AI: 1)OpenAI launches web browser to compete with Google Chrome; 2)Gmail now uses AI to help you find meeting times. As The Verge reports, the AI-powered ‘Help me schedule’ feature will use the context of your email and your Google Calendar to help find available time slots.

1)OpenAI launches web browser to compete with Google Chrome

Courtesy Barrie360,com and The Associated Press

By Matt O’brien And Michael Liedtke, October 21, 2025

OpenAI said Tuesday it is introducing its own web browser, Atlas, putting the ChatGPT maker in direct competition with Google as more internet users rely on artificial intelligence to answer their questions.

Making its popular AI chatbot a gateway to online searches could allow OpenAI, the world’s most valuable startup, to pull in more internet traffic and the revenue made from digital advertising. It could also further cut off the lifeblood of online publishers if ChatGPT so effectively feeds people summarized information that they stop exploring the internet and clicking on traditional web links.

OpenAI has said ChatGPT already has more than 800 million users but many of them get it for free. The San Francisco-based company also sells paid subscriptions but is losing more money than it makes and has been looking for ways to turn a profit.

OpenAI said Atlas launches Tuesday on Apple laptops and will later come to Microsoft’s Windows, Apple’s iOS phone operating system and Google’s Android phone system.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it a “rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be about and how to use one.”

OpenAI’s browser is coming out just a few months after one of its executives testified that the company would be interested in buying Google’s industry-leading Chrome browser if a federal judge had required it to be sold to prevent the abuses that resulted in Google’s ubiquitous search engine being declared an illegal monopoly.

But U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta last month issued a decision that rejected the Chrome sale sought by the U.S. Justice Department in the monopoly case, partly because he believed advances in the AI industry already are reshaping the competitive landscape.

OpenAI’s browser will face a daunting challenge against Chrome, which has amassed about 3 billion worldwide users and has been adding some AI features from Google’s Gemini technology.

Chrome’s immense success could provide a blueprint for OpenAI as it enters the browser market. When Google released Chrome in 2008, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was so dominant that few observers believed a new browser could mount a formidable threat.

But Chrome quickly won over legions of admirers by loading webpages more quickly than Internet Explorer while offering other advantages that enabled it to upend the market. Microsoft ended up abandoning Explorer and introducing its Edge browser, which operates similarly to Chrome.

Perplexity, another smaller AI startup, rolled out its own Comet browser earlier this year. It also expressed interest in buying Chrome and eventually submitted an unsolicited $34.5 billion offer for the browser that hit a dead end when Mehta decided against a Google breakup.

Altman said he expects a chatbot interface to replace a traditional browser’s URL bar as the center of how he hopes people will use the internet in the future.

“Tabs were great, but we haven’t seen a lot of browser innovation since then,” he said on a video presentation aired Tuesday.

A premium feature of the ChatGPT Atlas browser is an “agent mode” that accesses the laptop and effectively clicks around the internet on the person’s behalf, armed with a users’ browser history and what they are seeking to learn and explaining its process as it searches.

“It’s using the internet for you,” Altman said.

About 60% of Americans overall — and 74% of those under 30 — use AI to find information at least some of the time, making online searches one of the most popular uses of AI technology, according to findings from an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll taken over the summer.

Google since last year has automatically provided AI-generated responses that attempt to answer a person’s search query, appearing at the top of results.

But the reliance on AI chatbots to summarize information they collect online has raised a number of concerns, including the technology’s propensity to confidently spout false information, a problem known as hallucination.

2)Gmail now uses AI to help you find meeting times.

The AI-powered ‘Help me schedule’ feature will use the context of your email and your Google Calendar to help find available time slots.

Emma Roth, October 14, 2025

Emma Roth is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.

Google is trying to make it easier to find time to meet with coworkers and clients. It’s launching a new Gemini AI-powered “Help me schedule” feature that suggests meeting time slots based on your Google Calendar and the context of the message. You can directly insert the suggestions into your email.

The new “Help me schedule” option will automatically appear within the email you’re composing when Gemini detects that you’re trying to schedule a meeting. Click it, and you’ll see your available time slots that you can quickly pop into an email. If your coworker wants to meet for 30 minutes next week, Gemini will use that context to find 30-minute slots based on your availability during that time frame.

The ‘Help me schedule’ button will appear inside your email draft.

You can also edit the suggested times and add additional slots. When your recipient selects a time from the email, Google will automatically put a Calendar invite on both of your calendars. It’s just one of the AI features Google has rolled out for Gmail lately, as the app can already summarize emails and surface an “Add to Calendar” button when it detects that you’ve received a message about an upcoming event.

For now, the “Help me schedule” feature only supports scheduling meetings between two people, not groups. It’s rolling out now for Workspace customers, as well as Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers.