To browse or not to browse with AI
Time to start planning your trip. Time to start cooking and shopping.
These must be the activities which we most frequently search for. At least this is the impression you get if you came across the announcements from OpenAI and Microsoft this week. Or at least this is what these companies think that we search for most of the time.
Both companies announced the same revolutionary product - The AI Browser.
Let's start with OpenAI and their announcement. The new browser is called Atlas and it resembles the simple ChatGPT page. One ironic thing which was rarely mentioned in the news coverage is that it is based on Chromium, an open source project maintained by ... Google.
The live demo begins with Mr. Altman describing that we have a rare, once in a decade opportunity to change how we are browsing the Internet. One would think that we have an opportunity everyday to re-think how we can reimagine and improve things, but I am sure he was just too excited in the moment. Where he was correct was in the assessment that we haven't seen lots of innovation in the browser department.
As with every demo, the live demo was beautiful and full of amazing opportunities. Achieving any task is a breeze and any magic is just a click away.
The unsettling part in all these demos is the unfettered access to all your information and always present assurance that at any given moment you are in control. During the OpenAI demo, the presenter asked to locate a document. Atlas obliged and searched through browser memory, past visited links and found a document which resized on Google drive. As a helpful assistant, it opens the document and it is ready to help with adjusting its content. Congratulations, you just opened a direct link between OpenAI and your Google drive. As the presenter suggested, the more you use it, the more it learns about you ... and so does OpenAI.
The next demo was connecting to a code repository, where the AI Agent reviews the code and provides suggestions on how to improve it. Also very helpful. And also disheartening for any company involved with vibe coding. You are no longer needed.
What is not mentioned during this demo is that every single piece of information you run through the Atlas browser is sent to OpenAI. As the old saying goes, if you are getting anything for free, you are the product. In this instance, you start voluntarily supplying training content to OpenAI plus all your personal information. No wonder that OpenAI wants to build new gigantic data centers. It will need to store every piece of information about you.
Not to be outdone, Microsoft announced its own version of an AI browser. It is the Edge browser integrated with Copilot. Yes, Edge is also based on Chromium. What would these companies do without Google?
In typical Microsoft fashion, it attempts to describe the amazing things in language only the marketing department can make sense of - “we introduced innovative AI features such as a streamlined new tab page to start a chat, search or navigate the web, reasoning across multiple open tabs with ease, and a dynamic pane that helps you keep the context of your webpage. With these features, you are actually able to achieve things, instead of just scrolling.” Yes, scrolling was always the activity in the browser which stopped me from fulfilling my destiny.
Side note: There must be a cult or cabal at Microsoft that’s bent on resurrecting dead software. I wrote about Clippy before when Microsoft first announced Copilot. The words describing Copilot were eerily similar to the ones talking about Clippy. But for some inexplicable reason, Microsoft decided that it has to make its AI warm and fuzzy. First you get assurance that Copilot can balance its personality: “Copilot is designed to be empathetic and supportive, not sycophantic. It will push back on you sometimes, but always respectfully.” And that balance has to be visualized - say 'hi' to Mico. Clippy got a sibling.
These attempts to build a better interface with technology (AI) are not the first nor the last. It is good and important that there is an effort to reimagine how we interact with information, how we find it and use it with more focus on the individual user. How to make the process easier for us so we can quickly achieve what we want to do with ease. That's commendable.
Unfortunately, we are not even told that this technology innovation will require that we completely surrender 'us' to the technology and its makers in the name of progress. Quite the opposite. We are told that this technology will most likely make most of humanity obsolete with no jobs left. Just an army of robots controlled by one guy.
The recurrent pattern? You still have a choice over what technology to choose and what you are willing to give up. Not to the technology, but to people who are behind it. Choose wisely.