Microsoft's Free AI Just Beat OpenAI and Google at Browsing the Web
Fara1.5 is a new family of open-source AI models from Microsoft Research designed for browser automation tasks, capable of navigating websites, filling forms, and completing real-world tasks as a human user would. It outperforms leading proprietary systems such as OpenAI’s Operator and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Computer Use on the Online-Mind2Web benchmark, achieving a 72% success rate versus 58.3% for Operator and 57.3% for Gemini. Even the mid-sized Fara1.5-9B outscored these commercial models. The models are built on Alibaba’s Qwen3.5 and fine-tuned with data generated using OpenAI’s GPT-5.4, serving as a teacher agent. Training included synthetic domains—replicas of real websites—to practice tasks involving sensitive actions without risk. Fara1.5 features robust safeguards, with a sandboxed environment that logs actions and allows user intervention to prevent unintended consequences. Unlike its expensive, closed-source rivals, Fara1.5’s model weights and inference code are openly available and can be run on local hardware. Microsoft plans to extend Fara1.5’s capabilities beyond browsers into desktop and enterprise applications.
