A few years ago, my colleague Olga Khazan shared a radical proposition: What if we stopped firing our friends' The friendship breakup has become a feature of modern life: Online, advice abounds on 'how to aggressively confront, or even abandon, friends who disappoint us,' Olga noted. But what if another solution exists' Instead of firing your friends, psychologists told her, it helps to expand your circle, allowing more people to provide you with different types of support or camaraderie: 'Rather than resting on one pillar, healthy friendship is better imagined as crowd-surfing'many hands holding you up,' Olga writes. The magic of friendship is in its murkiness: We meet a new friend, make room for them in our lives, and sometimes come to rely on them more than we ever expected. But unlike in other relationships, communicating our needs isn't the norm in friendships'which gives our friends more opportunities to disappoint us. Today's newsletter explores what to do when your friends aren't giving you what you need....
According to Sam Altman, your web browser is outdated. 'AI represents a rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be,' OpenAI's CEO said yesterday when announcing the company's latest product: ChatGPT Atlas. In this new AI-powered browser, ChatGPT becomes the central mechanism for surfing the internet. From any webpage in Atlas, you can click an 'Ask ChatGPT' button to open a side conversation with the chatbot. Want cooking inspiration' Atlas can pull from recipes you've recently viewed through its 'browser memories' feature'no need to personally dig up the NYT Cooking recipe you opened and closed last week. And as Altman and his colleagues were eager to show off while introducing Atlas yesterday, the browser has an 'agent' mode, in which ChatGPT can use the web for you. For instance, it can, in theory, research and (with your permission) book a vacation. Given all of these big promises, I was struck, when I tried Atlas for myself, by how much the experience simply felt like browsing the internet. Fire up the browser, and Atlas opens ChatGPT in a new tab'exactly what Chrome does with Google. (Atlas is built on Chromium, the same open-source browser project developed by Google that is the foundation for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.) Clicking on the 'Ask ChatGPT' button in Atlas was akin to using any other browser and opening up ChatGPT. The browser memories are similar to the 'memory' feature already built into ChatGPT. I have found agent mode, if impressive, extremely slow and buggy, and it has been a stand-alone feature in ChatGPT since this past summer. OpenAI's bold attempt to rethink how people use the internet boils down to a fairly ordinary web browser that eliminates the already-tiny amount of friction needed to navigate to ChatGPT.com....
See images from around the world over the past week, including a long holiday across China, night surfing at a wave pool in Germany, reactions to a cease-fire deal in Gaza and Israel, the last day of Oktoberfest in Germany, and much more....
A cattle drive in Germany, anti-government protests in France and Nepal, the U.S. Open Tennis Championships in New York, surfing Chihuahuas in California, and much more...
