I recently used Comet to find out of print movies that were never released on DVD/Bluray, then find them on ebay, then find the best value, then provide me with a list to order. It felt like magic watching it work, and saved me many hours of either doing it myself or scripting it.
I did have to repeatedly break it into ever smaller tasks to get everything to fit within the context windows, but still... it might have been janky but it was janky magic.
The point is the multiply how much you can get done, simple searches still require me to be present and to do the work of compiling the list myself, this type of busy work seems much better suited to tools like this that take a sentence or 2 to kick off
I am also finding work is becoming more tiring. As I'm able to delegate all the rote stuff I feel like decision fatigue is hitting harder/faster as all I spend my time doing is making the harder judgement decisions that the LLMs don't do well enough yet.
Particularly tough in generalist roles where you're doing a little bit of a wide range of things. In a week I might need to research AI tools and leadership principles, come up with facilitation exercises, envision sponsorship models, create decks, write copy, build and filter ICP lists, automate outreach, create articles, do taxes, find speakers, select a vendor for incorporation, find a tool for creating and maintaining logos, fonts and design systems and think deeply about how CTOs should engage with AI strategically. I'm usually burned pretty hard by Friday night :(
I consider myself extremely competent at getting niche results. Couldn’t for the life of me find a certain after market part for a home appliance.
I go ask Claude to find it and it comes back with exactly what I need. One of its queries hit a website with a poorly labeled product that it was able to figure out was exactly what I needed. That product was nested so deeply in results that I would have never found it on my own.
That was the goal, yes. In the end I only actually found about 10 I didn't already own, but the AI had to wade through a few hundred to find them.
We will likely have decent standalone voice assistants at some point soon but Alexa and Siri were way too early for that.
I see this as a big unbundling, since your agent has your ear now, not Google, not social networks, they lose their entry point status and don't control by ranking, filtering and UI what I see or what I can do. They can spread out searches to specialized engines, replace Google for search, walk above all social networks and centralize your activities so you don't have to follow each one individually. A wrapper or cocoon for the user, taking the ad-block and anti-virus role, protecting your privacy and carefully reducing your exposure to information leaks.
All of this only works if you can host your model. But this is where the trend is going, we can already see decent small models, maybe before 2030 we will be running powerful local models on efficient local chips.
Once this is working better, it will allow to extend the abilities of local models without running into the massive issues with context limitations I personally was hitting for self hosted.
A firewall which can set the user on fire.
https://guard.io/labs/scamlexity-we-put-agentic-ai-browsers-...
That's _still_ the only thing they're good at...
The closest one came to handling controlling music playback well in anyway was Cortana but even Cortana didn’t do the things that I needed to do with my voice while controlling music play.
The biggest Used case for me was always hey Cortana hey Siri add a specific song to now playing and play it next. No matter what on any operating system. The voice assistant delete the entire queue and then probably plays the wrong song. Not only will they play the wrong song, but they will play the entire album from the wrong song if it is available so now I’ve gone from a playlist that I was building and listening to on loop for potentially days to some album that I don’t wanna listen to because it could not just add a song next.
In general, I like the idea, but I'm afraid the final implementation will still auto-decide between using the local (for cost saving) and cloud LLM. And potentially outsourcing all your browser-usage LLMs calls to Big Tech like Google is a no-go .
It's not an irrational fear, but the frightening bit depends on whether or not this actually takes off. I very much doubt it ever will. The browser ecosystem, despite being in desperate need of upheaval, is largely resiliant to it because things that work don't tend to get replaced unless they are broken to a point where even the most basic of users are inconvenienced. Or forced to change (due to vendor pressure). Oh, there's the rational fear.
Wonder which company has the best in class browser today, along with a really really good model, an in-house chip, datacenter infra, and most importantly, is cash flow positive?
Do not want, I want none of it and no part of it.
I'll use Lynx before I use that.
AI is already infesting search results directly (til I adblocked it), writing the crap on whatever page I just landed on and led me to turn unhook up to "just show the damn video" on YT.
I've yet to see a single use of AI that in any way improves my life and I'm supposed to hand companies who are already too powerful even more of my life/data for that.
I'll pass.
From my point of view it's become very tiresome pretending the emperor is wearing clothes or at least not pointing that out.
Yet people are using AI for therapy, listening to AI-written novels read by AI, gladly watching AI-made slop. There seems to be real actual demand for it. Feels like total insanity to me; but here we are and facts are facts.
I guess whether the emperor is wearing clothes or not never actually mattered.
I also use Comet for specific financial research, also very useful.
I have edge with Copilot. Never use it. Microsoft is gross.
I have an invite to something called Strawberry but at this point, I'm tapped out. Sorry OpenAI, you're late to the game for me.
