Meet Ben Goodger: The Kiwi behind ChatGPT maker OpenAI’…

For the third time in his career, the ex-Aucklander is driving a web browser revolution.

Ben Goodger, head of engineering for OpenAI's recently launched web browser, ChatGPT Atlas. Photo / Alyse Wright The Kiwi behind Google’s Chrome – which smashed Microsoft’s web browser monopoly – is now the driving force behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas, a browser that could, in turn, dethrone Chrome. It’s a huge change from Ben Goodger’s teenage years, when internet access was beyond his family’s budget.

During a visit home, he talked to the Herald about AI’s promise and the human skills he thinks it will never replace. Ben Goodger, the high-flying Kiwi tech star at ChatGPT maker OpenAI, is a bit analogue around the edges. “I have a smart litter box and I don’t need my wrist to vibrate every time our cat does its business,” he told the Herald during a recent visit home to Auckland. Similarly, he’s gone back to hard-copy books, and arrives at the Herald’s offices clutching a couple he’s just bought at Whitcoulls.

No one could mistake Goodger for a Luddite, of course. His iPhone and MacBook remain within grabbing distance during his interview. But there’s something reassuring about him not being mindlessly pro-tech at a time when AI is upending everything. He’s the driving force behind OpenAI’s first web browser, the recently launched ChatGPT Atlas, which some pundits see as a threat to Google Chrome’s dominance.

Shortly after Goodger talked to the Herald, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey laid off 4000 staff from his latest venture, online payments company Block, saying AI tools could do the same work. Dorsey said many firms would follow suit over the year ahead. A Bloomberg report called Dorsey’s move “AI washing”. The news service quoted an analyst who said the real story was that Block had over-hired during Covid, when it rapidly tripled its workforce.

It was now simply returning to the norm. Still, the fear is real, and AI is evolving much faster than other earlier disruptive forces that have changed the workplace. What’s Goodger’s message for white-collar workers who have the heebie-jeebies about AI taking their jobs? “I don’t like to think of it as sort of a zero-sum game of humans versus the machines. And it’s more like, how can we get more out of every human?” “When I joined OpenAI, I started writing code again,” says Goodger, who joined the ChatGPT maker in June 2024 from Google.

“I’d had a fairly senior management position at Google [vice-president], so I hadn’t written a lot of code in years. I’d become extremely rusty. “So I used ChatGPT to teach me how to code again in a different language on a different platform.” He adds, “Earlier in my career, I struggled a bit with impostor syndrome. I’d think, ‘Should I even ask this question? Will I sound dumb?’ No question is too dumb for AI.” “OpenAI’s a fantastic place to work.

They’re supporting me growing the team, with basically as many good engineers as I can find. We’ll grow the team a lot over the coming year.” AI is taking over a lot of software development tasks, and Goodger says, “I wrote software for many years, but I don’t know if writing the code itself is the most fun. It’s seeing the thing that you made come up on the screen and having that ‘Aha, this actually works’ moment.” AI can code at superhuman speed and help humans accelerate their work, but it’s people who come up with novel concepts, the new features that no one else is doing.

He says AI can help professional coders work faster, but “vibe-coding” (creating software with natural language commands) leads to more software, and more tweaks. He says he created some code to adjust the curtains in his smart home using OpenAI’s Codex (a coding agent) – something he probably would not have bothered to dig out documentation for and research pre-AI, with home automation not being a speciality.

Today, it could be done in 15 minutes. A shopkeeper who never thought they had the time or funds to create their own website could now vibe-code it. “Now that they can just talk to these tools and have them make something for them, it will be pretty exciting to see what people can do.” Goodger says he’s even vibe-coded elements of Atlas, OpenAI’s web browser with ChatGPT built in, the better to ask questions or summarise content.

“It can explain a difficult concept that you might not understand the way the author of the page had written it.” Of course, all AI chatbots summarise, but with Atlas, ChatGPT is built into your browsing experience. Atlas can also take over common tasks (you can adjust how much access it has to your data and browsing history, or not). In the US, its agent mode can not only research a purchase or a holiday, but buy it for you too.

