The question remains, though, what will be left to browse.
Let’s say that, as often happens, I half-remember an article that I’ve been reading. It’s not in my Reader saves, so what am I going to do? Even this time last year, I would have typed what I could remember into my browser address bar, which would then take me to my default search engine: DuckDuckGo.
Over the last few months, however, for anything more complex than just quickly looking something up, I’ve been using Perplexity, which allows you to search the web (default), as well as academic and social sites such as Reddit. Unlike other LLMs, its not sycophantic, and it always shows its sources.
Casey Newton discusses the advent of the AI-first browser which uses ‘agents’ to go searching on your behalf. I’m kind of already doing this. And before you judge me, let’s just reflect on the fact that almost 40% of people click on the first result on Google results, and [fewer than 0.5% go past the first page of search engine results. So even an LLM that goes out, reads 20 links and presents back the most salient results is already doing a better job.
[T]he decline of the web has been met with a surprising counter-phenomenon: a huge investment in new web browsers.
On Wednesday, Opera — the Norwegian company whose namesake browser commands about 2 percent market share worldwide — announced that it is building a new browser.
Two days earlier, the Browser Company said it plans to open source its Arc browser and turn its efforts fully to a new one.
The moves came a few months after “answer engine” company Perplexity teased a new browser of its own called Comet. And while the company has not confirmed it, OpenAI has reportedly been working on a browser for more than six months.
It has been a long time since the internet saw a proper browser war. The first, in the earliest days of the web, saw Microsoft’s Internet Explorer defeat Netscape Navigator decisively. (Though not before a bruising antitrust trial.) In the second, which ran from roughly 2004 to 2017, new browsers from Mozilla (Firefox) and Google (Chrome) emerged to challenge Internet Explorer and eventually kill it. Today the majority of web users use Chrome.
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“Traditional browsers were built to load webpages,” said Josh Miller, the Browser Company’s CEO, in a post announcing its forthcoming Dia browser. “But increasingly, webpages — apps, articles, and files — will become tool calls with AI chat interfaces. In many ways, chat interfaces are already acting like browsers: they search, read, generate, respond. They interact with APIs, LLMs, databases. And people are spending hours a day in them. If you’re skeptical, call a cousin in high school or college — natural language interfaces, which abstract away the tedium of old computing paradigms, are here to stay.”
Perplexity is one of my pinned tabs both on my desktop and laptop. I use it multiple times every day in both professional and personal contexts, for example when researching information that is helping me make a decision about car leasing. This year, I’ve also used it to help decipher medical records, pull out information from extremely dense reports, and synthesise information from multiple sources.
It does feel a bit like a superpower when you use these things well. But, as Newton points out, as the business model for putting content on the web fails, where are AI browsers going to get their information from?
[I]t’s easy to imagine the possibilities for an AI browser. It could function as a research assistant, exploring topics on your behalf and keeping tabs on new developments automatically. It could take your to-do list and attempt to complete tasks for you while you’re away. It could serve as a companion for you while you browse, identifying factual errors and suggesting further reading.
[…]
The question remains, though, what will be left to browse. The entire structure of the web — from journalism to e-commerce and beyond — is built on the idea that webpages are being viewed by people. When it’s mostly code that is doing the looking, a lot of basic assumptions are going to get broken.
Source: Platformer
Image: almoya