Maybe next week.
I want an AI browser that digs into webpages, finds the information I want and presents it to me in a single consistent and beautiful UI with all of the hazards removed. Yes, I even want the stupid machine to filter content for me. If I tell it "no politics on Tuesdays" it should be able to go find the things I'm interested in, but remove the references to politics.
I understand that there are new risks to this approach, but it could be built with those things in mind. I'm aware that this would give a lot of power to the developers, but frankly trusting thousands/millions of individual weirdos on the open web hasn't turned out to be any better at this point and it's all become consolidated by near monopolies in user-hostile ways anyhow.
1. a pure data API web (like the original semantic-web idea)
2. open-source browsers which can query for information using on-device LLMs and display it to the user in any UI way they want.
I think 1. will happen, since all search engines will use AI results, with no click through to the original data-owner (website). So there is no more financial incentive to keep a UI website. The question is if the "data API web" will be decentralised or under the control of a few big players that already mined the web.
2. will hopefully happen if on-device models become more capable, the question is by then whether most people are already defaulted to AI browsers from big tech (since they have the money to burn-cash using cloud LLM services to capture market share before on-device LLMs are good enough). The only way to prevent this is user-education and mistrust verus Big Tech, which is what already befell Microsoft's Recall (besides a terrible security architecure).
The browser you're looking for already exists :) (partially) its called arc browser on mobile and specifically their browse for me feature
https://amphetamem.es/meme?id=seinfeld_03_05_67×tamp=0%...
There were of course many browser extensions that did this beforehand (and even better, by hyper-linking the exact text passage of answer segments), but the main differentiator is that most people don't use them/know about them, and this comes with a big tech nametag and it is free.
OpenAI probably barely knows or cares that Perplexity/Comet exists.
That's the first thing that came to mind. Every single action across every single website would be available to OpenAI with this browser. Even if I wanted to leverage something like this it'd have to be a fully local LLM interacting with a huge local DB of my info.
Frontier models take a lot of money and experimentation. But then people figure out how to train them and knowledge of those models and approaches leaks. Furthermore, we can make informed guesses. But best of all, we can exfiltrate the model's output and distill the model.
If we work together as an industry to open source everything, we can overcome this.
OpenAI has to 100x in five years or they're going to be in trouble.
Models are making it easy to replace SaaS, but also easy to replace other AI companies.
There may be no moat for any of this. The lead is only because they're a few generations ahead, running as fast as they can on the treadmill.
I don't think this hurts China at all.
Maybe LLMs get that by knowing our entire past? But I find that creepier than useful. Right now ChatGPT is at the top of the world, but I don't see it becoming the new unrivaled Google Search. There's just too many people building it, and once OpenAI starts monetizing and "enshittifying" it, other offerings will become more compelling.
I think AI models put a large swath of mostly tech companies at risk. Including the old business models of titan products like Google Search. I think image/video/world models do this more to media than LLMs do to complex business processes.
It's what I was thinking looking at the launch video. Is there a moat? No, there is none. The LLM itself is fungible, what matters is the agentic and memory layer on top. That can be reconstructed easily. All you need to do is export your data from old providers to bootstrap your system in another place. I actually did that, exported from reddit, hn, youtube, chatgpt, claude and gemini - about 15 years worth of content, now sitting on my laptop in a RAG system.
At minimum all you need is a config file, like CLAUDE.md containing the absolute minimum information you need to set your preferences and values. That would be even more portable, you can simply paste text in any LLM to configure it before use. Exporting all your data is the maximalist take on the problem of managing your online identity.
If they get a decent audio interface and get this on phones, apple is in trouble.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/ai/ai-tech/ai-link-previ...
Oooh boy, thanks, but no thanks. I don't want a BitTech to know everything about me and my browsing habit.
Yet I wonder how these browser behave when you are visiting your Friday night porn site?
Also, your comment made me think about the fact that free AI is dead in a near feature because it probably is economically unsustainable. Consequently, pay to browse might around the corner. Or ..., like for the for all those social networks, we all be the product. Is AI powered browsers the dead of our freedom ?
Hasn't this gate been open since Chrome conquered the browser market years ago?
> these AI-browsers do truly bring value
Do they? Truly?
> a single Big Tech Winner that truly knows everything about you
Again?
We have had that for over a decade, and the Big Tech is called Google. By owning Android, Google pretty much owns and knows everything about its users. The same applies to Apple.
I really hope open-source Browsers like Firefox follow up soon with better alternatives, like on-device LLMs to counteract the "all in the cloud" LLM approach. Of course that would require top-tier ML engineers who mostly all are pay-captured by Big Tech.