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Show HN: Open-source alternative to ChatGPT Agents for browsing

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Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to ChatGPT Agents for browsing

#11

Post by tcwd »

phsource wrote: post #10
cahoodle wrote: post #2

James here from the team! Let us know if you have feedback on either our cloud or open source repo. We want to push the frontiers for computer-use so that people can do less repetitive work.

This is pretty impressive results given that this is not from one of the major AI labs. Congrats: https://blog.withmeka.com/meka-achieves-state-of-the-art-per... Out of curiosity, what do you think contributed to this working better than even OpenAI agent or some of the other tools out there? I'm not that familiar with how OpenAI and other agents like Browser Use currently work, but is this, in your opinion, the most…

Thanks! Quite a few factors, here's a detailed post on the architecture: https://blog.withmeka.com/introducing-meka-an-open-source-fr...

IMO, the combination of having an "evaluator model" at the end to verify if the intent of the task was complete, and using multiple models that look over each other's work in every step was helpful - lots of human organization analogies there, like "trust but verify" and pair programming. Memory management was also very key.

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to ChatGPT Agents for browsing

#12

Post by tcwd »

wsycharles0o wrote: post #9
anonymousiam wrote: post #3

"* Full computer access: It's not sandboxed in a browser. Meka operates with OS-level controls, allowing it to handle system dialogues, file uploads, and other interactions that browser-only automation tools can't." This seems pretty scary. Just recently an AI wiped a company database: https://fortune.com/2025/07/23/ai-coding-tool-replit-wiped-d...

I would assume this capability is meant to be used in a docker?

We explored using a containerized VM that exposed agentic controls in the open source version, but generally found that the cloud-based solutions were much faster to get started and easier to work with. Our repo contains adapters that work with several of the most popular cloud-hosted VM-as-a-service infra providers.

Definitely would be happy to be wrong and missed something here!

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to ChatGPT Agents for browsing

#14

Post by armanj »

Nice job. It's exciting that the quality is approaching human level, but still I think we are spending way too many tokens, and the automation speed-up isn't really worth the total token price yet (unless you have very high-end gpus and you don't care about the completion speed of your tasks)

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to ChatGPT Agents for browsing

#15

Post by tcwd »

chhxdjsj wrote: post #13

Hi, great work congrats! Does it use openrouter for model selection? Which models did you achieve the webarena result with? Are there any open source models which are any good for this?

For the WebArena result, we actually used a mixture of models checking each other's work and evaluating in real time. We found the verifications to be really effective in producing accurate results. Feel free to take a look at our architectural blog post to learn more in detail: https://blog.withmeka.com/introducing-meka-an-open-source-fr...

Unfortunately, we didn't try it out with open source models, but you are welcome to pull the repo and try with any model that has good visual grounding! (I heard UI-TARS and the latest Qwen visual model are quite good)

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to ChatGPT Agents for browsing

#16

Post by tcwd »

armanj wrote: post #14

Nice job. It's exciting that the quality is approaching human level, but still I think we are spending way too many tokens, and the automation speed-up isn't really worth the total token price yet (unless you have very high-end gpus and you don't care about the completion speed of your tasks)

Thanks! I agree with your sentiment for a lot of basic mundane tasks, but there are a number of tasks that exist today that are very high value yet still mundane and requires manual work.

Examples include form filling, sales prospecting, lead enrichment, or even just keeping track of prices of important things.

Over time, we do expect the cost of tokens on these models to decrease drastically. Powerful vision models are still relatively new compared to other generic LLM models for text. Definitely a lot of room for optimizations that we expect will come quickly!

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to ChatGPT Agents for browsing

#19

Post by ElasticBottle »

nsonha wrote: post #18

Tested a few agentic browsers such as genspark, fellou and comet. I found the vision approach less effective comparing to the dom-based approach, and seem quite slower too. Does it need a reasoning step to type an url into the address bar?

I see it 3 fundamental pillars:

* Accuracy (does it do what we want) * Reliability (does it consistently do what we want) * Speed (does it do what we want fast)

We're mostly focused on solving 1 and maybe in some capacity 2.

The belief here is that models are going to get better. With that smaller models will become more capable. This will result in speed ups automatically.

So yes, I will concur that speed is probably not the main strength of our framework right now, but believe that we will get there with time.

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to ChatGPT Agents for browsing

#20

Post by esafak »

armanj wrote: post #14

Nice job. It's exciting that the quality is approaching human level, but still I think we are spending way too many tokens, and the automation speed-up isn't really worth the total token price yet (unless you have very high-end gpus and you don't care about the completion speed of your tasks)

I wish AI products competed on token efficiency.
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