Is OpenAI Computer Use Faster Than a Person?

OpenAI says its computer use is now faster than the average person at using a computer. It says this is its fastest, cheapest, and most reliable computer-use product, and it thinks that product is getting close to superhuman, meaning faster than an expert computer user.

Speed matters because a slow agent makes a person feel they could have done the task themselves. In some background cases, duration does not matter, because the person can do other work while the agent finishes. Other tasks have to finish before the next step can start, and those are the ones a person wants to watch.

OpenAI thinks that once an agent is faster than doing the work by hand, a person will probably let it do anything they could do manually, unless they want to do that work themselves.