It is true that a large portion of the tablets are probably going to be boring (bills, records, etc). But we mustn't forget that the tablets we have excavated and translated so far have given us gems like the Epic of Gilgamesh and the writings of Enheduanna - the ancient Sumerian princess and the first named author in the history of humanity.
Remarkably, these figures and their writings, dating from ~2300 BC, were as distant from Julius Caesar as he is to us, and yet they played a major role in shaping our world, for instance by setting the early foundations for Judeo-Christian thinking (examples: the flood story, Enheduanna's laments, etc). So we have every reason to be interested in them.
It would, of course, be great to do both. But my point is that it is going to be much harder to attract funders, participants, press coverage, and so on for reading Mesopotamian tablets than for reading Greek or Roman papyri excavated from Piso’s villa in Herculaneum.
I'm a big fan of the Vesuvius challenge (and Graeco-Roman history/philosophy) but I'm not convinced if the effort justifies the reward here, relative to other pockets of ancient writings we can use technology for reading and archiving.
We have large volumes of clay tablets from Mesopotamia that pre-date these papyri and are considerably easier to read that get nowhere near the attention. E.g. the library of Ashurbanipal.
Several reasons are at play I suppose - the excitement and the drama are much higher with this. But I think the West's obsession with the Graeco-Roman world is also a major factor.
I just finished reading da Vinci's biography by Walter Isaacson, which left me with a different sense of what it means to finish a piece of work. He famously never "finished" anything and eventually abandoned most of the projects he started.
He worked on the Mona Lisa for 16 years, adding a brush stroke here and there until his death, never handing it to the wool merchant who commissioned it or his wife who was the subject of the painting.
His work is largely a collection of drafts and anti-*'s, but that hasn't taken away from his transformative role in the history of art, science, and engineering. There is beauty in unfinished work and in what we abandon. Finality is not necessary for greatness.
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 representations (DOM, screenshot, etc) is an order of magnitude lower than that of, say, a document or piece of code, which is where LLMs shine. So we either need much better web page representations, or much more capable models, for this to work robustly. Having LLMs book flights by interacting with the DOM is sort of like having them code a web app using assembly. Dia, Comet, Browser Use, Gemini, etc are all attacking this and have big incentives to crack it, so we should expect decent progress here.
A funny observation was that some models have been clearly fine tuned for web browsing tasks, as they have memorized specific selectors (e.g. "the selector for the search input in google search is `.gLFyf`").
I wonder if the same would also be true for immunosuppressants administered for autoimmune conditions. Given they mostly interact with the signaling pathways, I guess in theory they should also be more effective in the morning if there is more immune cell activity going on.
Good analysis. Would it make sense to look at cumulative capital raised in addition to whether the companies have raised a Series A, to account for large seed rounds which don't seem uncommon with this cohort of companies? Series A as a milestone could obscure some details, e.g. company has raised a small seed round previously so the next round is labelled as series A, or company has raised a large seed round so doesn't need a series A within 24 months.
The raison d'être for BrowserBee is to control the user's browser in a private fashion so they can automate tasks that require them to be logged in. I'm unsure how it would work in a remote browser setup - tools like Browser Use and BrowserBase seem to cover that use case already.
The key differentiator is privacy and local control. When users need to automate tasks on sites where they're already authenticated (banking, personal accounts, work systems), they need their actual browser with their existing sessions and cookies, not a remote instance.
You can use it to check and summarize news and social media, fill out forms, send messages, book holidays, do your online shopping, conduct research, and pretty much anything else that can be done within a browser.
In a way this should be a core feature of any browser and if this project accelerates/improves that by 5% I will be very happy!
The fact that Chrome and Gemini are, at least for now, owned by the same company raises huge privacy and consumer choice concerns for me though, and I see benefit in letting the user choose their model, where/how to store their data, etc.
Good spot. I probably shouldn't have the 2nd most expensive model in the demo!
Some of the cheaper models have very similar performance at a fraction of a cost, or indeed you could use a local model for "free".
The core issue though is that there's just more tokens to process in a web browsing task than many other tasks we commonly use LLMs for, including coding.