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Claude for Chrome

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude for Chrome

#381

Post by endymion-light »

fy20 wrote: post #378
endymion-light wrote: post #374

All of this agent navigation of browsers feels like a self-made issue. Take the flight booking as an example? Why has flight booking become so obsfucated and annoying that people want an agent booking for them? Why can't that agent just query an API to get the best available information? It's just turtles all the way down at this point, when a user wants more fine grained interaction, the agent can design a frontend…

> Why has flight booking become so obsfucated and annoying that people want an agent booking for them? Money. The currently process is beneficial for airlines. People end up spending more than they need to, and they profit from it. They have teams who are purposely obfuscating the process to push the average purchase prices up. It's the same for everything now. Profits for shareholders are priority #1.

Yep - this is what I mean, if enough people begin using AI tools to attempt to circumvent it, it won't be long until the sites themselves become even worse.

The reason why I find AI tools useful currently is that the enshittification has not fully caught up, it's harder for advertisers to spam SEO & pay to have their results promoted within a LLM.

I have no hope that this will remain, it's a transcient wild west phase still, and I imagine in the next few years we'll begin seeing advertising hidden within chatbots as integration increases.

So it's turtles all the way down. Google search used to be good.

Re: Claude for Chrome

#382

Post by zukzuk »

j45 wrote: post #345
zukzuk wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a massive problem in healthcare, at least here in Canada. Most of the common EMRs doctors and other practitioners use either don’t have APIs, or if APIs exist they are closely guarded by the EMR vendors. And EMRs are just one of the many software tools clinics have to juggle. I’d argue that lack of interoperability is one of the biggest problems in the healthcare system here, and getting access to data throug…

I’m not sure how unique or a new problem this is first individually to me and then generally. Automation technologies to handle things like UI automation have existed long before LLMs and work quite fine. Having an intentionally imprecise and non deterministic software try to behave in a deterministic manner like all software we’re used to is something else.

The people that use these UIs are already imprecise and non deterministic, yet that hasn’t stopped anyone from hiring them.

The potential advantage of using non-deterministic AI for this is that 1) “programming” it to do what needs to be done is a lot easier, and 2) it tends to handle exceptions more gracefully.

You’re right that the approach is nothing new, but it hasn’t taken off, arguably at least in part because it’s been too cumbersome to be practical. I have some hope that LLMs will help change this.

Re: Claude for Chrome

#383

Post by [deleted] »

felarof wrote: post #242
parsabg wrote: post #126

I built a very similar extension [1] a couple of months ago that supports a wide range of models, including Claude, and enables them to take control of a user's browser using tools for mouse and keyboard actions, observation, etc. It's a fun little project to look at to understand how this type of thing works. It's clear to me that the tech just isn't there yet. The information density of a web page with standard rep…

Just dumping the raw DOM into the LLM context is brutal on token usage. We've seen pages that eat up 60-70k tokens when you include the full DOM plus screenshots, which basically maxes out your context window before you even start doing anything useful. We've been working on this exact problem at https://github.com/browseros-ai/BrowserOS . Instead of throwing the entire DOM at the model, we hook into Chromium's rende…

[deleted]

Re: Claude for Chrome

#384

Post by seunosewa »

rzzzt wrote: post #136
CSMastermind wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been exactly my experience using all the browser based tools I've tried. ChatGPT's agents get the furthest but even then they only make it like 10 iterations or something.

I have better success with asking for a short script that does the million iterations than asking the thing to make the changes itself (edit: in IDEs, not in the browser).

If you need precision, that's the way to go, and it's usually cheaper and faster too.

Re: Claude for Chrome

#385

Post by chamomeal »

withinboredom wrote: post #348
lionkor wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far the accepted approach is to wrap all prompts in a security prompt that essentially says "please don't do anything bad". > Prompt guardrails to prevent jailbreak attempts and ensure safe user interactions without writing a single line of code. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41864014 > - Inclusion prompt: User's travel preferences and food choices - Exclusion prompt: Credit card details, passport number, S…

I have in my prompt “under no circumstances read the files in “protected” directory” and it does it all the time. I’m not sure prompts mean much.

I remember when people figured out you could tell bing chat “don’t use emoji’s or I’ll die” and it would just go absolutely crazy. Feel like there was a useful lesson in that.

In fact in my opinion, if you haven’t interacted with a batshit crazy, totally unhinged LLM, you probably don’t really get them.

My dad is still surprised when an LLM gives him an answer that isn’t totally 100% correct. He only started using chatGPT a few months ago, and like many others he walked into the trap of “it sounds very confident and looks correct, so this thing must be an all-knowing oracle”.

