery, and Operator. While Deep Research debuted globally, Operator remains limited to U.S. users—a contrast amplified by their releases just two weeks apart. Looks almost intentional, since it raises a bunch of questions around what using the internet is going to look like in the coming years, and it probably gives OpenAI much more time to iteratively improve the underlying CUA powering Operator.

    Right now, Operator works through a Chrome extension where you can watch everything it does in the browser. But eventually, all those UI interactions won’t matter much - the CUA will just hit APIs directly or handle things behind the scenes. Makes you wonder what happens to digital advertising when users aren’t even seeing the pages. Take Uber - they make a billion dollars from ads. What happens to that when AI agents are browsing instead of humans? Sure, OpenAI probably has deals with them like they do with publishers like Axios, but long-term?

  2. Shifting onus of choosing links to surface from user to AI agent

    The other big shift is who’s picking what content to look at. Right now, humans choose which links to click, which articles to read. But as more stuff goes behind paywalls and more sites use dynamic paywalls, AI agents like Deep Research might end up working with whatever sources they can get. What happens to quality when AIs, not humans, are deciding what information is worth looking at?

    gergely-orosz-tweet Source: X

    Eventually, agentic search will get better to the point of being as discerning as experienced humans in sifting through information and decided what’s high quality and what’s not. But by the time we do reach there, we might already have $1000/month plan of using Deep Research within firm-wide subscription network while the regular $200/month plan struggles to keep up.