Ask HN: Why is everyone suddenly so interested in AI browsers?(techcrunch.com)
techcrunch.com
Ask HN: Why is everyone suddenly so interested in AI browsers?
https://techcrunch.com/podcast/atlassians-610m-bet-and-why-everyones-fighting-over-your-browser/
6 comments
Because the 'agents' thing is already a year or so old; got to keep the hype going _somehow_, you know. The VCs thirst for exits.
Honestly, I don't find any AI browser out there that is actually useful to me. All those shiny new features fade away once you start using them in your day-to-day life. I am not able to understand why I would automate something like browsing the web with AI. All I need is a good utilities-based browser that makes my browsing easy. Arc does a good job, but it's sad to see that they are wasting their time on a useless Dia browser instead of making Arc great.
What do you guys think?
What do you guys think?
My guess is that there is a belief that the value extraction is happening closer to the user.
Like before search engines you wanted to be a web page with a recipe for chocolate cake, and you could monetize the value of that recipe with ads.
Then search engines existed and people spent part of their time on the search engine rather than the web page, extracting value there (and possibly redirecting away from your particular chocolate cake tecipe) AI summaries means it is very hard to extract value further down the value chain; neither the search engine nor no recipe website will get as much traffic as the AI summary.
So if people habitually type Google.com and habitually use their AI (or ChatGPT for that matter) there’s no money in being the website that has the info, and the only way to get ahead of all that would be to be native in browser deciding where you go.
Like before search engines you wanted to be a web page with a recipe for chocolate cake, and you could monetize the value of that recipe with ads.
Then search engines existed and people spent part of their time on the search engine rather than the web page, extracting value there (and possibly redirecting away from your particular chocolate cake tecipe) AI summaries means it is very hard to extract value further down the value chain; neither the search engine nor no recipe website will get as much traffic as the AI summary.
So if people habitually type Google.com and habitually use their AI (or ChatGPT for that matter) there’s no money in being the website that has the info, and the only way to get ahead of all that would be to be native in browser deciding where you go.
This really makes a lot of sense to me now. Thanks a lot for explaining it in detail.
I think it's not going to be easy for them to get that market share from google especially since they’re doubling down on AI themselves.
I think it's not going to be easy for them to get that market share from google especially since they’re doubling down on AI themselves.
The logical next step to get between the user and the content may be at the OS level, via the OS’s built-in search. So the user won’t even launch a browser.
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