Is ChatGPT Operator Terrifying or Simply Broken?

About this video

David tests ChatGPT Operator, OpenAI’s browser-using agent, across four tasks and finds it promising but unreliable. He explains Operator was only available in the United States on the $200-a-month Pro plan as a research preview, runs in a cloud browser, and uses computer vision to see pages and act with a mouse and keyboard. In the shopping test it succeeds: it uses Bing and Amazon filters to find a 13-inch MacBook with 8 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage under $700, though it cannot make the purchase itself. Flight search fails badly — date pickers on Kayak confuse it, pop-ups recur, it searches the wrong dates, takes about seven minutes, and finds a $296 flight versus about $200 David found himself. Web scraping works better: asked to fill a blank spreadsheet with contact details for the head coaches of the top three men’s college basketball teams (Auburn, Duke and Alabama), it creates its own column headers, populates rows, and on follow-up adds team names and corrected profile links. The final Naples, Italy itinerary test for two adults on March 12 partially works for a train from Rome — including removing a $19 rail insurance add-on and taking over the browser for payment — but hotel booking collapses into a 37-minute loop on Booking.com over March 12-13 dates. His verdict: glimmers of magic, not ready for prime time.

Key takeaways

• Operator was a US-only research preview requiring the $200-a-month Pro plan, using a cloud browser and computer vision to click and type like a human
• Product search succeeded: it filtered Amazon to find a 13-inch MacBook with 8 GB RAM and 512 GB storage under $700, but could not complete a purchase
• Flight booking failed on date pickers — it found a $296 flight after about seven minutes versus roughly $200 found manually
• Spreadsheet lead scraping succeeded for Auburn, Duke and Alabama head coaches, creating headers itself and fixing team names and links on iteration
• Complex multi-step booking broke down: the Naples hotel search looped for 37 minutes on Booking.com without finishing

Episode details: published March 27, 2025 · 15:47 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Kevin Stratvert’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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