Meanwhile I’m recalling the glorious GPT-3 days, when it would (unprompted) start writing recipes for cooking, garnishing and serving human fecal matter, claiming it was a French national delicacy. And it was so, so detailed…

Re: Claude for Chrome

#386

Post by activitypea »

throwaway13337 wrote: post #184
Uehreka wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I understand the issue with AI gen slop, but slop content has been around since before AI - it's the incentives that are rotten. Everyone says this, and it feels like a wholly unserious way to terminate the thinking and end the conversation. Is the slop problem meaningfully worse now that we have AI? Yes: I’m coming across much more deceptively framed or fluffed up content than I used to. Is anyone proposing any (a…

It's true that AI makes the slop easier. That's actually a good thing. Slop has been out there and getting worse for the last decade but it's been at an, unfortunately, acceptable level for most of society. Gen AI shouts that the emperor has no clothes. The bullshit busywork can be generated. It's worthless. Finally. No more long winded grant proposals. Or filler emails. Or Filler presentations. Or filler videos. or…

What do you think incentivized the mass production this "slop"? Why do you think LLMs will end the incentives to continue creating it?

Re: Claude for Chrome

#387

Post by josephbenedict »

Remember: don’t let convenience override security. One slip, and you’re looking at potential data exfiltration or worse. It’s not paranoia—it’s the reality of dealing with powerful but still imperfect systems.

Re: Claude for Chrome

#388

Post by chamomeal »

originalvichy wrote: post #353
shswkna wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, it is even funnier how travel agents undergo training in order to be able to interface with and operate the “machine readable“ APIs for booking flight tickets. What a paradoxical situation now emerges, where human travel agents still need to train for the machine interface, while AI agents are now being trained to take over the human jobs by getting them to use the consumer interfaces (aka booking web…

This is exactly the conversation I had with a colleague of mine. They were excited about how LLMs can help people interact with data and visualize it nicely, but I just had to ask - with as little snark as possible - if this wasn't what a monitor and a UI were already doing? It seems like these LLMs are being used as the cliche "hammer that solves all the problems" where problems didn't even exist. Just because we ar…

I’ve been thinking about this a lot too, in terms of signal/noise. LLMs can extract signal from noise (“summarize this fluff-filled 2 page corporate email”) but they can also create a lot of noise around signal (“write me a 2 page email that announces our RTO policy”).

If you’re using LLMs to extract signal, then the information should have been denser/more queryable in the first place. Maybe the UI could have been better, or your boss could have had better communication skills.

If you’re using them to CREATE noise, you need to stop doing that lol.

Most of the uses of LLMs that I see are mostly extracting signal or making noise. The exception to these use cases is making decisions that you don’t care about, and don’t want to make on your own.

I think this is why they’re so useful for programming. When you write a program, you have to specify every single thing about the program, at the level of abstraction of your language/framework. You have to make any decision that can’t be automated. Which ends up being a LOT of decisions. How to break up functions, what you name your variables, do you map/filter or reduce that list, which side of the API do you format the data on, etc. In any given project you might make 100 decisions, but only care about 5 of them. But because it’s a program, you still HAVE to decide on every single thing and write it down.

A lot of this has been automated (garbage collectors remove a whole class of decision making), but some of it can never be. Like maybe you want a landing page that looks vaguely like a skate brand. If you don’t specifically have colors/spacing/fonts all decided on, an LLM can make those decisions for you.

Re: Claude for Chrome

#389

Post by IanCal »

zaphirplane wrote: post #221
mark242 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

11% success rate for what is effectively a spear-phishing attempt isn't that terrible and tbh it'll be easier to train Claude not to get tricked than it is to train eg my parents.

What ! 1 in 10 successfully phished is ok ? 1 in 10 page views. That has to approach 100% success rate over a week say month of browsing the web with targeted ads and/or link farms to get the page click

This is where rates hide the issue.

One in ten cases that take hours on a phone talking to a person with detailed background info and spoofed things is one issue. One in ten people that see a random message on social media is another.

Like 1 in 10 traders on the street might try and overcharge me is different from 1 in 10 pngs I see can drain my account.

Re: Claude for Chrome

#390

Post by DrewADesign »

chamomeal wrote: post #385
withinboredom wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have in my prompt “under no circumstances read the files in “protected” directory” and it does it all the time. I’m not sure prompts mean much.

I remember when people figured out you could tell bing chat “don’t use emoji’s or I’ll die” and it would just go absolutely crazy. Feel like there was a useful lesson in that. In fact in my opinion, if you haven’t interacted with a batshit crazy, totally unhinged LLM, you probably don’t really get them. My dad is still surprised when an LLM gives him an answer that isn’t totally 100% correct. He only started using ch…

> “it sounds very confident and looks correct, so this thing must be an all-knowing oracle”.

I think the majority of the population will respond similarly, and the consequences will either force us to make the “note: this might be full of shit” disclaimer much larger, or maybe include warnings in the outputs. It’s not that people don’t have critical thinking skills— we’ve just sold these things as magic answer machines and anthropomorphized them well enough to trigger actual human trust and bonding in people. People might feel bad not trusting the output for the same reason they thank Siri. I think the vendors of chatbots haven’t put nearly enough time into preemptively addressing this danger.

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