The NIH Folly from OpenAI — Atlas
Why reinventing Chrome is the wrong hill to die on
NIH = “Not Invented Here” — the reflex to rebuild something yourself rather than use someone else’s solution.
The Hidden Grind: Becoming a Browser Vendor
“Build an AI browser” sounds visionary until you realize what that sentence actually commits you to. Atlas isn’t a chatbot with a window — it’s a full-scale Chromium fork. That means inheriting one of the most relentless engineering obligations in modern software.
Every week brings high-severity CVEs to patch, renderer regressions to chase, GPU quirks to triage, and site-compatibility bugs to debug. Each OS update, new display driver, or codec revision adds to the testing matrix. Media stacks, sandbox rules, extension APIs, and accessibility layers all shift under your feet.
Chromium is not a foundation; it’s a moving organism. Maintaining parity with it means staffing a full-time QA and release-engineering arm just to keep the lights on. That’s not R&D — that’s operations. Unless OpenAI plans to become a browser vendor in perpetuity, Atlas will slowly lag, accumulate vulnerabilities, and lose user trust.
The NIH Killer: Let Google Do It
Here’s the strategic mistake: every capability Atlas chases — context-aware browsing, structured data access, agent hooks — Google also wants, and Google owns the browser stack.
Chrome’s roadmap already points toward these same primitives: built-in AI sidebars, declarative automation APIs, richer DOM introspection, and task agents. Google’s incentives are identical — they want an “AI-aware web,” because it strengthens Search and the ecosystem around it.
The counter-argument is obvious: “We need to move faster than Google. We need control.” But that control is an illusion. You’ll spend 95% of your effort just keeping pace with upstream Chromium, not innovating ahead of it. The speed advantage evaporates in 18 months when your fork’s bleeding-edge yesterday becomes today’s security liability.
That means Atlas isn’t pioneering anything new; it’s re-implementing tomorrow’s Chrome ahead of schedule, at massive cost, without leverage. The not-invented-here reflex looks clever right up until Chrome ships the same features natively and your fork becomes redundant.
The smart play is to ride the Chrome wave, not dig your own channel. Build on the APIs as they appear. Focus your engineering on what only you can do — model quality, reasoning, UX — and let Google’s thousands of browser engineers handle the substrate. That’s the NIH killer in one line: don’t compete with the team that owns the stack.
The Leverage Principle
Here’s a strategic pattern that holds across industries: the smartest move isn’t always building what you need — it’s recognizing when what you need will get built anyway, as a side effect of someone else’s incentives.
Solving hard problems efficiently is about leverage, not brute force. Don’t try to lift everything yourself; you’ll just end up with back problems. Find the fulcrum. Google needs an AI-aware web to protect Search and strengthen their ecosystem. They’ll build those primitives whether OpenAI exists or not. Atlas isn’t leverage — it’s grinding against the very forces that will eventually solve your problem for free.
Strategic patience beats premature optimization when incentives align.
SIDEBAR: The UX Warning Sign
OpenAI’s track record on interface design should give pause. ChatGPT remains a clunky, command-line-esque chat app years after launch. Canvas — their attempt at a richer document editor — shipped incomplete and awkward. If polishing a text box and a basic editor proves difficult, maintaining the UX sophistication of a modern browser borders on hubris.
Browsers demand pixel-perfect rendering, sub-50ms responsiveness, and thousands of interaction patterns users expect to “just work.” This isn’t OpenAI’s strength, and forking Chromium won’t magically change that.
The Real Work: Super-Extensions, Not New Browsers
You don’t lose power by staying inside Chrome. The extension ecosystem and modern web toolchains already let you build full-fledged applications — real software, not toys — that live inside the browser itself.
With Dart/Flutter, TypeScript, React, and WebAssembly-based toolchains (including Python interpreters like Pyodide), you can ship compiled interfaces that rival native apps. Chrome’s side-panel APIs let you render full custom UIs; background scripts handle orchestration; secure messaging connects your UI to backend services that do the heavy computation.
Your “extension” becomes a distributed AI app — secure, updateable, and instantly available to hundreds of millions of Chrome users.
Yes, building these “super-extensions” demands serious software discipline — permission scoping, modular builds, sandbox hygiene — but that’s a fraction of the cost of maintaining a browser fork forever. The right architecture is obvious: keep the client thin, let the cloud think, and build on the rails that already exist.
There Is No Easy Path
Here’s what many people misunderstand: Chrome is Google’s proprietary browser, but inside it runs Chromium — the open-source rendering engine that anyone can use. You might think, “Fine, we’ll just take vanilla Chromium, slap our UI on top, and avoid the hard stuff.”
It doesn’t work that way.
Even if you never touch a line of Chromium’s code, you still own the build pipeline, the testing matrix, the security response, and the release cadence. Every Chromium update — and they ship weekly — means recompiling, regression testing across platforms, validating extensions, and shipping installers. You’re running a full browser factory whether you customize the engine or not.
Microsoft learned this the hard way. After abandoning EdgeHTML, they moved to Chromium thinking it would lighten the load. It didn’t. Edge still requires hundreds of engineers just to maintain their Chromium-based browser — tracking upstream changes, ensuring compatibility, managing distribution, and handling support. And Microsoft has essentially infinite resources and decades of platform experience.
If Microsoft, with all their infrastructure and talent, can’t escape the perpetual grind of being a Chromium-based browser vendor, what makes OpenAI think they can?
The hard truth: there is no version of “build a browser” that doesn’t commit you to this treadmill.
The Verdict
The browser wars are over, and the winner already shipped. OpenAI’s superpower isn’t rendering engines or codec support — it’s intelligence. Atlas represents a classic strategic error: spending finite resources to solve someone else’s solved problem. Chrome will eventually offer every AI primitive Atlas needs, because Google’s interests align perfectly with that future. The question isn’t whether OpenAI can build a browser — it’s whether they should burn years of engineering cycles doing it. The answer is no. Build on Chrome, ship faster, and focus on what only you can do: making AI that actually works.