Two of top Chrome co-founders, beng and darin, who are also Firefox alumni, are now working at OAI. It's rather surprising if they do not build a web browser. These are browser people.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bengoodger/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/darin-fisher-7059ab/
> I honestly wonder whether they even have to buy Chrome.
Momentum. Any change of direction they take after such a purchase is taken by a huge number of current users whether they like it or not (unless they dislike it enough to make the effort to switch their daily driver browser).
> They can just fork it.
That would result in much lower user numbers unless their changes are incredibly attractive. Most users will start where they are due, again, to product momentum.
WTF. I had the exact same idea. Why buy Chrome when Chromium is open source and there are existing successful forks (e.g. Brave browser) which managed to do it... Why pay $100 million for something you can have for free? It's not like Open AI would struggle to find users for their new browser... They could just advertise it "Download our new GPT Browser" on their website above the chat window.
I think it's less about the difficulty of forking versus buying Chrome and more about not wanting to compete with a Google owned Gemini enabled Chrome