OpenAI announced Operator in January 2025: an agent that handles web tasks autonomously. Book restaurants, order groceries, plan vacations. The demo looked smooth.
You get a $200/month research preview that stops at every CAPTCHA and password field. It refuses financial transactions. Early users compared performance to "watching an arthritic half-blind grandma use a rusty typewriter."
The 38.1% benchmark success rate tells you everything. Rate limits on concurrent tasks. Ninety-day data retention. Computational costs OpenAI calls "cost-prohibitive for widespread use." The gap between "can interact with browsers" and "can reliably complete tasks" remains enormous.
Novel architecture, genuine innovation. But production reality? Still distant.