This is actually very cool. Not really replacing a browser, but it could enable an alternative way of browsing the web with a combination of deterministic search and prompts. It would probably work even better as a command line tool.
A natural next step could be doing things with multiple "tabs" at once, e.g: tab 1 contains news outlet A's coverage of a story, tab 2 has outlet B's coverage, tab 3 has Wikipedia; summarize and provide references. I guess the problem at that point is whether the underlying model can support this type of workflow, which doesn't really seem to be the case even with SOTA models.
For me, a natural next step would be to turn this into a service -- rather than doing it in the browser, this acts as a proxy, strips away all the crud and serves your browser clean text. No need to install a new browser, just point the browser to the URL via the service.
But if we do it, we have to admit something hilarious: we will soon be using AI to convert text provided by the website creator into elaborate web experiences, which end users will strip away before consuming it in a form very close to what the creator wrote down in the first place (this is already happening with beautifully worded emails that start with "I hope this email finds you well").
Classic that the first example is for parsing the goddamn recipe from the goddamn recipe site. Instant thumbs up from me haha, looks like a neat little project.
Very cool! My retired AI agent transformed live webpage content, here's an old video clip of transforming HN to My Little Pony (with some annoying sounds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_j6cYeByOU. Skip to ~37 seconds for the outcome. I made an open-source standalone Chrome extension as well, it should probably still work for anyone curious: https://github.com/joshgriffith/ChromeGPT
Super neat - I did something similar on a lark to enable useful "web browsing" over 1200 baud packet - I have Starlink back at my camp but might be a few miles away, so as long as I can get line of sight I can Google up stuff, albeit slow. Worked well but I never really productionalized it beyond some weekend tinkering.
I wonder if you could use a less sophisticated model (maybe even something based on LSTMs) to walk over the DOM and extract just the chunks that should be emitted and collected into the browsable data structure, but doing it all locally. I feel like it'd be straightforward to generate training data for this, using an LLM-based toolchain like what the author wrote to be used directly.
The main problem with these approaches is that most sites now are useless without JS or having access to the accessibility tree. Projects like browser-use or other DOM based approaches at least see the DOM(and screenshots).
I wonder if you could turn this into a chrome extension that at least filters and parses the DOM
this is another layer of abstraction on top of an already broken system. you're running html through an llm to get markdown that gets rendered in a terminal browser. that's like... three format conversions just to read text. the original web had simple html that was readable in any terminal browser already. now they arent designed as documents anymore but rather designed as applications that happen to deliver some content as a side effect
You could also use headless selenium under the hood and pipe to the model the entire Dom of the document after the JavaScript was loaded. Of course it would make it much slower but also would amend the main worry people have which is many websites will flat out not show anything in the initial GET request.
I definitely like the LLM in the middle, it’s a nice way to circumvent the SEO machine and how Google has optimized writing in recent years. Removing all the cruft from a recipe is a brilliant case for an LLM. And I suspect more of this is coming: LLMs to filter. I mean, it would be nice to just read the recipe from HTML, but SEO has turned everything into an arms race.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 68.6 ms ] threadA natural next step could be doing things with multiple "tabs" at once, e.g: tab 1 contains news outlet A's coverage of a story, tab 2 has outlet B's coverage, tab 3 has Wikipedia; summarize and provide references. I guess the problem at that point is whether the underlying model can support this type of workflow, which doesn't really seem to be the case even with SOTA models.
But if we do it, we have to admit something hilarious: we will soon be using AI to convert text provided by the website creator into elaborate web experiences, which end users will strip away before consuming it in a form very close to what the creator wrote down in the first place (this is already happening with beautifully worded emails that start with "I hope this email finds you well").
https://github.com/sstraust/simpleweb
I wonder if you could turn this into a chrome extension that at least filters and parses the DOM
Obviously, against wishes of these social networks, which want us to be addicted... I mean, engaged.