Remarkably, Atlas will be the third time Goodger has shepherded a revolutionary web browser through its early days. Now in his mid-40s and living in San Francisco, he has been in the web browser game since 1999, when he was in the second year of a computer engineering degree at Auckland University. It was the first time he had regular access to the “worldwide web” as it was often called back in the “dub-dub-dub” era.

It was a different story at high school. He would later write on the news site SF Gate, “I didn’t have internet access at home because it was expensive and we didn’t have a lot of money. I lived with my mother, who works as an accountant. I would occasionally be able to get internet access at her work.” At varsity, Goodger discovered the Mozilla Project, the non-profit that took on Netscape’s web browser after it was turned free and open-source in 1998, relying in part on its community of users to update its code voluntarily.

Goodger made several contributions, which were noticed by Netscape. “Eventually, I got some pings on IRC [Internet Relay Chat, an early form of messaging]. They liked my changes and asked if I wanted a job. I was pretty floored.” He adds, “I told my mum and she said, ‘It’s nonsense. He has not actually given you a job. You need to find a real job.’” Netscape sent the 19-year-old a ticket by DHL courier (this was 1999) and he flew to San Francisco.

His mother was right, at least in terms of pay, even if the work was transformative. After what he describes as an “extended internship” that stretched from a couple of months to a year, he returned to Auckland to finish his degree. By that point, Netscape – which had already essentially lost the web browser wars to Microsoft’s Explorer – was imploding as its efforts to diversify foundered.

No matter. He was soon recruited by a small band of ex-Netscape staff who had formed the Mozilla Foundation, a successor to the Mozilla Project. The salary was a pittance, but the work was “fun and exciting”. As lead engineer, he was instrumental in a drive, supported by the open-source community, to remake Netscape as a faster, more efficient browser. The result was the Firefox browser released in November 2004, which, with its speed and design breakthroughs like tabbed browsing, became an instant hit with the tech-savvy.

Still, Microsoft’s dominant position in the PC market, where its browser was bundled by default, saw Firefox grab only a couple of per cent market share. But things were moving fast. In January 2005, Goodger shifted to Google, where he began work on what would become the Chrome web browser, after some lobbying. “I pitched the executive leadership of Google on building this new browser,” he remembers.

“There was a bit of concern, hesitation back then about building a browser and going directly at Microsoft. ‘Do we want to do that?’ Larry and Sergey [Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin]. And then we had Eric Schmidt, who was CEO at the time, who had tussled with Microsoft a bit in some of his prior roles.” Schmidt was chief executive of networking firm Novell from 1997 to 2001, a period when it went from 70% market share to being steamrolled by Microsoft as Bill Gates’ firm introduced Windows NT.

Goodger prevailed, and the first version of Chrome was released in December 2008. Its minimalist design was radical and an instant hit. It also took the concept of extensions mainstream and changed the role of a web browser from just a thing used to visit websites to an “operating system within an operating system”, as Goodger frames it, It quickly stole a march on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to claim around two-thirds of the web browser market – a position it still holds today.

“In the early stages of the project, we said, in our wildest dreams, that maybe we could hit Firefox-level of market share.” He was at the forefront of a revolution. But over time, the lie of the land changed. “As a company gets bigger, you find yourself dealing less and less with the creation of new things and more with the management of a mature system. I think that’s probably the destiny of most big companies.

“That’s where I found myself a couple of years ago. And then I saw ChatGPT launch, and it was just the most amazing thing I’d seen since I discovered the web back in the 90s. “I knew intuitively that it wouldn’t be a fad, like crypto. It had clear value. Anyone I showed ChatGPT to, they got it immediately.” At this point, it’s available on MacOS only. Goodger says that was the natural starting point, with most of his colleagues using MacBooks.

And its agent features are restricted to those on ChatGPT premium plans. “We’re working on Windows. I think that’s really important. A lot of times, the leading edge of tech influencers are using Macs, but then to really get a lot more folks using it, you kind of need to go out to Windows.” Goodger is back at the sharp end of things, steering a browser through its earliest days for the third time in his career.

Atlas recently got grouped tabs. Support for multiple ChatGPT accounts and new, faster agentic AI features are on the way. (So-called “lazy” agents that peter out part-way through a task have been a pain for the AI industry.) Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.

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