Live data from Hacker News

Look, Another AI Browser

manuelmoreale.com

101–110 of 137 posts

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#101
To every billionaire in America right now who can read this...

I haven't used any of the AI stuff that's been released so far. It doesn't appear to have affected my day to day in any manner but I'm not particularly connected in the first place I suppose.

But this browser, with the AI on the top of it? I haven't used it yet. But it sounds life changing. I'll be surprised if I have a job in three weeks now that this is out. And coming off that Sora drop? DAMN! Haven't used that either but I heard it's a really expensive tic tac that gets boring after 10 minutes.

Anyways, please give all your money to Sam Altman. He needs 7 trillion dollars. And with results like these, the path forward must be paved with gold. So pour, all of your money, right into this one, please.

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#102
post #100
post #11

To find out what someone truly believes, don't listen to what they say, observe how they act. I don't see how OpenAI's recent actions make any sense from the perspective a company that internally believes it's actually close to unlocking super-intelligence.

I'd go a step further: has OpenAI actually achieved any significant research breakthroughs on par with Google's transformers? So why does everybody think they will achieve the next N breakthroughs necessary to get to AGI?

They basically invented LLMs as we know them (autoregressive transformers trained on web data) with the GPT 1/2/3 series of papers.

They also pioneered reasoning models, which are probably the biggest breakthrough since GPT-3 on the AGI tech tree.

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#103
TLDR: yet another blogger demonstrating a complete lack of intellectual curiosity by completely dismissing an idea instead of exploring its potential.

There is a lot to discuss about a browser that has an LLM with local, personalized memory and follows and assists you on every interaction. But ”this is just chromium with AI on top” is a lazy take

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why won't these sites simply block this browser?

Because this browser is just chromium and its user agent will be indistinguishable

Bots can report such user agents too, so that's not the reason.

The reason is that it's easier to block bot hosting providers. That's why illegal botnets rely on compromised personal machines.

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#105
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another possible aspect of it is that probably more and more sites are blocking AI crawlers through e.g. Cloudflare's support for blocking AI crawler and AI agents. This will give them a backdoor to that content through a user's connection. I am not sure if this is happening, but as blocking becomes more prevalent, having a widely-used browser will help.

I can just see the news story now: "Oops, we got caught using our customers' internet connections as exit nodes for the largest residential proxy ever to exist, both on pages they visited and ones that they didn't. But don't worry, this was an unauthorized experimental rollout to only parts of the world that we don't have legal nexus in. The program has been halted, and the person responsible has been sacked. Mynd yo…

What's the user agent?

We can redirect those users to horrible content. One of those blinking gif websites with loud midi music or something.

Edit: it reuses popular browser user agents and is indistinguishable. They know what they're doing.

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#106
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the optimism: Google is launched and it is web directories but…better. It takes a decade to become a monolithic ad-tech company but all is not lost yet, until it becomes the face of enshittification of the entire internet another decade on. Facebook is launched and it’s this cool way to keep in touch with your friends until that too becomes a monolithic ad-tech company a decade later, and soon after become…

So much modern tech is just about capture and extraction, not actually empowering the end user. It's as if guitar companies found a way to make more money in claiming royalties on musicians' work instead of building good guitars.

I would amend that to basically all modern tech. It's all fucking rent seeking now. Everyone wants to be the next Google and Facebook (or to be acquired by them) and just sit on their asses and cash checks while occasionally rebooting a server.

Every tech company is headed by MBA graduates who couldn't read code if their lives depended on it and all they know how to do is order engineers to make the UX worse so they can make imaginary lines go up. I am so, so terrified of what happens to Steam when Gabe Newell retires/dies.

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#107
post #11

To find out what someone truly believes, don't listen to what they say, observe how they act. I don't see how OpenAI's recent actions make any sense from the perspective a company that internally believes it's actually close to unlocking super-intelligence.

They're spinning up their own advertising platform; chatgpt is a coherent contender to google's search bar, over a long enough time span if they can maintain user engagement numbers, it seems plausible that they could secure half of google's ad revenue. Spinning up a browser is not cheap but it certainly lines up with their actions of spinning up a perpetual advertising machine via chatgpt to fund other things. Which might include AGI if/when that happens.

>a company that internally believes it's actually close to unlocking super-intelligence

I am not sure if this is still true, they started backing off from this line of reasoning summer of 2024 and haven't returned to it.

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#108
post #5

To be sure, a browser that retains a representation of every word you read on it, constantly synthesizing a profile on your preferences, using that profile to filter everything you see through a lens that consistently enforces and limits the worldview of a snapshot-of-you - all with a level of data retention that would be controversial for Google but that OpenAI's users will happily opt into, that Palantir and its go…

Man, I miss the old days, seeing new tech come out and not immediately wondering how the worst parts of our industry are going to turn it into the torment nexus.

I do too. Those days are gone. The profit motive makes everything - even cool things - feel adversarial to me.

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#109

> Yesterday, OpenAI announced Atlas, its AI browser. To the surprise of literally nobody, it’s Chromium with AI slapped on top. Perplexity also has a browser: it’s called Comet, and it also is Chromium with AI slapped on top. Then we have DIA, which is, you guessed it, Chromium with AI slapped on top. I think Opera also has one of those Chromium browsers with AI slapped on top. The interesting thing is what they "sla…

The bothering part is the browser factor form. Why not just an extension?

Re: Look, Another AI Browser

#110

Genuinely curious - what do people want to see from a new/different rendering engine? The web is crazy complex these days because it is an entire app platform. The incentive for anyone building a browser is to use the platform that gives you the best web compat especially at the outset when you don’t have enough users of your app to be able to make big changes to the platform. Even Chrome didn’t start from scratch -…

I think Google has proven with their recent actions concerning android that they really can't be trusted with big, critical open source projects.

> trusted with big, critical open source projects.

You talk as if the community has appointed Google to take care of these projects. Google is spending $$$ writing code and open sourcing it. Not the other way around.

And as with anything open source, if you dont like the direction of open source code - fork it.

If I have an open source project, you dont say 'bitpush cant be trusted with the project'.

Post reply on HN