When OpenAI released ChatGPT, we likened it to having a mediocre graduate in your pocket—someone you could chat with and consult. But it couldn’t just go off and complete tasks independently, you still had to be involved.
Agents promise to change this. And the release of Claude computer use is a sign that things are coming very fast.
This new feature allows Claude to interact directly with your computer. This is different from previous agents we’ve seen, like Devin, which operated in a more closed environment. Now Claude can do whatever your computer can do — at least in theory.
See these demos for instance:
And automating operations:
It’s a huge step forward. AI can now interact with computers like most (non-dev) humans do. But remember I said “in theory”. Perhaps promising “graduate” performance is too generous; it’s more like having an undergraduate intern to help you out. It can automate some mundane tasks you’d typically assign to an intern—like moving data from Salesforce or Stripe to a spreadsheet. It’s definitely still a beta product, but it’s a very impressive one at that.
Testing it out myself, I gave Claude a task to collect financial information on 10 companies. It managed to complete the task in 15 minutes… It used Firefox and LinkedIn to get the info and then failed to put it in a spreadsheet, so instead, it saved it to a text file.